I’m extremely proud today to be able to announce By Miles’ first expansion into another country. We’re taking pay-by-mile car insurance in real-time to Italy for the first time, and wanted to take a few moments to tell you our thinking behind this decision.
A little known fact about us is that despite (until now) not being available outside the UK, we’re already the biggest pay-as-you-drive insurance provider in Europe. We’ve cornered the usage-based insurance (UBI) market in the UK, and have now insured a whopping quarter of a billion miles for our members. Having gone from the acorn of an idea between my co-founder James and I, to a serious player in the UK insurance market and a valid alternative for many low-mileage drivers – we decided it’s time to take our playbook global.
Driving habits have changed significantly over the past few years as a result of the pandemic, but this phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the UK. Italian drivers have also seen a decade-long downward trend in average mileage (or average kilometre-age), and this shows no sign of reversing soon. This signals a pent-up demand for fairer pricing which we’re well placed to meet.
After we established that Italian drivers are behaving similarly to their UK counterparts, we started looking for other factors that might make Italy a good choice for us. We found that there are roughly the same number of vehicles on the road in both countries, 32.1 million in Italy and almost exactly the same amount on our roads.
Ironically, it was one of the largest differences between Italian and British drivers that sealed the deal for us. In the UK, around 6% of car insurance policies sold are usage-based, but in Italy this number climbs to a staggering 27% of policies. Italian drivers are already incredibly receptive to the fairer pricing offered by usage-based policies – so it was somewhat of a surprise to learn that we’d be the first real-time pay-by-mile insurance provider that Italian motorists had ever seen.
We’re powering this expansion on By Bits, our highly scalable UBI platform, which enables us, as well as any other insurer or insurtech, to launch new UBI products in under twelve weeks.
As you can tell, we’re really excited to offer something genuinely different to the lower-mileage drivers of Italy – having proven that we can make this work successfully at home. This is just the start of an exciting period of expansion for us, our ambition is to become a global authority when it comes to offering pay-as-you-drive insurance products.
