Insurtech Leadership Podcast
Live Maps, Smarter Risk: Inside TomTom’s Insurance Playbook
Insurtech Leadership Podcast
•February 13, 2026•28 min
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Insurtech Leadership Podcast•Feb 13, 2026
Why It Matters
Location‑based data transforms underwriting from coarse proxies to real‑time risk signals, directly impacting insurers’ loss ratios and profitability. As mobility data becomes more accessible, carriers that adopt TomTom’s solutions can gain a competitive edge in pricing accuracy, fraud detection, and telematics effectiveness, making this insight timely for any underwriting, claims, or product leader.
Key Takeaways
- •TomTom's Orbis merges open and proprietary map data.
- •Live location intelligence improves auto loss ratios up to 2%.
- •Stable IDs reduce data integration costs for insurers.
- •Real‑time traffic data enhances risk and fraud models.
- •Insurers adopt agentic AI for faster claims validation.
Pulse Analysis
TomTom has transformed from a consumer navigation brand into a data‑centric platform with its Orbis product suite. By combining proprietary probe data, partner feeds, and open‑source contributions such as OpenStreetMap, Orbis delivers a richer, more accurate, and fresher map layer. The collaboration with the Overture Maps Foundation creates an open standard that lets insurers tap into high‑resolution speed limits, road geometry, and live traffic conditions—key ingredients for modern usage‑based insurance (UBI) and territory risk models.
In the insurance arena, TomTom focuses on property‑and‑casualty carriers, offering four primary use cases: territory risk modeling, usage‑based driver scoring, claims‑validation/fraud detection, and property exposure analysis for natural hazards. Live traffic patterns and granular road attributes enable underwriters to refine loss‑ratio forecasts, with some auto insurers reporting up to a 2% improvement—significant at scale. For property lines, proximity to flood or earthquake zones is quantified instantly, supporting more precise underwriting and reinsurance decisions.
The introduction of stable IDs, derived from the Overture foundation, tackles the industry’s “data conflict tax” by simplifying cross‑dataset joins, reducing manual reconciliation, and accelerating model development. Insurers are now layering TomTom’s geospatial feeds with demographic and historical claim data, and many are experimenting with agentic AI to automate claim validation and fraud detection. This convergence of high‑quality location intelligence, flexible APIs/SDKs, and emerging AI tools signals a shift toward faster, data‑driven insurance operations, positioning TomTom as a strategic partner in the next wave of InsurTech innovation.
Episode Description
-Introduction
TomTom isn’t just “navigation” anymore. In this episode of the InsurTech Leadership Podcast, Josh Hollander talks with Vinod Poomalai, Head of InsurTech Product Marketing at TomTom, about how insurers are using location, map, and traffic intelligence to improve how they price risk, validate claims, and build telematics programs that actually produce underwriting signal.
Guest bio
Vinod Pumalai leads go-to-market for TomTom’s insurance and InsurTech vertical. His work focuses on helping carriers, brokers, actuaries, and InsurTech teams integrate TomTom’s location and traffic data into risk models, pricing engines, and telematics workflows—with a practical emphasis on adoption inside real operating environments.
Key topics
-From static territories to live location intelligence
-Why “territory” is a crude proxy—and how mobility patterns add resolution to risk.
-Territory risk models powered by traffic + map data
-How insurers use location and traffic attributes to refine pricing and portfolio strategy.
-Telematics enablement: APIs, SDKs, and flexible integration
-What teams actually plug into, and what the implementation path looks like in practice.
-Claims validation and fraud detection using mobility history
-Using historical mobility/traffic context to validate events faster and reduce leakage.
-Where experimentation becomes operational value
-The difference between demos and workflows that move loss ratio outcomes.
-What the insurance market is missing in location data
-Why the market has been underserved—and what that creates as an opportunity.
-Talent and leadership required to make it real
-Product, data, and insurance domain collaboration: what “good” looks like inside carriers.
Quotes
-“The insurance market as a whole is very underserved when it comes to location data, traffic data, and so on.”
-“At the end of the day, what our clients really care about… is loss ratios.”
-“Customers are leveraging our traffic data in validating auto insurance claims.”
Resources
-Vinod Poomalai: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinod-kumar-poomalai/
-TomTom Insurtech: https://www.tomtom.com/solutions/insurtech/
-Joshua Hollander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuarhollander/
If you found this useful, subscribe to the InsurTech Leadership Podcast on YouTube and your preferred podcast app. Share the episode with an underwriting, claims, or telematics leader on your team—and leave a review to help more operators find the show.
Show Notes
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