Trucker Path, the multi-service app that allows drivers and fleets a wide range of services on one platform, is getting into the insurance business.
More accurately, Trucker Path is getting into the insurance agent business. Its new offering is called Trucker Path Insurance. And as Aaron Ealy, the general manager of Trucker Path Insurance noted, the new insurance arm of the company will not be an underwriter. It will act in the same way as an independent insurance agent, matching up the needs of an individual driver or small fleet with an insurance underwriter who provides the actual coverage.
Like other agents, Ealy said Trucker Path Insurance is selling insurance on behalf of insurance providers with well-known names, like Geico, or companies who might not have their advertisements all over television and whose names are not known to the general public.
“We are not a risk-bearing entity ourselves,” Ealy said.
Asked what the “value proposition” of Trucker Path Insurance is, Ealy’s answers went back to what is the “value prop” of the Trucker Path app itself.
“We’re here to make this process easy, efficient and save the trucker money,” Ealy said. “Truckers have a lot to think of when they’re on the road, and so we want to make their understanding of insurance, their purchasing of insurance, and their management of insurance, as easy as possible, and save them money where we can.”
Buying into the business
Trucker Path did not create its insurance arm from the ground up. Instead, it bought into it, earlier this year purchasing a small South Carolina agency, Truckers Best Insurance, which only sells insurance policies to trucking companies. Ealy said the company had about a $7 million book of business.
Ealy said Trucker Path concluded that buying an agency was a better way of getting into the business than trying to grow it organically, because the acquired company would already have all the necessary licensing and other permissions to sell insurance. “It was a bit of a Goldilocks process for me, where I was thinking it can’t be too small and can’t be too big,” Ealy said. He said Trucker Path arrived at the conclusion that Truckers Best Insurance was the company it would target after “I kind of narrowed down hundreds of agency prospects into a handful.”
The acquisition of Truckers Best Insurance did not suddenly bring big fleets into the fold. Its base was the same small fleets where Trucker Path’s app has long penetrated. “Our insurance partners that we work with today are predominantly focused on that one to nine, one to 10 power unit space,” Ealy said.
The acquisition was completed in May. Ealy earlier had joined Trucker Path in September 2024.
Organic growth a likely strategy
The plan to grow Trucker Path Insurance does not involve a slew of acquisitions on top of the Truckers Best purchase, according to Ealy. “We really don’t have the appetite,” he said. “I think we have a really solid foundation from the one acquisition.”
While the actual Trucker Path app is a key component of the marketing of Trucker Path Insurance, ultimately the product offering will operate like any other insurance company, Ealy said.
Ealy said truckers “do not have the easiest time on the road, and they don’t have a really easy time of understanding their insurance.” So Trucker Path Insurance will furnish that sort of guidance to existing and potential customers.
“We are a retail agency, so we help acquire customers, help them understand their insurance needs, go through their coverages, sell them their insurance and help them manage their insurance during the policy life,” Ealy said.
But all insurance agents do that.
However, there are some features that Ealy touted as being made possible by the app. “You could get a push notification in the app that says, hey, your insurance is expiring in 60 days,” Ealy said as an example. “Click here to work with a Trucker Path agent.”
The various safety tools embedded in the Trucker Path app, Ealy said, can be used in conjunction with insurers to demonstrate a driver is a preferred risk based on how well it follows the safety-based recommendations provided by the app on such things as weather and routing.
And while other insurance agents have online tools, Trucker Path is already on the phones of a huge network of drivers, either independent or with small fleets. Trucker Path Insurance is trying to reach them through the app, but Ealy said it is also doing standard outreach over the phone, emails and text.
“We really have a pretty diverse marketing channel of how we get to our customer,” he said.
“We market in a number of ways, but obviously we take advantage of the great ecosystem that Trucker Path has today.”
Another tie-in with the app, according to Ealy: a potential customer using the app in order to at least kick the tires on different insurance offerings can have the process made easier by having the app’s knowledge base of its customers supply the agent with the information needed to get the process started, potentially leading to a sale or upgrade of existing coverage.
A long road to get here
Chris Oliver, Trucker Path’s CMO, said he was the person at the company who first started discussing the possibility of the company moving into the insurance space. “It took me about a year to figure out that I knew hardly anything about insurance,” Oliver said. “I started learning. And the only thing it did was really point us to the need to have an expert like Aaron join the team and lead the business for us.”
Oliver said some of the discussions of whether Trucker Path should have an insurance offering go back as much as four years.
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