The insurance company is working with Azuga and Zubie to power their new initiatives.
The commercial insurance group at nationwide has secured two strategic insuretech partnerships. These are meant to help the insurer streamline its coverage options using telematics.
Their goal is to launch new and refined fleet management programs for human services drivers.
To do this, Nationwide has entered into insuretech partnerships with Azuga and Zubie. These two firms provide trip-tracking and analytics capability support technology. They are playing a substantial role in the insurance company’s Vantage 360 Premium Partner Program. That program provides qualifying firms with comprehensive fleet management and GPS tracking.
The program targets human services companies. These are firms with social services and medical fleets which, among their offerings, help to transport patients to their vital appointments.
“Many of these customers are nonprofits, and it’s tough for them to afford a telematics solution,” explained Nationwide director of commercial telematics, Pete Frey. Through the insurance company’s Vantage 360 Premium Partner Program, Nationwide covers the cost of the solution for the first year to “get them up and running, and they do share their driving data with us and that allows our loss control folks to help coach them.”
The technology provided by the insuretech partnerships provides various types of tracking.
Primarily, this tech makes it possible to tack the vehicles in the sense that the trips and driver behaviors are monitored. It will function with virtually any telematics data-gathering device. This includes everything from OBD-II devices to mobile apps. The program is mainly meant for middle-market organizations with a fleet greater than 20 vehicles. That said, there is a smaller app-based version of the service available in three states for organizations with smaller fleets.
The initial launch will roll out this program as a stand-alone product without ties to insurance premiums. That said, the purpose of the Vantage 360 Premium Partner Program over time will be to link it to the insurance side of Nationwide’s 
offerings. This way, the analytics collected regarding the drivers’ behaviors will be used for the development of an improved overall usage-based insurance product.
