Mobility and ride-sharing company Bolt will invest €100-million over three years to improve safety, develop new safety products and scale up preventive measures.

The company will also continue to raise awareness of its safety tools, such as the current 'Bolt Safety Team' campaign in South Africa aimed at raising awareness of the in-app features that can help prevent safety incidents, says Bolt senior operations manager Simo Kalajdzic.

The company will introduce new trip verification features to its 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.

These features will include trip count and unique four-digit trip pickup codes to help match riders and driver partners. Bolt will also continue to scale up its Rider Verification solution, he says.

Further, the company 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 also 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 South Africa, since launch.

The 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, Kalajdzic points out.

Its Safety Team has more than 500 specialists, including 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.

This all supports The Bolt Safety Team's work in partnership with external experts, including the Automobile Association of South Africa, to raise awareness of safety issues, and make clients aware of features like the in-app Emergency Assist button that allows riders to quickly and discreetly alert an emergency response team if they need assistance, he says.