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Life360’s recently announced partnership with Allstate and its affiliate telematics offshoot Arity is truly unique, says Gary Hallgren, Arity’s president.
Life360 is a family networking app that will now provide insights for each family unit on how their closest relatives are driving. By leveraging telematics data and connecting with an application that already has a huge user community, Arity will be able to collect five billion miles of driving data each month, versus the one billion miles it was gathering before. In turn, Life360 users will gain access to the Answer Marketplace, where they can get competitive offers on auto insurance based on their driving behaviors.
“It allows us to rapidly advance the scoring and the availability of telematics for the insurance industry,” said Hallgren, adding that it takes companies a long time to reach this many users, so all parties involved will benefit from this partnership, including Arity’s Answer Marketplace.
“We need to have publishers and we need to have advertisers, and Life360 is a great partner to be a publisher because they have a very large user base and the focus of their business is really around families, it’s around keeping people safe, so we think that they’re going to be the right user group to be interested in and care about this,” said Hallgren.
The collaboration also exemplifies the changing face of telematics companies’ relationships with the insurance industry.
“If you think about the vision that we have for transportation, and [that] it’s changing and we’re moving into new modes of transportation, that’s the premise of everything we do at Arity, and one part of that is the changing face of insurance and understanding insurance for customers,” said Hallgren. “There’s an ongoing trend towards adoption of these services. I think if you would look back several years ago, there was a lot of conversation on, first of all, is this going to work?”
Today, with telematics solutions becoming widely adopted, the debate centers around whether using devices or phones to collect data is best.
“What we found inside of Arity is that there’s roles for devices in certain situations and roles for mobile, but I think it’s more a given or an understanding that everybody knows this is coming, it’s just a matter of when it is going to come,” explained Hallgren.
The transportation ecosystem is all interlinked together, according to the Arity president, and the way people move is rapidly changing, but the glue that holds everything together, whether it’s a rideshare user ‘borrowing’ a car to run errands or a daily commuter traveling to work, is the understanding of risk. The insurance industry is going to have to embrace these different modes of transportation, and the Life360 partnership is a good example of how the two industries can partner together to ultimately provide a better solution for customers.
“The reason that I’m so excited about this marketplace is that it’s an opportunity for an insurer to start getting the benefits of telematics without having to rollout the programs. I think in a perfect world, every insurer wishes they could just order a score, in the same way they do with MVR today or a credit score, and that just doesn’t exist today,” Hallgren told Insurance Business. “By having a program like this with Arity and Life360, we’re able to give that insight for an insurer into the understanding of these customers.”
