The buy adds TrueMotion’s 150 employees to CMT’s team, as well as a number of clients including
"With this acquisition, we will use our world-class talent, technology, and scale to help our partners overcome the complex challenges of global road safety,” said William Powers, CMT’s CEO and co-founder.
Ryan McMahon, VP of insurance and customer affairs for CMT, says that adding this additional talent and customer base will help the combined company adapt quickly to new demands from the telematics market at a time when take-up of the technology is expected to grow. J.D. Power recently found that personal auto telematics users have doubled in five years to 16% of policyholders.
“This market is rapidly expanding, and building more capabilities is more important than ever,” McMahon says. “Both companies follow similar philosophies and grew up in similar ecosystems, and now we’re bringing those cultures together.”
But the new company won’t just focus on pricing programs in personal lines. Increased interest in using telematics for crash reconstruction in personal lines claims requires more innovation companies, McMahon says. He also notes that there are increased opportunities in commercial insurance as well, pointing to CMT’s introduction of video telematics with its Drivescape offering earlier this year.
“Telematics is absolutely the future of commercial auto and rideshare, and it’s kind of a step up beyond the normal telematics” to include video, he explains.
“We will not only widen our lead in smartphone telematics, but also use our combined talent to invent new products for risk measurement, contextual telematics, and crash mitigation across emerging mobile, IoT, connected-car, video, and sensing technologies,” Hari Balakrishnan, CMT’s co-founder and CTO, said in a statement announcing the buy.
