RHS 086 - Steve Lekas on Why Insurance Needs Another Startup Carrier

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Speaker 5 In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home,

Speaker 6 hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.

Speaker 6 We have an incredible episode for you today.

Speaker 6 I'm joined by Steve Lakis, the co-founder and CEO of Branch Insurance, a startup insurance carrier that is doing some pretty wild stuff on the personal line side, and they're working through independent agents.

Speaker 6 Now, they also, like many of the insurtechs that have come up, Hippo and some of the others, there is a direct arm to what they do, but primarily they are working into the IA space.

Speaker 6 They're in six states now with hoping, and I think

Speaker 6 Steve kind of mentions this. They're hoping to be in 30-plus states by the end of 2021.
They have a very aggressive schedule for the rollout of their product.

Speaker 6 And as Steve outlines, and you'll see right away, Steve is an insurance wonk, a nerd. I mean,

Speaker 6 we go deep on some stuff that only people who really love this industry will enjoy. I think you're just going to love this episode.

Speaker 7 But, you know,

Speaker 6 they can bind home auto umbrella in seconds. We're not talking about minutes.
We're talking about seconds. And that's, from an IA perspective, pretty powerful.

Speaker 6 And we talk a little bit about my experience with something similar to that with...

Speaker 6 Plymouth Rock and what they're doing on home and, you know, openly and hippo and

Speaker 6 Swift. You know, there are a lot of dynamic dynamic changes coming to the way the insurance customer experience is presented, and it feels like Branch has a chance to be one of those players.

Speaker 6 So it was a great honor to have Steve on the show. Before we get there, I want to give a big shout out to our friends, our friends at Tarmica.

Speaker 6 Tarmica is making small commercial insurance profitable for you, the independent agent. We've seen all these transactions, Bold Penguin getting bought by American Family.

Speaker 6 We've seen Easy Links getting bought by Applied. You know, these are great things for their founders.
And while I'm sure that at face value,

Speaker 6 you know, nothing may change,

Speaker 6 those buyouts,

Speaker 6 they're not a net improvement for the everyday independent agent. These aren't net improvements.
And to see a company like Tarmica founded by an independent agent,

Speaker 6 Ragov's dad is a client of Tarmica.

Speaker 6 I mean, you just, when these, you have these kind of things in place, when your board and your advisory board is made up of individuals who are pro-IA, what you find is a product that's pro-IA.

Speaker 6 And I just can't speak highly enough about Tarmica and the work that they're doing and the success that companies that use them have. So go check it out: T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com.
T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com.

Speaker 6 Also, huge huge shout out to our friends at Better Agency.

Speaker 5 Better Agency and Tarmica are partnering.

Speaker 6 So now you have the best commercial insurance rater

Speaker 6 integrated into the best independent agent CRM out on the market. And, you know, these are the kind of partnerships and integrations.

Speaker 6 You know, I'd love to believe that these are matches made inside the Ryan Hanley show as they're both sponsors.

Speaker 6 But ultimately, these are the kind of tools that are lining up to help you just be more efficient,

Speaker 6 give that quality customer experience that you daydream about in your mind where systems talk to each other and pass data so that you're not spent double entering and your people aren't trying to rush off the phone because they know they have 20 minutes of data entry to do.

Speaker 6 When the systems that we use talk to each other, it's not just our agencies that benefit. It's our customers that benefit.

Speaker 9 And maybe even most important,

Speaker 6 it's our employees that benefit because they get more of their time back.

Speaker 6 they get they can work less stressed and ultimately all of that comes out in the quality of operation that we're able to run and the profitability of our agency the growth of our agency and uh it's just tremendous so if you haven't at least taken better agency for a test drive i highly recommend that you do go to betteragency.io betteragency.io i think for a buck you get a two-week trial or a 30-day trial something like that and um just take the tool for a a test drive.

Speaker 6 You know, I use some of the features, other features I don't. But as a collection,

Speaker 6 the CRM is absolutely tremendous and it's getting better every two weeks. Every two weeks on the dot, they drop four, five, six, seven feature improvements, just expanding what the tool can do.

Speaker 6 And I just think Better Agency is a great tool that you need to be aware of. So go to betteragency.io.
Okay, let's get on to Steve.

Speaker 7 Steve.

Speaker 10 Brian.

Speaker 8 How are you?

Speaker 10 How are you? Nice to meet you.

Speaker 7 Yeah, nice to meet you as well.

Speaker 10 I love that New York Central mutual sign.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 10 Not a lot of folks rocking that one.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Well, they're, I, I, I've been saying for years, they're one of the best companies in the entire country that, you know, only New Yorkers know about.
Um,

Speaker 7 you know, I'm sure you know this, but.

Speaker 7 A lot of people don't realize who don't write in New York, a lot of agents, how,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 mutual company and domestic, in specific, domestic company-driven our marketplace actually is.

Speaker 7 I think we have something like 300 mutuals and 100 plus of them are domestics or something like that, some number around there, which makes it a, it's just a unique ecosystem for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 7 And then most of those won't write down in the city, you know, or and then some will only write down there. So,

Speaker 10 yeah, I mean, I've been up to the Edmiston office yeah up there in upstate new york uh it's a it's fascinating i mean

Speaker 10 i think what people don't know is that in 1960 we had over 6 000 mutual companies in the united states

Speaker 10 and you know they they grew up for a really specific reason which was um there wasn't regulated surplus and

Speaker 10 people were just banding together. It's actually one of the core principles on which branch is founded.

