Bolt okays €100m for riders’ safety

E-hailing platform Bolt has committed €100 million over the next three years to bolster safety measures on its platform. This investment will support The Bolt Safety Team in its critical work of product development, customer support, safety feature awareness, and preventative measures to minimise safety incidents. The announcement was made during a global safety campaign launch event held in Lagos recently.

Consequently, new trip verification features will join Bolt’s suite of safety tools in the coming months to help address the critical role of mutual trust between driver partners and riders in the safety of the platform, including trip count and unique four-digit trip pick-up codes to help match riders and driver partners.

Bolt will also continue to scale its Rider Verification solution

Bolt will also continue to invest in upgrading existing features like Ride Check to proactively detect if a trip’s route unexpectedly changes or takes longer than expected to finish, and introduce Trusted Contacts to ensure Ride Check notifications are escalated to a friend or loved one if needed.

Record Audio will continue to support The Bolt Safety Team’s safety investigations and has already been used to trigger in-app audio recordings to submit with Customer Support tickets across 14 markets including Nigeria since launch.

The measures are expected to further enhance the Bolt Safety Team’s work in partnership with regulators, drivers, and police to raise awareness of safety issues through events such as Safety Summit.

General Manager at Bolt Nigeria, Osi Oguah, said: “We take our responsibility to ensure the safety of our platform very seriously. With €100 million committed over three years to safety, we recognise that this requires an end-to-end approach across our business in Nigeria. That’s why The Bolt Safety Team of over 500 specialists from across the world will focus their efforts on product development, support, and scaling preventative measures to stop safety cases before they happen in that time. We’ll also continue to raise awareness of our safety tools with educational campaigns like the current ‘Bolt Safety Team’ campaign running in Nigeria to raise awareness of the in-app features that we know can help prevent cases.”

Lagos State Commissioner of Transportation, Oluwaseun Osiyemi, lauded Bold for its continued collaboration with Lagos State and its proactive approach to enhance safety.

The event brought together key stakeholders, including the Lagos State Commissioner for Transportation, representatives from the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) and Vehicle Inspection Officers (VIO), safety experts, Bolt representatives, and members of the media.