The Financial Markets Authority published its insurance priorities for 2026/27 last month. Consumer transparency, plain-language disclosure, and using complaints data to drive product improvements featured prominently. The FMA said boards and executives should be treating those principles as material to their business - not managing them as standalone compliance functions.
The Uber pricing research published this year is, at one level, a US and UK story about gig economy labour rights. At another level, it is a case study in exactly the kind of opacity the FMA is pushing against: a platform that describes its commercial insurance costs to regulators and to drivers in ways that, according to two independent research teams, do not reflect how those costs actually behave on individual transactions.
The research comes from two sources. The first is a peer-reviewed Oxford University study, published at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in June 2025, built on 1.5 million trips from 258 UK drivers and accessed through data subject access requests using GDPR rights. The second is a June 2026 analysis by Len Sherman, adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, using decade-long trip histories from three veteran US drivers who completed 50,000 combined rides.
Both found the same pattern: Uber's take rate has passed 50% in many markets, driver pay has fallen in real terms, and reported commercial insurance fees on individual trip receipts correlate with fare levels rather than the risk profile of the trip.
Sherman's most specific finding comes from 100 near-identical trips on the same route - same driver, same vehicle (a Tesla Model Y), same distance, same service type. Uber's reported "estimated commercial auto insurance and operational expenses" varied from $13.75 to $50.00. A regression found day of week, time of day and service type were all statistically insignificant in explaining that variance. What did predict it: the rider price and the driver pay. Higher fares were associated with higher insurance fees. Lower driver pay was also associated with higher insurance fees. On trips where both applied together, the fees were higher still.
Consumer Watchdog reported in May 2026 that Uber's self-insurance reserves grew from $6.7 billion in 2023 to $12.5 billion in 2025, while approximately $4.1 billion was released as unrestricted cash over the same period. The company simultaneously pushed for legal changes across several US states to limit its liability for accidents - changes that, if successful, would allow further reserve releases.
Uber's public position is that insurance costs are genuinely high, that state mandates in some US jurisdictions require coverage far exceeding that required of private vehicles, and that its true take - after insurance and other pass-throughs - is approximately 21% globally. What that position does not address is the trip-level variance. If insurance fees reflect genuine costs, they should vary with risk characteristics. Sherman's data shows they vary with margin characteristics instead.
Uber operates in New Zealand. New Zealand drivers operate under Uber's global algorithmic pricing system - the same dynamic pricing architecture documented in both the Oxford and Columbia research. There is no basis to assume the trip-level insurance fee dynamics documented in the UK and US do not apply here.
The NZ regulatory environment is relevant context. The FMA's 2026/27 priorities include specific focus on consumer communication following product changes and on ensuring firms use complaints data to drive product improvements rather than treating it as a compliance function. The Contracts of Insurance Act 2024, which takes effect in November 2027, shifts disclosure obligations so that insurers ask consumers the right questions rather than leaving consumers to work out what to disclose. The FMA expects firms to be preparing now.
Those principles apply to insurers. They speak to a broader principle that, applied to Uber's situation, points to a problem: a platform that charges insurance fees on individual trip receipts using criteria it does not disclose, in patterns that appear to serve margin objectives rather than risk pricing, is operating in a way that sits poorly with the direction New Zealand's regulatory framework is moving.
The gig economy is growing in New Zealand as it is elsewhere. The NZ market has not faced the same volume of rideshare tribunal decisions that have accumulated in Canadian jurisprudence, but the underlying insurance architecture - personal auto policies, rideshare endorsements, platform-carried commercial coverage - presents the same coverage gap questions. When those gaps reach New Zealand tribunals, the question of how Uber's commercial insurance fees are determined on individual trips will become relevant in ways the current research begins to illuminate.
The Oxford and Columbia research is not about New Zealand specifically. But the mechanism it documents - a platform with pricing power on both sides of its marketplace characterising certain fees as insurance costs in ways that are correlated with margin - has implications for any underwriter trying to price rideshare risk from outside the platform. Insurance Business Australia has examined what the same findings mean for the Australian rideshare insurance market, where the same algorithmic pricing system operates.
Rideshare insurance has been developing as a product category for a decade. The standard assumption in pricing that product is that the platform's reported insurance costs on individual trips represent genuine cost allocation. Sherman's regression suggests that assumption is worth examining. Uber's opacity about how its per-trip insurance fees are calculated - noted by the Oxford researchers, who found that even with 1.5 million trips of backend data, take rate calculation required inferring links between tables because no trip ID is provided - is itself a risk factor for any carrier writing rideshare exposure.
The lesson for any entity operating in the NZ insurance space whose cost disclosures do not reflect the underlying economics is that the direction of regulatory travel is toward more scrutiny, not less. The FMA's recent enforcement record - IAG ordered to pay $19.5 million, Tower $7 million, Southern Cross Travel $1.1 million and FMG $2.1 million in successive rulings through 2025 and 2026 - reflects a regulator that has moved from observation to action on transparency failures.