Speaker 10 The mutual should have been the perfect insurance model because

Speaker 10 perfect is frequently defined by our customers as efficient, and mutuals don't have a profit motive. The problem has been,

Speaker 10 it's actually been a problem of motivation.

Speaker 10 NYCM is a great company. It's got great service, great people,

Speaker 10 but no desire to leave New York, right? I mean, best kept secret, not because the rest of the U.S., you know, wasn't interested. New York Central never cared to try out outside New York.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 10 And actually, like State Farm, who's probably the

Speaker 10 whose market share rides on the greatest innovation and personal insurance in the last hundred years, just barely, right? We're right at the cusp there.

Speaker 10 That,

Speaker 10 you know, a lot of people don't know that nationwide only exists because State Farm was blocked from entering Ohio and the president of the the Farm Bureau here paid State Farm to send employees and license the business model.

Speaker 10 I mean, like the mutuals have such a strong part of our storyline and in U.S. personal

Speaker 10 PNC, especially. But

Speaker 10 it's always a little bit confounding to trace all the tales of it because of motivation. Yeah.
Without the profit motive, like, why progress? And it's such an interesting part of our story.

Speaker 7 Yeah. You know, and you talk about the ease of business thing.

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 you know, NYCM, New York Central Mutual, they have a great auto home umbrella rater. You know, I'd put it up against any of the, you know, travelers, Safeguard.

Speaker 7 I mean, actually, they're probably better than those two guys.

Speaker 7 But you still quote rental properties on a Excel spreadsheet that you can only get to from a. windows pc computer so like it's just funny how

Speaker 7 you know and this is one of the things. And they even said, like, based on their current rating models or, you know, their current rating system, there's not really a big drive to move from that.
So

Speaker 7 you're quoting home auto umbrella. And then if they have a rental, you then go into this Excel spreadsheet and use like macros to generate.
the quote.

Speaker 7 And then, you know, it's just funny how, you know, we're in a day and they're can be so successful. I mean, they're, they're an incredibly successful and profitable company.

Speaker 7 And I think either number six or seven for auto insurance in all of New York State. So, I mean, I think that's a fairly unheard of thing that a domestic would be ranked that high in a state,

Speaker 7 especially for auto insurance. So

Speaker 7 it is interesting. I mean, what's one of the things about our industry in general that I've...

Speaker 7 You know, again, I don't know that any little boy grows up dreaming of being an insurance nerd, right? But we find ourselves in these places.

Speaker 7 And one of the things that I find to be so intriguing are those stories.

Speaker 7 You know, you just run into all these unique stories about how different companies evolved to serve certain needs and how the decisions they made over time impacted where they are today.

Speaker 7 And I think it's very, very interesting.

Speaker 10 I agree with you.

Speaker 10 I would add about mutuals, which is so fascinating,

Speaker 10 is

Speaker 10 owned by their policyholders, but the policyholders have no understanding of what that means or even that fact

Speaker 10 and that because of the way capital works which it's all our businesses right moving capital um if you're a mutual it's really hard to raise capital if things go bad and so the reason the mutual should have been so efficient and remember like when the mutual started policies were all accessible right so you paid in a small premium and then if if premiums didn't cover claims we'd all chip in the difference so it should have been perfectly efficient But for a million reasons, you can imagine like that's really hard on consumers to have that kind of uncertainty and then get a big bill at the end of a period.

Speaker 10 And so we moved to this, you know, the statutory capital model.

Speaker 10 And then it became regulated, so regulatory capital.

Speaker 10 But in this model, when you have to stow so much money away, you don't have a way because your customers are owners, but they don't know their owners.

Speaker 10 Then how do you get more capital when you need it? And insurance is built for volatility smoothing, right?

Speaker 10 And so you end up with this long-term problem for mutuals, which is

Speaker 10 give the money back.

Speaker 10 And how do you do that? Especially when like that doesn't actually like no one gets, no one is bonused better if you give if you give the money back.

Speaker 10 And so that led us to like, you know, is it the late 80s or early 90s demutualization of Met and Prew, right?

Speaker 10 Tens of billions of millions, tens of billions of dollars going back to owners that didn't know they were owners. But then you hear the kind of

Speaker 10 the same

Speaker 10 subtext with some of the insured text, of which you'll hear it from me, which is we built it so it can be hyper-efficient and our customers are owners.

Speaker 10 But what does it mean and how would it be different? And

Speaker 10 why does it bend that? that long-term

Speaker 10 conflict that mutuals have had with themselves and their customers because they are built for the community only to serve that community, but like give the money back, right?

Speaker 10 And then having to fend off your policyholders in lawsuits and things. It's the dynamic.
And who else's marketplace that's $400 billion big

Speaker 10 is dominated by nonprofits? That's by itself a super interesting question.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So, you know, you have a pretty,

Speaker 7 you know, doing the LinkedIn stalking of your profile.

Speaker 7 You have a pretty dynamic history in the industry. I mean, give us the

Speaker 7 10,000 foot,

Speaker 7 you know, and it's going to be tough. I mean, just looking at some of the places that you've been and some of the things you've done,

Speaker 7 but kind of walk us through how, you know, how not necessary, I don't, maybe not necessarily to right up to the formation of branch.

Speaker 7 Cause I have some questions about that, but I'd love to hear just a little bit about your backstory because, um

Speaker 7 you know most of my guests don't start so um authoritatively nerdy and i mean that in an incredibly positive way uh right off the rip so um so how the heck did you get all that information

Speaker 10 you know the uh starting with your last question ryan um

Speaker 10 i

Speaker 10 i was at a big company and you know, we hadn't grown policies in force in a long time.

