Personal Lines Telematics Moves
Beyond Auto—Into Homeowners

• By: AnneMarie McPherson Spears
• November 1, 2025

Telematics and usage-based insurance are common offerings for personal auto insurance customers. However, insurers are now beginning to expand the use of auto telematics data to inform risk assessment and pricing in other personal lines.

Nationwide recently launched its Telematics Property Discount, which connects driving behavior to homeowners policy discounts.

“We’ve done extensive research and see a clear pattern around certain customer mindsets and behaviors and their impact on loss performance,” says Sarah Jacobs, senior vice president of property & casualty personal lines at Nationwide. “Our hypothesis was that customers who display safe behaviors in one aspect of their lives, such as driving, might be more likely to do so in other areas of their lives, such as taking a proactive approach to their homes and property.”

“We found a clear correlation between better auto telematics scores and improved homeowners claims,” she says.

Cross-product risk rating is “not a new concept,” Jacobs points out. However, the integration between telematics and home policies is new and provides an insight into the future of personal lines telematics.

“As agents are well aware, inflation and other factors are continuing to drive up insurance prices,” she says. “The appeal of telematics or usage-based insurance programs is the opportunity for customers to directly influence their premium through their driving behavior.”

With telematics programs being available in the market over the past decade, “we’ve got so much data,” Jacobs says, while artificial intelligence (AI) has also increased opportunities to find insights in data for segmentation.

Additionally, customers are becoming more comfortable with sharing driving data. “We see a very high rate of acceptance from customers who are offered telematics programs directly—over 70%,” Jacobs says. “Customers increasingly want more transparency, they want more control over their premium and, on the carrier side, we ultimately want to remain competitive and available as broadly as possible.”

For independent insurance agents, cross-product telematics can complement and enhance the classic bundling strategy. “Retention is higher for customers with more than one product, and adding telematics program discounts creates another level of reinforcement for safe behaviors and gives customers another way to control rising premiums,” Jacobs says.

Despite Nationwide’s product being in early stages of implementation, “we’re already seeing an even greater retention uplift than multi-product or bundling alone,” she adds.

As telematics programs become more integrated in personal lines, independent agents play a key role in helping customers navigate the programs. The best customers for cross-product personal lines telematics are those “who take the time to understand their individual risk situation, and then they’re actually willing to help mitigate that risk through actions, such as safe driving or installing home protection devices,” Jacobs says.

Although telematics utilization rates vary among agencies that Jacobs interacts with, “agents should understand that telematics can help their customers obtain a competitive quote and manage not just that customer’s loss performance but, at an even bigger level, the agency’s loss performance,” Jacobs adds.

AnneMarie McPherson Spears is IA news editor.