Prior to Parks Associates’ 13th-annual CONNECTIONS Europe: Strategies for the Smart Home and Consumer Iot conference, Kristian Järnefelt, EVP Consumer Cyber Security, F-Secure Corporation shared insights with the analyst team to discuss opportunities and challenges facing the European smart home market.

Kristian will be participating on the Data Security and Analytics: AI Challenges and Opportunities panel on Tuesday, November 13 at 15:15. Panelists joining him on this session include:

Nathan Taylor, EMEA - General Manager, CUJO AI
Razvan Todor, Head of IoT Security, Bitdefender

What are the largest recurring revenue opportunities for the smart home industry in Europe?
-- Home devices like fridges, TVs, video recorders were traditionally one-off purchases and today business models have transitioned to recurring revenues especially in areas like entertainment (Netflix, etc.), home automation and security.
-- Recurring revenue business models improve customer experience significantly as it enables constant customer interaction, learning and improvement of the services, which increases loyalty.
-- Security as endpoint protection has been a recurring business model already for a long time and now extending the security for consumers’ smart connected homes improves the best protection promise with holistic protection.
-- One area for a recurring revenue opportunity is also the secure home offering combining physical and online security to drive growth for the smart home industry. Physical security for the home is provided with smart locks, smart security cameras, window/door sensors and combined with security against online threats it offers a holistic protection with peace-of-mind proposition to the end users.
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What are the biggest challenges rolling out new smart home products and services in Europe?
-- There are several challenges in driving the uptake of new smart home products and services such as interoperability issues, difficult set-up, high prices and slow replacement cycle of the household devices.
-- One of the biggest challenges that can also be a major growth barrier for smart home products and services market growth are growing consumer concerns about their security and privacy and the resulting postponing of purchasing of these products and services due to these concerns. Our F-Secure consumer survey data from 2018 (n=4000) shows that:
        -- 68% of consumers are concerned about security & privacy of IoT devices
        -- 8% of consumers are postponing purchasing of IoT devices due to these concerns

What channels to market are driving growth in the smart home industry?
Operators have an excellent opportunity to drive the uptake of the smart home services due to their scale and strong customer relationships. Especially to drive the uptake of connected home security for smart homes is a major opportunity for operators as they own the connectivity to the home. According to our F-Secure consumer survey data from 2018 (n=4000) 60% of consumers trust their operator to provide the security and privacy – enabling operators to take the trusted provider positioning.