Speaker 10 And,

Speaker 10 you know, trying to figure out how to help, I started asking the question of, well, how did we get this big in the first place?

Speaker 10 We're big,

Speaker 10 really big.

Speaker 10 And that was a hard question to answer. And, you know, the first observation as I tried to research it was,

Speaker 10 no one record keeps in our marketplace. And, you know, the rationalization was, well, because nobody would read it if someone actually paid to publish something.

Speaker 10 And so it's really hard to cobble together the history. But I was obsessed with the question of how did big insurance companies become big?

Speaker 10 And that led me to kind of a love of

Speaker 10 insurance history, but for its prescriptiveness, right? I mean, it's actually kind of amazing how short our viewpoint is, right?

Speaker 10 I mean, even if you're kind of old guard, you're talking about Hurricane Andrew and its impacts on the industry.

Speaker 10 And maybe if you've been around a really long time, you're talking about when we invented homeowners as a product in 1950.

Speaker 10 But, like, it's reasonable to believe that the biggest impacts to our market cycles have been caused by regulatory changes and natural disasters. And those things are not multi-year cycles, right?

Speaker 10 We're talking multi-decadal or maybe multi-centennial.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 so, how I got the information was just

Speaker 10 cobbling it all together. I'll tell you,

Speaker 10 I stumbled across this place that anybody listening to your show should visit at some point.

Speaker 10 I think it's called the Insurance Library of Boston.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah. No, that is phenomenal.

Speaker 10 Phenomenal. I mean, like, if you're trying to find answers to why the things that occur today exist the way they occur, there are these gems of places.

Speaker 10 And the state of Massachusetts industry funds the Boston Library. But if you walk in,

Speaker 10 you know, the librarians all look at you a little bit funny because they just don't get a lot of foot traffic.

Speaker 10 But the answers, the information is deep. And,

Speaker 10 you know, a lot of the things we talk about today aren't new, right? And the way we talk at branch is we're not trying to disrupt a market.

Speaker 10 We're trying to introduce some of the oldest ideas of insurance, which are that it's a communal good, that it is good.

Speaker 10 And this all stems from a really long view.

Speaker 10 But your question about my background, you know, I grew up,

Speaker 10 I was a sophomore in college when I started working nights at All State Insurance.

Speaker 10 I was there, started taking first notice of loss and claims, then small claims adjusting. I was going to school for tech, moved into tech, realized that they probably weren't going to compete.

Speaker 10 from as far back in the back office as I was, and I had a desire to help them win.

Speaker 10 And so tried to find my way into the business, got into underwriting, then into a strategy function, and then into product development and product management.

Speaker 10 It was at a time where Allstate was kind of slowing down its own direct business and bought a company called eSurance.

Speaker 10 And so as they published on the web to Wall Street, you know, the desire was that eSurance could be the all-state of the web as the direct revolution was, you know, well underway.

Speaker 10 And I had the cool op to go to San Francisco and help create the first online home insurance program in the United States. It's a great business.

Speaker 10 You start from scratch.

Speaker 10 We didn't have the risk tolerance to be coastal. So in the inland market, it grew to 100 million in five years and it ran its target loss ratio the whole time.

Speaker 10 But it's interesting as you think about the bones of organizations and places.

Speaker 10 All state's got a strong pedigree in underwriting and tends to make its targets like some other companies like Progressive and Auto.

Speaker 10 And so that was all built into the fabric of that business. The downside was, even being the first,

Speaker 10 it was 83 questions to purchase,

Speaker 10 far shy of,

Speaker 10 a digital experience standard for most consumers.

Speaker 10 Soon after, I left and went to a company called Verisk Analytics. I'm sure you know,

Speaker 10 in the industry, it grew out of the insurance services office and had a chance to run the personal insurance arm of the insurance services office.

Speaker 10 And the moment I saw the way data worked and grew my relationships across the data aggregator world, I saw a model of underwriting that wouldn't compromise on underwriting integrity, but would allow for different and unique business models in insurance that could be really powerful in creating price value and convenience value to consumers.

Speaker 10 So my background and the branch background, very intertwined.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, it sounds like the perfect cocktail for starting your own insurance company.

Speaker 10 It might be, you know, or the, you know,

Speaker 10 no one else has used that particular cocktail, so maybe not. We'll see.

Speaker 7 So where does, it's okay. So now we're at branch.
So where does branch come from?

Speaker 10 You know, the name Branch was my own placeholder.

Speaker 10 It's from my favorite insurance history story, funny enough.

Speaker 10 But the very first underwriting ineligibility in the United States,

Speaker 10 as far as my own research goes, was

Speaker 10 the Philadelphia Contribution Ship from Protection of Loss to Homes by Fire, I think was the name of the company,

Speaker 10 decided that homes with trees around the structure were no longer eligible for fire insurance.

Speaker 10 And this was maybe like I'm not sure, but you know, Ben Franklin was on the board and also causing the first fire brigades to exist in Philly.

Speaker 10 Maybe some confluence of information there. But a couple of the employees from the Philly quit.
and started a company called the Mutual Assurance Company for protection of homes by fire.

Speaker 10 For protection, it's it's a very long name.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 they bifurcated the rate.

Speaker 10 And so they charged X for homes without trees and they charged X plus for homes with trees.

Speaker 10 So you've got both the first underrating ineligibility and the first pricing segmentation in the United States insurance marketplace as a result of trees. And I loved...

Speaker 10 you know, part of how we built on this idea of communities with some real product innovations and how the community can benefit each of the members.

Speaker 10 And I love the metaphor of a tree creating coverage.

