On March, 1st, the new traffic year 2022/2023 began for e-scooters, which have been allowed on our roads since June 2019 in Germany. They were immediately lined up and ready for rent. If you go further into the city centers, you quickly see the other side of the coin: overturned scooters piled up on the sidewalks. A Curse or a Blessing?
According to our own research, at the beginning of 2019 there were several thousand e-sooters in Munich, Hamburg and in Frankfurt am Main. By now, all major cities in Germany should already be adequately supplied and some cities are now reducing the number of scooters. The price per minute is largely the same. Other features such as hour packages, reservations, and pausing have already been developed and are now standard offerings. The growth in e-scooter rental is 100 times faster than options such as the UBER chauffeur service.
However, there are also dissenting voices. Helmut Dedy, chief executive of the German Association of Cities and Towns, is calling for clear rules of the game. This is because accidents involving e-scooters are becoming more frequent, and there is a "scooter game of pick-up sticks" in German city centers.
Distributors seek strategic partners
Who or what is actually behind the e-scooter rental companies? The e-scooter rental companies line up with names such as Mister Spex, brands4friends or Lieferheld. Behind the companies are experienced founders like Lukas Gadowski, who are now making the business "big." Distributors are seeking strategic partners in insurers, automakers, and software companies to expand their business worldwide. The task for insurers and IT service providers is to find intelligent solutions for this new form of mobility. Here, insurers and IT service providers are quickly becoming start-up companies with interdisciplinary teams. This is in order to satisfy new business areas and, in particular, new IT processes, as customer requirements reach new dimensions every day and present them with major implementation challenges.
User-centric mobility solutions are in demand
As a result, user-centric solutions for mobility in its entirety are necessary for the insurance industry and IT. Insurers and IT service providers must evolve from traditional product providers to solution providers, and thus focus on the needs of their customers. Despite negative press and concerns, the new mobility will continue to grow due to the further urbanization of inner cities, and insurers as well as IT service providers will have to decide for themselves which position they want to take in this new business field. Based on the e-scooter example, there is a need for fast, individual and flexible solutions, which in my estimation will continue to increase.
For example, there will be other forms of mobility in the form of autonomous buses, teleoperated driving, and drones. In addition, forms of mobility such as car-sharing, e-scooter rentals, and per-minute car rentals will increase,
and as a result the focus will no longer be on the vehicle as the insured object, but rather on the package that comes with it.
New demands on IT
The requirements will continue to change going forward. This gives rise to completely new tasks for the IT architecture, such as the management of highly volatile inventories, new products, such as timely rates, or the integration of insurance products into the shopping carts of Amazon and other online retailers.
The goal of new IT applications, in addition to implementing flexible and fast solutions, should be to store data pertaining to the customer's user and mobility behavior and to evaluate it with AI. This can be used to generate important insights on future products.
Currently, these products are entering the market in ever shorter . Due to the dynamics of this trend, it is advisable for hesitant companies to enter the market as soon as possible. Insurers who are too late in putting this development on their to-do lists could jeopardize their future position in the market.
Successfully taking advantage of this potential depends on many factors and presents companies with new challenges. Despite the individual ways of achieving a solution, all companies must adopt a mindset, processes and systems that are not exclusively oriented toward calculating the risks contained in product innovations. State-of-the-art policy management systems and a future-proof IT architecture form the basis for successfully meeting the challenges of the future.
Would you like to talk about state-of-the-art policy management systems or are you planning to upgrade your IT? Then please contact our expert Karsten Schmitt, Head of Business Development.
