Bolt Invests €100m To Enhance Platform Safety Over 3 Years

Bolt, a leading ride-hailing platform, today announced a significant commitment of €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 general manager of Bolt Nigeria, Osi Oguah, at the unveiling ceremony, on Thursday, in Lagos, explained that the new safety measures were built around three main approaches: prevention, monitoring, and support tools. The features include Ride Check, Share Location, Emergency Assist, Record Audio, Rider Verification, Driver Selfie Check, Driver Alerts, and Trip Details,
Bolt’s dedicated Safety Team of over 500 specialists work to achieve the company’s safety goals. The team comprises Safety Specialists who provide 24/7 customer support from Bolt’s Safety Hubs across the globe and Safety Experts based in Tallinn, Estonia, who focus on product development, engineering, and operations.

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.”

The Lagos state commissioner of Transportation, Oluwaseun Osiyemi, said, “I commend Bolt for its continuous collaboration with the Lagos State Government and its proactive approach to enhance safety measures on its platform. Given the importance of a safer transportation ecosystem, it is our responsibility as a progressive government to encourage collaboration among all key stakeholders, including private sector operators like Bolt”.

As part of the commitment, 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.

This all supports 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.