Speaker 10 I love that it grows.

Speaker 10 And it was just, you know, it was a name that ended up sticking as we incorporated and went to market.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So, I mean,

Speaker 7 why start the company to begin with, though?

Speaker 7 What was the spark that said to you, you know, there's something missing in the market that, you know, there's been, you know, I was, at least from an editorial standpoint, on the front lines of the 2016 insure, we'll call it

Speaker 7 revolution or evolution, whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 7 And a lot of players came and went at that time. It feels like our system has found

Speaker 7 a little bit of equilibrium, you know, in recent years in terms of, you know, the agency and carrier world working more in kind with InsurTech and new insurance players versus fighting against them, which is, which is a good thing for all of us.

Speaker 7 So I'm just interested. You know,

Speaker 7 it's not a small thing to do what you're doing. So I'm just interested what the spark was.

Speaker 10 Yeah, you know,

Speaker 10 it was the combination of these three insights. First was

Speaker 10 insurance would have to be cheaper to be better to its customers. in the commoditized market that it is auto and home.

Speaker 10 Second is that technology and data could change the underwriting underwriting model in a way that it could be incredibly easy.

Speaker 10 And in the frictionless acquisition, new business models that could also make insurance less expensive, you know, appeared in my head as obvious. And then the third was that

Speaker 10 insurance could be good, right? Like good, like orthogonal to how most of my customers and focus groups have ever gone about how people think about their insurance.

Speaker 10 but insurance provides such a wonderful thing to society. Like, how do you pull that through in a, you know, in a different kind of brand? And if you could make insurance less expensive, right?

Speaker 10 I mean, I think Geico's business model is the moat that it's had for 40 years since its near insolvency in the 70s, right?

Speaker 10 It's difficult to match because of others go to market.

Speaker 10 You know, how could you take that a step further in real economics, in appropriately pricing the product and create real value for consumers and what we what i knew was the biggest and most um or the biggest and highest lifetime part of the market was people who owned homes who owned cars who frequently needed umbrella and these multiple needs uh consumers were unserved digitally uh and so

Speaker 10 all of this kind of was hitting me at the same time it was this confluence of experiences and this real eye-open in the capabilities of data

Speaker 10 as I ran a large data aggregator. And at some point, I just, I started penning it out and I couldn't sleep.
Like it was, it felt like it had to be done.

Speaker 10 And that led me to making a first pitch to a VC corporate kid here, right? Like I didn't know anything about fundraising

Speaker 10 and getting some advice I should think about a technical co-founder, and called up some of my friends saying, hey, do you know anybody?

Speaker 10 And I had the wonderful fortune of Joe Emison, who had founded five companies, five or six by then.

Speaker 10 And the last one being BuildFax, which is a data company aggregating building permits from across the U.S. And for 10 years been building products and selling them to home insurance companies.

Speaker 10 His deep background in tech, but also an understanding of insurance, like he got what I explained the moment I said it. And we've been at it together since.

Speaker 10 So definitely some good fortune, but I think we come at it from a little bit different angle because

Speaker 10 of the experience of working with consumers and

Speaker 10 understanding their buying and shopping behaviors and architecting a business that was built to solve the problems I couldn't solve in some of my past lives.

Speaker 7 so um

Speaker 7 i'm trying to figure out the right way to ask the question that i want to ask um

Speaker 7 so what i heard what i what i heard you say is that um there's a market opportunity uh from the standpoint of consumers who own a home own a car and sometimes buy umbrellas

Speaker 7 you know at face value and this is obviously where i want you to dig in, but at face value, every agent who heard that went, really?

Speaker 7 Every carrier rep who's ever walked into my office ever has told me that they're the best at writing homeowners who also have vehicles and sometimes write umbrellas.

Speaker 7 So, what is it about, you know, as much as we're not giving away the secret sauce, you know, you don't have to drop into ones and zeros or whatever, but

Speaker 7 what would what is it about branch that makes it different than any of the other companies who've been underwriting for 150 years or whatever?

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah. Well, and Ryan, maybe level setting, if I turn you back the question and asked you,

Speaker 10 why do you think Geico and Progressive Direct have moved 20 points of market share over the last 35 years?

Speaker 7 Why do I think they

Speaker 7 mean I think I think part of it is pricing. I think a big part of it is brand.

Speaker 7 Those would be my, those would be the, I mean, that would be my two big, if I were to pick two, it would be pricing and brand.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, I think those companies do a ton of things well.

Speaker 10 But like, you know, Progressive, by the time that we're in the early 90s, was already the largest auto writer in the agency channel, independent agency channel, and had essentially no brand, unknown to consumers.

Speaker 10 But both Geico and Progressive Direct have a business model price advantage, right?

Speaker 10 It's an expense structure advantage that they give back to consumers because a lower expense ratio, if they paid the same in claims, you'd have

Speaker 10 a higher loss ratio, but lower average price for the lower expense ratio. And so you can think of that as why Geico can say, you know, save 15%.

Speaker 10 You know, it's kind of the simplistic way to think about it.

Speaker 10 And no one was doing that for home and auto. We wrote the first online umbrella policy last year when we launched as well.

Speaker 10 And so inside, I think our fastest customer buying both home and car insurance purchased insurance in 37 seconds.

Speaker 10 With two more clicks, they could have had umbrella as well, been fully underwritten, fully insured. We don't quote.
We only give prices.

Speaker 10 And so it gives us an ability to do something that's hyper-unique, which is we flip the model in its entirety. And we love agents, right?

Speaker 10 We've got an agency business, we've got an rbranch.com business, and then we've got a business that's entirely new.

