Protecting drivers: Auto insurance and the future of mobility

We all have a role to play when it comes to creating a smarter, safer, and more useful future of mobility – from tech companies to auto insurers, to government agencies, to drivers, and beyond. However, as transportation stakeholders, we clearly aren’t doing enough considering traffic deaths have risen 30% in the past 10 years.

It’s time to reinvent how we all approach risk on our roads.

While the auto insurance industry was set up as financial protection after an incident, their role in protecting drivers can and should expand beyond that. What if they could prevent these incidents from happening in the first place?

The good news is, they can! Here are three ways auto insurers can protect their customers while they’re on the road.

#1 Educate on driver risk

Auto insurers are experts when it comes to driver risk, and telematics have taken this to the next level. While, historically, carriers have relied on proxies of risk such as age, gender, and education level to inform pricing policies, telematics enables them to leverage insights into customers’ driving behaviors – an actual measure of risk.

With a telematics program, auto insurers can use their unique view of driver risk for good through coaching.

For instance, mobile phone-based telematics programs can give insight into risky driving behaviors like phone handling, speeding, hard braking, extreme acceleration, and more. Carriers can use these insights to provide valuable, personalized feedback on customers’ driving habits – what they do well and what they could improve to become a safer driver.

According to Arity data, 79% of drivers believe individual drivers are most responsible for improving safety on our roads. However, they may not understand how their own behaviors behind the wheel are impacting road safety day-to-day.

While 68% of drivers believe distracted driving is extremely unsafe, only 4 in 10 believe speeding and hard braking are. And 1 in 4 drivers view extreme acceleration as a neutral behavior. However, all of these can be key indicators of risk – and insurers have an important role to play in educating about these dangerous driving behaviors.

#2 Incentivize safe driving behaviors

Using their telematics programs, auto insurers can also take their role a step further and reward safe drivers. This can come to life in a couple of ways:

• With the Arity Marketing Platform, carriers can programmatically target safer drivers, based on their driving behaviors, and offer them a discounted rate on their policies.
• With the Arity IQ℠ network, carriers can pull a person’s driving score at time of quote to inform pricing – i.e., offering safer drivers better rates. And with driving attributes, carriers can put more emphasis on certain driving behaviors – for example, phone handling – in a driver’s overall score.

By offering a tangible reward for safer driving, carriers can start to motivate behavior change. If someone is a safe driver, they may be encouraged to keep it up to maintain their discounted rate. If someone is a risky driver, they may be influenced to change their behaviors behind the wheel for a future discount.

In 2020, Arity helped Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (SFBCIC) launch its telematics program, DriveDown. Through this program, SFBCIC provides feedback about how a person drives and rewards customers for safe driving behaviors with a reduced policy deductible. After just 30 days, over 20% of its drivers reduced their distracted driving by more than 50%.

#3 Be there when customers need you most

In addition to educating on driver risk and motivating safer behaviors, carriers can leverage technology to help customers when they need it most. With Crash Detection by Arity, they can enable real-time responses to an accident, including:

• Alerting emergency services
• Notifying emergency contacts
• Sending helpful content
• Kickstarting the claims process

This gives carriers the chance to connect with their customers in a meaningful way, establishing a strong relationship as an insurer they can trust and rely on.

With telematics-driven solutions, insurers can help customers drive smarter and safer – and they can be more useful when customers are at their most vulnerable.

Are you ready to drive the future of mobility? Let’s start a conversation around how our solutions can help you protect your customers!