Giving the Insurance Industry a Jolt

4 min readJan 10, 2020

Insurance is like a seat belt; you hope to never need it, but you’ll be glad that it’s there should the unthinkable happen. Besides, in most developed countries, car insurance isn’t exactly negotiable. Insurance coverage is mandatory for most of us using the road.

Perhaps it is the compulsory nature of insurance that prevents the insurance industry from adapting to change or moving with the times. For as long as people are required to have insurance by law, they’ll tolerate quite a lot in terms of annoyance, inconvenience and even unfairness. That’s a lot of negatives to have to put up with.

How a Mobility Insurtech Company Sees Drivers and Blockchain as Key to Fairer Car Insurance

A backwards model

For a long time now, all vehicle insurers have followed the same outdated philosophy:- you break, you pay. This immediately puts insurance in a negative position in people’s minds, and prevents drivers from claiming while doing nothing to prevent the accidents that give rise to claims.

Multiple inefficiencies for the consumer arise as a result of this backwards business practice: administrative hoops to jump through before completing a claim, long delays in the payout process, and disproportionately high user premiums. These same difficulties apply to any type of common mobility device. Electric car fleets, lower-end bikes, scooters and solowheels all share the same problems.

To survive the digital age, insurance must change. Insurers have to think beyond existing services, to include and expand the range of relevant consumer-centric mobility services.

A 2019 EY report acknowledges that insurers must now contend with a landscape of declining consumer trust and inefficient legacy systems, while at the same time grappling with, “potential threats of lost revenue from personal and commercial auto risk to increasingly complex questions concerning consumer privacy and the use of data”.

Independent research shows that in 2018 alone there was a 20% decline in US consumer trust of financial services, including insurance. In Asia Pacific, 40% of consumers said they trusted neither banks nor insurance companies with their personal data.

At Joltee, our combined experience as drivers, vehicle owners and insurance analysts has shown us how painful and expensive it can be to stay fully covered. This is why we are working to bring changes to the industry and give the whole insurance business a long-overdue wake-up jolt.

A fairer system

The key to a fairer system is to focus on the user and get closer to their driving experience. What if we could turn the current negative model on its head, and in the process promote positive change? Rather than punishing drivers for accidents which lead to claims, we can instead reward them at the end of each trip for driving well.

With Joltee, when drivers practise polite, ethical behavior on the road and drive safely, they get rewarded with digital tokens called JOLT. Performing simple everyday tasks properly, such as parking, adjusting one’s speed according to road conditions & circumstances, and obeying traffic rules, leads to greater rewards. The better you drive, the more you earn.

You can use JOLT to access the entire range of Joltee services including:

- Renting an electric mobility device from our partner companies.

- Charging it at a discount at partner stations.

- Parking it at a discount at parking networks.

- Getting pay-as-you-go insurance from a major insurer at a discount.

Loyal users earn more, unlock cooler cars, receive better rates and have a greater degree of flexibility and options as part of our loyalty program.

Why blockchain?

Joltee does not integrate blockchain just to jump on the tech bandwagon. Various aspects of blockchain technology make it well suited to resolving some of the problems with existing insurance models and will allow us to build a fairer and more efficient system.

A blockchain-based system ensures the transparency of all transactions within the platform. This allows users to view and verify those transactions themselves, building greater trust in the Joltee ecosystem. Furthermore, the decentralized system means that there is no single point of weakness for attacks to focus on. This protects Joltee’s transactions with unrivaled cryptographic encryption and security, allowing users to safely pay for the services of our partner companies.

Joltee is a peer-run system that cuts out the middleman, leading to cost efficiencies and an enhanced sense of ownership between Joltee users. With blockchain, profit-sharing between drivers, insurers and data collectors is easily tracked, with the precise amount of JOLTs earned for a given score.

These benefits are all made possible via blockchain, without users needing to understand how it works under the hood. It simply works.