Speaker 10 And so the way we think about it is consumers will want to buy in many different scenarios and settings. And in each setting for each customer, they'll think differently about how important price is.

Speaker 10 And agents have great distribution. They've got great relationships.
It's why that business can be so sticky for them.

Speaker 10 And in that model, we have a price that considers agency commission and reduces the amount that we would spend ourselves on acquisition.

Speaker 10 In our branch.com price, we have a price that considers our own advertising expense, but doesn't have a commission expense. And then you'll see us

Speaker 10 in new places, like as you're buying a home in Rocket Mortgage, you may need insurance still.

Speaker 10 Get an instant price, check out, have us cancel your existing insurance for you on your closing date, have us transmit all the documentation digitally back to the mortgage underwriter

Speaker 10 and have to exert no effort of your own.

Speaker 10 And this becomes very unique and unique to us because we can serve that need of a consumer to bring multiple

Speaker 10 in a frictionless way. You know, we had an agent we were working with who said, who heard what we were doing and said, there's no way you can instantly purchase the bundle.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 then they did, right? They actually purchased policies and were insured in seconds. And it's high quality,

Speaker 10 good coverage.

Speaker 10 But that's the big flip.

Speaker 10 And so, you know, we're not necessarily pushing any specific model, model, but we are the first to truly embed insurance, right?

Speaker 10 Leverage the full stack to create value across the value chain from the customer's point of view, allowing them to buy when and how they want, but

Speaker 10 at the most appropriate, unblended price point. And so, you know, you'll pay less with us through Rocket than you'll pay with us on ourbranch.com.

Speaker 10 And you might say, well,

Speaker 10 doesn't that bother you? Doesn't that worry you? No, I think our mission is to make insurance less expensive.

Speaker 10 And by making it less expensive, we can help more people be insured, which we most explicitly go after through our nonprofit Arm Safety Nest.

Speaker 10 But that's why that's the space that is unfulfilled, because you really can't buy insurance bundled except through branch digitally today. It's very difficult to do.

Speaker 11 The phone rings and it's that one-man contractor and he needs that general liability, and he needs it quick. He was referred to you.

Speaker 11 So, you've got to do everything you can, and you're really not going to make any money because you know it's going to take a lot of time.

Speaker 11 And heck, you probably can't even get anybody in the office that's going to want to quote it. And so, after hearing that pain and that frustration,

Speaker 11 tarmica, t-a-r-m-i-k-a.com, they'll solve everything I just said was terrible.

Speaker 5 Check them out, tarmica.

Speaker 10 They're awesome. You'll love them.

Speaker 7 Yeah. You know, it's interesting.

Speaker 7 It's interesting to me that

Speaker 7 this is a conversation that we still have to have. You know what I mean? Like,

Speaker 7 how is it that

Speaker 7 how is it that we still don't have multiple players who are able to do this? Why is it still so challenging? And

Speaker 7 I mean, I know, I know the answers,

Speaker 7 I guess that's more of a rhetorical or philosophical question, or we would call it waxing than it would be like a real question. But,

Speaker 7 you know, I think, I mean,

Speaker 7 there is, it's funny. I have a lot of emotions with something like that.
The hardcore independent agent in me says,

Speaker 7 you know, I, I, you know, you always hate that someone like Rocket Mortgage, who at any who, in large part, can take a lot of business from the independent agency channel and direct it away.

Speaker 7 Um, because obviously a lot of agents do business with uh mortgage brokers who refer business to them. And Rocket Mortgage is one of their biggest competitors.

Speaker 7 So the more business Rocket Mortgage does, the less business independent agents do.

Speaker 7 But that that's not your fault. Um,

Speaker 7 the other side of it is, I work with a company here in the Northeast called Plymouth Rock.

Speaker 7 And you may or may not be familiar with them, but they are a more traditional independent carrier who has put in a tremendous amount of work to become more of a leader in the digital space from the standpoint of making it easy to purchase policies.

Speaker 7 And I think they've done, while not perfect, they're way, way ahead of

Speaker 7 a lot of carriers.

Speaker 7 And man, it is, I've seen the way even my own company you know myself and and i have i have a personalized producer the way we've gravitated towards geez if it's a hundred bucks and we know plymouth rock is going to be take us 10 minutes you know i'll

Speaker 7 i'll gravitate towards the one that's going to take 10 minutes versus the 30 minutes i know it's going to take to to quote unquote finalize a quote from from someone else. And,

Speaker 7 you know so i it's really hard for me to not think what you're talking about isn't the future of how we're going to do business it just it to

Speaker 7 think that you know we're still going to be plugging all this information into systems or even still using raters like pl raider which is still a duplicate entry machine regardless of you know what carrier you have it's i mean it really is i mean it's exciting to think that there's options like that so

Speaker 7 how are you, as much as you can, like, how are you making it happen? I mean, how are you getting all of it? Is it, you know, proprietary systems you've been able to piece together? Is it,

Speaker 7 you know, you slip the right number of ones and zeros together? You know, how are you able to piece this together when everyone else has not been able to?

Speaker 10 Well, and Ryan, on your first point, too,

Speaker 10 I mean, I think I know the Plymouth Rock guys a bit and, you know, are familiar with the new homeowners product, especially.

Speaker 10 And I love that

Speaker 10 the industry is advancing, right? It's going to be ultimately it'll be the benefit of consumers. You know, it's funny too, as we started doing some business with independent agencies.

Speaker 10 The challenge for us was

Speaker 10 the agent's process is about throughput, right?

