-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/
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