E-hailing firm Bolt has committed €100 million to strengthen safety measures on its platform over three years.
Announced yesterday, the financial commitment will also benefit the local market, raising awareness of in-app safety features in SA, says Bolt.
In a statement, the firm says the investment will support the Bolt safety team to provide product development, customer support, safety feature awareness and preventative measures to minimise safety incidents.
Simo Kalajdzic, senior operations manager at Bolt, says: “We take our responsibility to ensure the safety of our platform seriously. With the €100 million committed over three years to safety, we recognise this requires an end-to-end approach across our business in South Africa.
“The Bolt safety team, of over 500 specialists worldwide, will focus their efforts on product development, support and scaling preventative measures to stop safety cases before they happen.
“We’ll also continue to raise awareness of our safety tools with educational campaigns like the current Bolt safety team campaign in SA, to raise awareness of the in-app features we know can help prevent cases.”
Lebogang Maile, Gauteng MEC for finance and economic development, comments: “Bolt's global safety campaign, and other initiatives by the company which aim to raise awareness of safety features, safety initiatives and scaling preventative measures to prevent incidents of harassment and violence, are especially welcome in a South Africa that is battling the scourge of gender-based violence and femicide.
“Gauteng, the most populous province in the country, with a population of over 15.1 million people, is necessarily an important place for the launch of this campaign. Our unique economic and demographic profiles, which have a direct link to crime levels higher than the national average, make safety interventions crucial.
“For us, safety in the e-hailing industry is a social and economic imperative.”
Bolt says new trip verification features will add to the suite of safety tools in the coming months, to help address the role of mutual trust between driver partners and riders in the safety of the platform.
The features, it notes, will include trip count and unique four-digit trip pickup codes to help match riders and driver partners. Bolt will 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 SA, since launch.”
The e-hailing company is on an ongoing drive to improve safety on its platform, by taking strict measures against any misconduct, to ensure a safer environment for riders and drivers.
In March last year, it partnered with the Automobile Association of South Africa (AA) to trial its emergency SOS button located within the Bolt app’s Safety Toolkit.
The system shares smartphone GPS coordinates with the police or emergency services, which can be dispatched to the user's location without a phone call, according to Bolt.
The company highlights the financial commitment will support the Bolt safety team’s work in partnership with external experts, including the AA, to raise awareness of safety issues.
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