Speaker 10 And you get processes, you try to scale them, you try to be efficient so that you can be quick for your customers and also, you know, deploy your resources effectively.

Speaker 10 But so many independent agents then relying on comparative raters,

Speaker 10 we had early chosen not to get involved because our superpower was that it was instant.

Speaker 10 You could be insured in less than a minute. You could have one of your customers have three products in less than a minute.

Speaker 10 And you could focus on relationship and coverage, right? Like the decision to make is how much liability insurance you need, not tell me your escrow account number, right?

Speaker 10 Like we're wasting time in the wrong places.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 10 putting branch in a comparative rater just meant that we had to wait until all of the data fields were entered for other people before the process drained and we just looked like another travelers.

Speaker 10 And so we decided not to. Instead, what's been fascinating and exciting for us is

Speaker 10 our independent agents and as we grow our footprint and our relationships in that space,

Speaker 10 you know, they're installing us differently so that they can max value for themselves and their customers. And I do think, like, you know, like that's got to evolve.

Speaker 10 You know, when I was a data aggregator, we were making products to make these processes faster.

Speaker 10 But you get into this place where carrier A would say, well, I'm not buying data earlier in the process because it's just going to advantage my competitor in the Raider.

Speaker 10 And it's like, well, you guys know you're working against each other now, right?

Speaker 10 And so like, you know, the independent agents, you know, you're kind of wedded to your weakest link, which, you know, will evolve.

Speaker 10 But I think it takes a little longer because a lot of that is owned in the stack by the carriers. And so like, they need pressure from guys like me to care.

Speaker 10 And then they'll invest and then it'll trickle down and like, you know, the raiders will evolve and the method will evolve. But I agree.
I mean, I think that's a barrier.

Speaker 10 And what you don't want, worst-case scenario, is

Speaker 10 because we know, like, we know that on average, Geico has a cheaper price point than the independent agency channel in auto. That's been true for decades.

Speaker 7 Certainly for second holds and below.

Speaker 10 Well, and it's, it's not, um,

Speaker 10 it's not the only value that an agent provides. What we don't want is that the agent would be further handicapped in ease.
and

Speaker 10 um and so like now i felt as a consumer and i'm you know i'm a very old millennial like the most ancient i think i'm thinking right on the front end of it

Speaker 7 yeah i think we're the same

Speaker 10 graduated college in 2003 yeah yeah yeah yeah we're the same age yeah yeah so as ancient millennials like i love you know i love relationships and i love like low friction And so, you know, agents can be great with those two concepts in mind,

Speaker 10 but the tech's got to be there. And there are a bunch of companies in the startup classes that are really focused on the agency space.

Speaker 10 I think we're kind of evolving from direct to agency, which in some ways is neat because when you're, the agent can solve so much friction.

Speaker 10 right we relied you know when i was an agency writer we relied on the agents to solve how bad the systems were like you know engage the customer during all the waiting periods like clean it all up after the fact like just get through the

Speaker 10 sale.

Speaker 10 But when you have to build all of the UX, like every corner case, every unhappy path for a consumer, you build things that can work exceptionally well in an agent's office. And

Speaker 10 I think that's a really bright spot for our future. We're excited about that.

Speaker 10 And your question to Ryan, then about,

Speaker 10 I'm sorry, I talked myself out of your question about anything.

Speaker 7 It's okay because I forgot whatever I asked you. So it's fine.
I have another question anyways. So, you know,

Speaker 7 think about,

Speaker 7 you know, I look at Branch and I look at some of the things that you've said and it

Speaker 7 reinforces an idea or a concept that I, you know, so I don't know how much you know about my history, probably not that much, but

Speaker 7 I have been preaching for more than a decade now,

Speaker 7 you know, that

Speaker 7 marketing has to move out front of an agency and be, you know, as much a pillar of of an agency's operations as any of the classic um

Speaker 7 you know operational segments that have existed for a long time and while today we look around and you know that feels much more of like an acceptable idea back in 2010 when i did my first keynote on content marketing

Speaker 7 i i had kind of cut my teeth using early youtube videos and stuff like that to to grow an agency back back a decade ago um

Speaker 7 you know and i was sharing that case study and I would, and people would look at me like I was freaking crazy. And I think about how much of running an agency is the operation side.

Speaker 7 And I think, I'm, I think, you know, now owning my own agency, looking at, looking at where you spend time and resources, and I think about a company like Branch, and I'm like, Imagine how much of your day as an agency owner, imagine how much of your day is freed up to be a marketer, to be a salesperson, a relationship builder, if you aren't spending so much time dealing with the nonsense of the systems.

Speaker 7 Like,

Speaker 7 I just processed an auto renters policy. This is $1,100 in premium.
No one's getting rich off $1,100 in premium, but this individual needed an auto and a renter's policy.

Speaker 7 I process it,

Speaker 7 I put it in, get it all through. And this is 400 fields later.

Speaker 7 Verify, no errors. Click verify, no errors.
Nope, everything's good. All green checks.
Everything's fine. Submit business.
Whack. Underwriter referral.
Mother.

Speaker 7 You know what I mean? Like, if I was a cartoon, you would have seen all these crazy emojis coming out of my head. Cause it's like,

Speaker 7 what is going on?

Speaker 7 So now I'm calling people and and I'm going, guys, all I need is to get this poor woman a freaking auto ID card and your stupid system won't give it to me because I got an underwriter referral after an hour for an $1,100 premium freaking account.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, what am I even doing? Like, what am I doing? For $175 in commission, I've now spent three hours of time on this thing that should have taken 15 minutes.

