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It’s not a coincidence that the ride-sharing industry and data analytics are growing up together and maturing into the commercial world quickly in this age of IT automation.
After all, getting a ride from services such as Lyft, Uber and others is all about using geopositioning and analytics to triangulate locations and estimated times of pickups and arrivals. These analytics applications also are being used to rate the performances of drivers for their employers and for insurance companies.
Arity, a Chicago-based startup founded by the Allstate Corp., has gone deeper into this burgeoning market. It has launched a new suite of tools to enable rideshare, car share, car club and peer-to-peer companies to optimize efficiency and grow their businesses by utilizing insights derived from driver analytics.
Shared Mobility Solutions is an app for smartphones that uses more than 26 billion miles of historical driving behavior data and years of transportation expertise to determine personal driving metrics. Arity wants its new solutions to become the baseline for companies of all sizes in the industry to make transportation smarter and safer.
Going Deeper into Driver Analytics
“The industry (Allstate being a prime mover) has been pulling data out of cars and trucks for about 20 years (for aggregate insurance purposes), but it was never really cost-effective for a personal user,” CEO Gary Hallgren told eWEEK. “In 2010, we started to put devices into people’s cars and monitoring how they were driving. In turn for doing that, the insurance company would give drivers a discount for participating.
“As we started gathering more and more information, we discovered that this was a good predictive way—and better than some of the other variables—to measure risk. By about 2012-13, we thought about the expense of putting these expensive devices into all those cars and wondered if we could do this on a mobile phone inset. So we put out an SDK (software development kit) and the functionality into the Allstate Insurance Company app. Now the app gathers data around when/where you drive, and about your driving behavior.”
Allstate spun out Arity as its own business entity in 2016 so it could market this application to other insurance companies, Hallgren said.
“We think we’re on to something—that a lot of insurers are going to look at this way of accurately assessing risk and accurately setting pricing, based on risk. We believe that the whole insurance industry is going to go this way,” Hallgren said.
Better Prediction of Risk for Profit and Loss
Arity’s suite of services, launched Sept. 26, are designed to mitigate operational inefficiencies such as the inability to predict risk and profit losses, which impact vehicle uptime and driver retention. Applying predictive data models, these solutions are able to assess risk, driver behavior and economic value to a shared-use platform and monitor the impact of a customer’s driving behavior for increasing the ability to get more mileage from vehicles and increased driver retention.
These solutions and their benefits include:
- Arity PreQual, which improves the screening process by forecasting relative risk and potential losses a new driver poses to operations;
- Vehicle Utilization, which optimizes vehicle and fleet efficiency by tracking metrics such as miles driven, fuel consumption and maintenance costs;
- Mobility Behavior, which provides driving behavior data and insights to compare individual driver performance across a fleet of standard or electric vehicles, enabling companies to design incentives that help retain and effectively utilize drivers;
- Mobility Phases, which identifies driving time between personal versus business use to accurately measure drive times and maximize driver productivity; and
- Mobility Trends, which evaluates daily travel habits and transportation patterns to simplify asset allocation, supporting expansion into new markets and improving services provided in existing areas.
Arity has offices in Northern Ireland, India, and Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. For more information, go here.