On-demand insurtech platform Trov recently announced that Mobility Transformation, which owns eco-friendly car sharing service Zerology, has chosen Trov’s Mobility Insurance Platform to protect its fleet of Tesla Model 3’s in Madison, Wisconsin, where Zerology has its headquarters. Trov’s technology was built specifically to meet the needs of companies in the new mobility space, from bike-sharing to autonomous vehicle fleets. Other partners include Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving ride-hailing service, and Free2Move, Groupe PSA’s car-sharing service.
Zerology's fleet will be the first to leverage anonymized, individual Tesla vehicle data to inform an on-demand commercial insurance product, says Ian Sweeney, SVP & GM of Trov Mobility.
“The problem we address is a new type of risk that insurance companies aren’t familiar with because they have no historical data,” he says. “As a technology company, we sit between Zerology’s connected, electric Tesla fleet and insurance providers who we inform about the risk.”
The benefit for a company like Zerology, he adds, is that the risk of every vehicle is understood in real time as it moves around. This establishes a known risk profile that enables better risk mitigation and elimination, lowers costs and ultimately allows the company to shift resources toward its broader ecological mission. When the Tesla is rented and moving, it is at its highest risk, but when parked it is at low risk, since it cannot crash.
“Our technology right-sizes the insurance by the second,” he says. It is only when the car is moving and being paid for its use that the insurance risk goes up: “It’s an efficient way of providing insurance data,” he says, adding that Trov does not track where people are, but the change points in between risk periods.
With more commercial fleets used for personal use, thanks to the growth of the sharing economy, these new risk management opportunities have emerged. “Consumers are moving away from asset ownership and purchasing their own insurance, and the challenge for the insurance industry is it doesn’t have a plug and play solution for that,” says Sweeney. “We work with the ambitious underwriters around the world to work with usage patterns and changes in the way people access mobility.”
Going forward, Sweeney predicts the opportunities to optimize coverage based on vehicle movement will continue to grow. “We are seeing OEM car manufacturers come into the space, since they realize what’s happening,” he says, adding that Trov is not looking to disrupt the industry, but to help it shift. “We are not actually an underwriter, but strictly a broker and technology platform,” he says. Trov already works with a variety of underwriters, including Japan’s Sompo, Australia’s Suncorp, and Allstate.
“The trend is less about insurance companies possibly jumping in to do what Trov is doing than insurance companies working and partnering with Trov’s technology platform,” Sweeney says. “This allows the combination of right-sized insurance policies and technology to deliver a holistic product.”