Speaker 7 And I like literally want to put my head through a wall. And then you're getting, you know, and then it's, well, does she have five years of prior auto policy?

Speaker 7 And I'm like, who the heck keeps five years of prior auto policies? Like, I have her deck page right here from last year. What are we talking about? And I like get into that and I'm going, okay.

Speaker 7 So imagine if that was a more reasonable process. And let's just say it took a half hour to quote and bind and issue an auto renters policy for a single woman.
Let's just say who was paying in full.

Speaker 7 Let's just say that took a half hour. That gives me two and a half hours of my life and a reduced blood pressure back.

Speaker 7 I just start, I'm going, imagine what the rest of my day would look like after that. And

Speaker 7 I could maybe write another account.

Speaker 7 Imagine I could write another account because I had that time back. And like, these are the kind of things that agency owners have put up with for so long.

Speaker 7 And unfortunately, carriers will look at you like you're crazy when you tell them that their system is terrible. And like

Speaker 7 my travelers, my poor travelers rep,

Speaker 7 I give her so much. It's not her fault at all.

Speaker 7 It's her boss's.

Speaker 7 most likely her boss's boss's boss's fault, but it's someone's fault there that their system is still terrible. And,

Speaker 7 but but she's like, no, it's fine. No, I never hear any complaints from my agency force.
And I'm like, that's because they're just used to it and they're nicer than me.

Speaker 7 But, you know, I just, this is the kind of thing that gives agencies back their life to be marketers and salespeople and relationships. And it allows them to reduce their burden in operations.

Speaker 7 I mean, is that... I don't know.
That was more of a diatribe than a question, but, you know, I'm assuming this is where you're going.

Speaker 7 And probably the type of agents that you're looking for are the ones who, that's what they actually want out of their company.

Speaker 10 Entirely. And, you know, it's funny.
I was on a panel back when I was at Verisk with

Speaker 10 one of the executives from the Hartford, really, really good guy. And they were asking us each, you know, about InsurTech.
And they said, well, what do you guys think about it at the Hartford?

Speaker 10 And he says, we're going to wait.

Speaker 10 And we're, you know, they're going to watch like they always do. I mean, this was his point.
And the thing that I think is so interesting about that point is in representing the industry,

Speaker 10 you, our market moves slowly, largely because of the regulatory structure, but nothing happens overnight. And so like, you know, I was a company and,

Speaker 10 you know, Geico and Progressives' autos weren't growing off of unbundled customers, right?

Speaker 10 There wasn't a such thing, you know, like State Farm, who made the market, they launched auto in 22, and then they launched Life Next and then Fire,

Speaker 10 which became homeowners. And like, these were the core things people needed, and they did a great job of bundling them.

Speaker 10 And when customers are bundled, I mean, you know this, that their lifetime is much higher. They retain much better.

Speaker 10 The complexity of the need means the effort to shop goes way up and the price benefit is all baked in.

Speaker 10 But for all those reasons, like natural retention is high, right? You've got less than 15% of the market that shops every year.

Speaker 10 And so if retention is high, like the urgency is low because that person's boss's boss's boss, it's his replacement's replacement's problem.

Speaker 10 But by then, it'll all be bookended differently because the starting point will be reset because it's such, no one can see it look like this.

Speaker 10 So why, why have urgency, right i mean the market has changed i mentioned 6 000 mutuals in 1960 um you know over a 50 60 year period the world is so different but it took 60 years and that gives every and and by the way like you know i know what the comp structures are everybody's making comfortable livings wealth creation is occurring um and so like even and by the way half of the industry or more than half the industry gets to make its own paychecks because it isn't publicly traded and isn't privately held.

Speaker 10 It's nonprofit with no governors. So, like, you know, the question to ask is if they tell you that the system is going to get better, the big question would be why in any reasonable timeframe.

Speaker 10 I mean, I think the best thing that will happen

Speaker 10 is

Speaker 10 those of us that stand to gain something from turning it all upside down will make progress because everyone needs that impetus for innovation And otherwise things move crazy, crazy slowly.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Yeah. I,

Speaker 7 you know, I remember

Speaker 7 I was at Agency Nation back in 2016 and we were doing a tremendous amount of reporting on

Speaker 7 InsurTech and everything that was going on and had a ton of the

Speaker 7 hot new startup CEOs and stuff on our podcast and we were interviewing them and

Speaker 7 you know and then and

Speaker 7 being associated with, I don't know how familiar you are with that or trusted choice, being familiar with the big eye national, we were able to, we also, you know, had access to a lot of

Speaker 7 super regional, regional, even some of the national carrier CEOs and top executives and got their opinions. And

Speaker 7 it was very interesting how, you know,

Speaker 7 basically the major movers and still even today, investors are the super regionals, not the nationals. The nationals tend to play an even longer game, you know, like a Harvard.

Speaker 7 Like when they say they're playing a long game, it's like, yeah, we might adopt that technology in a decade. And again, I, like you said, I mean, there's a reason for that.
And when you,

Speaker 7 when you have as much to lose by making a bad decision, regulatory or otherwise, as they do.

Speaker 7 you know, you don't just turn on a dime. It just, it doesn't make, that would be,

Speaker 7 as much as it's fun to bitch, it wouldn't actually be prudent, nor would you expect an executive in any capacity to make that kind of decision.

Speaker 7 But these super regionals and some of the mutual super regionals, you know, I think about some of the things that Westfield,

Speaker 7 yeah, Westfield, Central, Acuity, Grange, Ohio Mutual.

