Generali and Progressive announce telematics R&D agreement

• The Generali-Progressive collaboration will foster their respective leading positions in Europe and the USA to develop a new generation of customized car telematics solutions

Trieste, Italy/Mayfield Village, Ohio - The Generali Group and The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies, among the world leaders in car insurance telematics, entered into an R&D collaboration to improve their individual data analytics capabilities and foster product offering.

Thanks to this agreement the two groups will share knowledge in telematics to benefit from synergies of scope, scale and expertise. Leveraging their experience as the leaders in the markets in which they operate, Generali and Progressive will further innovate their behavioral profiling systems to explore a new generation of customized car telematics solutions which will reward safer drivers, helping them to improve their driving through personalized customer feedback.

Valter Trevisani, Chief Insurance Officer of Generali, said: “The collaboration with Progressive allows Generali to accelerate the execution of the strategy in regards to Connected Insurance and advanced analytics. Joining forces with a leading player like Progressive will enable a further step in sophistication of our product offering and data analytics capabilities, to support an additional improvement of our technical performance”.

Pat Callahan, Personal Lines President of Progressive Insurance, said: “Progressive pioneered telematics usage in the US auto insurance marketplace, and we’re constantly striving for customer-centric improvements to those capabilities. Consumers continue to opt into our voluntary Snapshot program with increasing frequency and we know that key driving behaviors – like actual miles driven, braking, and time of day of driving – can carry more than twice the predictive power of traditional insurance rating variables, like a driver’s demographic profile, and the year, make and model of the insured vehicle. Collaborating internationally with Generali allows us to further expand and deepen our customer insights in order to help safer drivers save even more money through our Snapshot program.”

In Europe Generali has a leading position in car telematics and in Italy, in 2011, it was the forerunner in introducing a pay-how-you-drive solution with Genertel, the Group direct insurance company. Generali has more than 1 million policies concentrated in Italy with a wide range of solutions tailored to serve different customer segments varying from mileage-based to behavioral ones and sold both by agents and direct channels. In mid-2015 Generali acquired full control of MyDrive Solutions, an English start-up founded in 2010, among the leading companies in the use of data analytics tools to profile driving styles with the aim of identifying innovative and tailor-made products for the customers and favorable tariffs for low risk drivers.

Progressive is the US leader in usage-based insurance. Since introducing the first wireless telematics device in 2008, more than 4 million drivers have tried Snapshot and during that time Progressive has collected more than 15 billion miles of driving data. Snapshot is a voluntary discount program in which drivers can save money on their car insurance by sharing a picture of their driving habits with Progressive. People who drive less, in safer ways and during safer times of day are most likely to get a discount.