Trucking App Trucker Path Launches Retail Insurance Agency

The company behind a trucking navigation and compliance apps has launched its own insurance agency.

Earlier this month, Trucker Path announced the launch of its in-house, digitally enabled retail agency focused exclusively on trucking insurance. Trucker Path Insurance debuted with a $7 million book of business focused exclusively on the trucking sector.

TPI offers a full suite of commercial coverages, including auto liability, motor truck cargo, physical damage, non-trucking liability and more. According to a press release, unlike traditional distribution channels, TPI connects markets with a community of drivers already engaged in safe driving practices.

“Trucker Path Insurance gives markets direct access to a highly engaged audience of truckers—spanning operation types, commodities, and geographies,” said Aaron Ealy, general manager of Trucker Path Insurance. “With nearly one-third of all U.S. commercial truck drivers using our platform, Trucker Path Insurance is able to partner with markets to target risks that best match their unique underwriting appetite, at scale.”

Ealy is eager to integrate more safety functionality and data between Trucker Path and TPI—and chart how using the Trucker Path app improves loss outcomes for his agency’s insureds.

“The safer, more compliant that you keep your user base, that’s a way to contain insurance costs, which a lot of Trucker Path users would name as a top-three to top-five expense for them,” he said during an Oct. 14 interview at InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas. “And [a] top-three to top-five pain point for them year-to-year.”

Early in his career, Ealy cut his teeth across broad commercial lines on Zurich North America’s corporate strategy team, and he later took a position at SiriusPoint that enabled him to invest in MGAs and startups. While co-leading an investment round in Lucky Truck—another retail agency focused on trucking—the segment’s industry insurance dynamics piqued his interest, and Ealy joined Lucky Truck as its head of strategy and partnerships.

That company was designed to make the insurance-buying experience as frictionless as possible for a complex segment of the insurance industry, he said.

“They have the expectations, almost, of a personal lines consumer,” Ealy said of truckers. “And at the same time, what they’re buying is like a 20-, 30-, [or] 40-thousand-dollar package that is really complex to underwrite.”

The experience primed him to take the reins at TPI about a year ago. Trucker Path’s CEO, Joe Chen, reached out to Ealy about solving the insurance pain point truckers have, and Ealy saw the offer as a perfect opportunity to craft a solution and drive its development.

Even before he was hired, Ealy knew that the right move was to launch an in-house retail agency at Trucker Path.

Released in 2013, Trucker Path takes truck dimensions and fuel levels into account when generating custom routes for drivers. It also aggregates and shares information about weigh stations, truck stops and fuel prices. Ealy described the app as “Waze merged with Yelp, specifically made for truckers.” Trucker Path has one million monthly active users who use the app to safely and compliantly navigate their routes.

The positive brand equity and recognizability the app carries are hard to find within trucking, Ealy explained. He envisions Trucker Path Insurance as a “service-based company built on top of a company that truly knows technology and would provide us a really good foundation to build on top of.”

TPI has since been integrated into the Trucker Path application. The agency’s foundation came in the form of an acquisition; TPI acquired Truckers Best Insurance of Charlestown, South Carolina, and officially launched earlier this month.

“We’re like a startup—we’re quick, we invest in things very heavily as compared to an incumbent or a large existing brokerage,” Ealy said. “But we also have access to a finance team, an HR team [and] a legal team. We have the resources, so it’s very buttoned up. But we move quickly, and we invest quickly, and we build things really quickly.”

Cover Whale and several more markets have already integrated with the agency, and other carriers, wholesalers and MGAs have also expressed interest in integrating via API, Ealy said.

Some markets are excited about TPI’s potential to collect data and drive safer behaviors in its book of business, Ealy shared, and the agency has received interest from other markets regarding adding functionality or collecting data so they can offer “even better rates for potential insureds,” he added. In follow-up correspondence, Ealy added that any collection and sharing of data with insurance markets would not take place without the insured’s consent.

“Every market has their underwriting secret sauce,” Ealy said. “Some of them love New Jersey [or] love Texas [or] love DSG. They all have something that really fits within their appetite, and we have the access to one in three truckers on the road. So, we probably have access to the risks that they like.”

He views Trucker Path Insurance as both traditional and creative in the insurance distribution space. TPI is traditional in that it is a standard retail agency that works with trucking insurance markets of all kinds to get the best coverages and best rates for its customers—whether that’s done over email or via API integration, Ealy said.

Where he sees TPI creativity is in how the agency reaches potential customers by being embedded within Trucker Path. Ealy said he sees the trucking space in the same way, sharing that he believes “it will continue to be driven by experienced retail agents” because trucking is a complex, nuanced line of business, “but some, like TPI, will get creative and tap into other segments of the trucking value chain to reach new customers.”

Topics Trucking