Beyond Telematics: Why Cameras Are the Next Profit Lever in Commercial Auto Insurance
Commercial auto insurers no longer debate whether telematics improves profitability. That question has been answered. With the vast majority of insurers now viewing telematics as vital to underwriting performance — as highlighted in the SambaSafety 2025 Telematics Report — most carriers already understand the value of GPS, ELD, and driver-behavior data in improving pricing accuracy and risk selection. The challenge today isn’t proving telematics works—it’s determining how to extract even more value from fleet data.
The answer increasingly lies in expanding visibility from what happened to why it happened. That evolution comes through camera systems—not as a replacement for telematics, but as a powerful enhancement that provides context, accelerates claims decisions, and strengthens underwriting discipline.
1. The Next Frontier: High-Fidelity Data That Explains the “Why”
Telematics gives insurers essential visibility into driving behavior—speed, braking, routes, utilization, and hours-of-service compliance. But telematics alone can leave ambiguity. A harsh braking event may look identical on paper whether the driver was distracted or avoiding a reckless cut-in.
Cameras help close this gap by adding situational context. Video paired with telematics reveals what the driver saw, how they reacted, and what environmental conditions contributed to the event. This doesn’t diminish telematics—it elevates it. Together, they allow underwriters to move beyond surface-level indicators and develop a more accurate picture of true risk.
2. The Adoption Problem: Fragmented Hardware, Unified Solutions
The commercial trucking ecosystem is technologically fragmented. Fleets use different combinations of ELDs, GPS platforms, cameras, and safety systems—each with its own formats, APIs, and data definitions. Most insurers lack the internal engineering capacity to normalize these feeds on their own.
This is why aggregation platforms have become essential. Rather than requiring fleets to adopt proprietary hardware, carriers can leverage solutions like TruckerCloud that ingest data from 120+ ELD and camera providers into a single, normalized stream. This dramatically reduces adoption friction, accelerates program rollout, and ensures that camera data is accessible where underwriters and risk managers actually need it.
The practical strength of camera-inclusive telematics programs is that carriers don’t need to build proprietary hardware ecosystems to support them. By aggregating fleet-owned systems, insurers can implement high-fidelity programs without the capital costs and deployment challenges of requiring new devices.
This accelerates ROI. Most carriers implementing camera-inclusive telematics report measurable improvements in loss ratios, claims efficiency, and pricing adequacy within the first year—far faster than historical telematics programs that required multi-year hardware rollouts.
3. The Underestimated Advantage: Camera Requirements Create Positive Selection Bias
Here is where cameras become not just a data source, but a risk selection mechanism.
When carriers require cameras as part of a program, fleets effectively sort themselves. This selection bias is powerful and under-appreciated:
- Fleets with weak safety cultures hesitate to adopt cameras.
- Fleets committed to safety and accountability embrace them.
This self-selection dramatically improves portfolio quality before a single frame of footage is reviewed. Well-run fleets want cameras because they understand their protective value—both for defending drivers and for documenting incidents they didn’t cause. Meanwhile, fleets with operational problems often resist visibility, and naturally fall out of the pipeline when cameras are required.
This dynamic shows up directly in the loss ratio improvements reported by underwriters who use mandatory camera requirements. It isn’t magic, and it isn’t algorithmic—it’s behavioral economics. By elevating the visibility standard, you attract the fleets that already behave like better risks.
4. Cameras Enhance What Telematics Already Does Well
Adding cameras doesn’t make telematics less valuable; it makes telematics more actionable.
More Accurate Pricing
Telematics may show similar event patterns across different drivers. Camera data reveals the context behind those patterns—whether the risky event was defensive, environmental, or behavior-driven. Studies highlight that telematics-driven pricing already improves risk prediction (NAIC - Telematics in Auto Insurance); camera context sharpens those predictions further.
More Effective Coaching
Drivers respond more strongly to video than to abstract alerts. When safety managers can walk through an event frame-by-frame, coaching becomes faster, more credible, and more likely to change behavior.
Faster, More Defensible Claims Decisions
Camera data significantly reduces investigation times. Claims that take weeks with traditional methods often resolve in days when video is available. Fraud becomes easier to identify, subrogation becomes more effective, and liability becomes clearer. This translates directly into improved loss ratios and reduced litigation exposure.
Importantly, these benefits stack—they do not replace the value of telematics. Instead, they help insurers make better use of the telematics insights they already collect.
5. What This Means for Carrier Strategy
The industry is moving toward real-time operational visibility. Carriers who lead this shift will have materially better data, stronger risk pools, and faster claims cycles than those who continue to rely solely on historical information.
To capture this advantage, insurers should focus on three priorities:
- Investing in infrastructure that aggregates both telematics and camera data from fleets’ existing systems.
- Leverage camera requirements not only for data quality, but for the natural selection bias they create.
- Develop workflows that turn high-fidelity data into underwriting, coaching, and claims insights.
The path is clear: telematics has already improved commercial auto underwriting, but camera-enhanced telematics is how carriers will achieve the next generation of profitability gains.
