Over 300 Telematics Service Providers (TSPs) exist in the market today. That's over 300 opportunities for commercial auto insurers to implement and aggregate telematics into their operations.
There are many hurdles that these insurers face, with the most relevant issue being the rise in claims severity. As artificial intelligence and data-driven insights evolve the commercial insurance landscape, telematics has gained attention as a solution for insurers to manage risk.
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Despite its inception and utilization over the last two decades, telematics remains an obscure technology that has perplexed commercial auto insurers. It begs the question: how can the market bridge the knowledge gap currently blocking large-scale implementation?
We answer this question in a conversation with Kris Gault, Account Executive over Global Telematics Partnerships at SambaSafety, to address the telematics journey at SambaSafety and explain what opportunities exist for the market to adopt telematics in its goal to lower driver risk.
Why SambaSafety Is Addressing Telematics for Commercial Auto Insurance
Q: How would you describe the telematics journey we’ve had at SambaSafety, and why do you feel telematics aggregation is a necessary offering to our customers?
A: The most exciting thing about our journey [at SambaSafety] from a telematics aggregation standpoint is fleets and insurers alike are using multiple, disparate systems that are often done through manual work.
Telematics devices and cameras generate billions of data points, and most struggle to realize its full value. It’s a resonating reminder that data without action is negligent. And this negligence could be in the form of not acting on the data that indicates a potential risk. Or, for insurers, solely relying on lagging indicators or a limited data set due to lower policyholder adoption.
As a business, we've worked to bring telematics aggregation to serve two markets. One, telematics provides fleets with a greater sense of the full picture of a driver’s risk, whether it’s GPS monitoring or dashcams. From an insurance standpoint, with consecutive quarters of premium increases and losses, the question becomes,
- What can we do differently?
- How can we understand the behavior of our drivers?
- How can we understand if this fits our picture of risk?
At SambaSafety, we’ve learned that insurers are looking to us for guidance on what a telematics program could be. Telematics has been around for decades, but insurers are still in the infancy phase of understanding its applications.
Q: As we’ve implemented and offered telematics aggregation, what would you say has been the most unexpected insight or surprise that’s come from this offering at SambaSafety?
A: Something that has been interesting to me is that there has been an increased focus on the driver and the insights on them uniquely. For so long, the focus has been on the data coming from the vehicle, and now we have this driver behavior data that gives us so much information that TSPs are now utilizing AI to identify behaviors before they happen, creating a richer picture of risk in the aggregate.
Q: How do you see SambaSafety evolving in the telematics space and does that impact our future with commercial auto insurance companies?
A: If you think about auto insurers, personal lines have a mature telematics offering but commercial lines are very much in its infancy. And there are a couple of reasons—it’s expensive and it's an incredible amount of learning. Many insurers put all their efforts into one TSP, only to realize their policyholders have been using other providers for years and aren't motivated to switch. With over 300 TSPs in the market, most insurers don't have the time or resources to aggregate the data needed to price and manage their risk better.
SambaSafety has become a trusted partner and advisor for commercial auto insurers, lending our expertise to help them implement telematics programs and utilize aggregated data to address their business needs. Because what the industry is doing right now [in the market] is not working. It’s exciting to me at SambaSafety to be able to help insurers in tangible ways. It’s this cycle of, we support the insurer, the insurer supports the fleet and the fleet reports back to the insurance company or broker with their safe-driving data to show them that they are doing everything possible to manage their risk.
It's this cycle of working together. That's the only way that we're going to move the industry forward so that there's no longer continuous commercial auto quarter losses going forward. Today, the industry is making strides forward, but we have an opportunity to go from good to great. The opportunities in cost savings, collaboration, operational efficiency and getting home safely—I’m excited to push the industry forward, together—with SambaSafety playing an active role in roadway safety.
The telematics journey at SambaSafety highlights our commitment to leveraging data to improve insurer outcomes and prompt safe driving across their policyholder fleets. To learn more about how insurers are navigating costs in 2025 and how telematics plays a role in combatting them, join us for our next webinar! 