Speaker 7 Some of these companies have made really substantial investments into insure tech companies and been

Speaker 7 leaders in partnerships and different technologies. And And I think that that has been,

Speaker 7 I think that's been a huge driver of

Speaker 7 both insure tech companies in general coming to the industry and in general, agents greater willingness to adopt both new startup insurance carriers

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 insure tech companies that before they were completely turned off by, right? It was, well, if the Hartford isn't buying into them, I'm not buying into them. You know what I mean?

Speaker 7 Like, you know, nothing against the Hartford.

Speaker 7 I like the Hartford, but

Speaker 7 it was this mentality. And I feel like now people are much more open.
Like if you had come into the, I mean, I mean, ask. ask um Assan from Hippo and stuff.

Speaker 7 I mean, when he first came into the space four or five years ago, I mean, they were getting slaughtered by agents. I mean, they would, they were getting trashed all over the place.
Now,

Speaker 7 I feel like the agency plant is much more open. And I'm sure a lot of people listening are probably on your site right now figuring out how to get appointed.

Speaker 7 And we're going to get to that in a second and talk about where you're trying to go. But I feel like today.

Speaker 7 the agents the independent agency plant is much more open to it to what you're saying and to a carrier like yours and what you're trying to do and and there's a lot of you know what's really interesting is for as much um

Speaker 7 um um m a activity as you read about and there's a ton obviously, in the agency space. There are a lot of startup agencies, a lot of driven,

Speaker 7 sales-focused startup agencies that have come into the that have come into the marketplace that would that would die to be able to operate with a company like yours. So

Speaker 7 I guess that kind of leads me into my next question: is where are you guys today? Like, what does the future of working with independence look for you?

Speaker 7 You know, that's obviously the independent space is most of what listened to the show. So

Speaker 7 that's why I'm asking in that direction.

Speaker 11 WegotYourPodcast.com.

Speaker 5 Allow us to help you. You don't have a lot of time.

Speaker 11 I get it. But during COVID, you have a little bit more.
What if you just did two podcasts a month? How much time would that be?

Speaker 11 Well, probably about 10 minutes to set up the podcast, about 20 to 40 minutes to record it, and that's it. Do that twice.
I think that's about two, two and a half hours.

Speaker 11 Do you have two and two and a half minute hours? Because we will help you at wegotyourpodcast.com. We take everything else.

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. Thanks, Ryan.

Speaker 10 We are live today in six states, which are Arizona, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, and Texas.

Speaker 10 And because of our unique model, where sometimes I am working with major U.S. corporations, you'll see us in the press in a really neat way in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 10 On that point, I need to be nationally available much quicker, right? I mean, the insurance company side of this, you know, it's hard to be an insurance company. There's a great B.J.

Speaker 10 Dowling quote from a long time ago. I think it's Dowling's that says, there's nothing that looks worse on paper than a growing insurance company.

Speaker 10 And in some ways, it's not totally unlike the pain of growing an agency because you are extending acquisition in anticipation of

Speaker 10 residuals, right?

Speaker 10 And so, like, you're always out a little bit ahead of your skis. Just that's that same model, but amplified, and then you have to put just for the scale of the cost.

Speaker 10 And then you have the regulatory capital to solve at the same time because, you know, the whole game is paying claims. Like, that's your privilege here, right?

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 10 And so,

Speaker 10 you know, those for the race to scale then becomes critical.

Speaker 10 Right. And if you choose to be full stack, which I don't recommend for most because

Speaker 10 it only makes sense to be full stack if you're more than a marketing organization, right? You should be innovating on the whole stack.

Speaker 10 And, you know, branch as a reciprocal has a, it's an esoteric model, but even a unique model in reciprocals because our customers who are owners vest in the dividends, right? It's a really neat model.

Speaker 10 You'll see more of it as we do some experiments and press,

Speaker 10 but we've got to get everywhere quickly to get to scale and to be able to appropriately serve all of our customers. And so you'll see us launching states fast and furious all year long.
So

Speaker 10 probably most of the folks that would be listening will be there soon if we're not there now.

Speaker 7 Yeah, when's New York? When's New York going to happen is it going to be 50 out of 50.

Speaker 10 it's not it's not you know we budgeted 12 months for new york right you know we we know new york um you know we've been doing this a long time and so you can kind of predict how long each state takes yeah um but you should expect 12 months from new york which means that we were working on it in 2020.

Speaker 7 sweet well i look forward to the day that uh that you guys launch here and um i i'd love to i'd love to be part of part of the journey. I think what you're doing is really interesting.
I think that

Speaker 7 these new

Speaker 7 carrier opportunities, I think new models, I think they deserve our attention. I know a lot of independent agents say, you know,

Speaker 7 stick to the old guard. There's a reason they're the old guard.
And

Speaker 7 I have a tremendous amount of respect for that opinion. I think at the same time,

Speaker 7 while the players who have been around for 100 years are due our respect because they have proven that they're able to continue to pay claims for that long.

Speaker 7 I think the new models need our attention as well. And

Speaker 7 I'm honored that you come on and share what you have going on because I think it's super interesting, man.

Speaker 7 I think that.

Speaker 7 I think that being able to put an auto home and an umbrella in someone's hands in seconds,

Speaker 7 not even talking about minutes,

Speaker 7 That is an impressive feat. And I think, you know, you got to, you're going to, you have a lot to prove, obviously, over the long term.
But that being said,

Speaker 7 you know, my hope is that you guys are

Speaker 7 open to younger startup agencies as well, because those are the ones that often get pushed to the side by some of the older, more established carriers. And those are some of the most hungry.

Speaker 7 agents that are going to be the ones that are loyal long term. So, you know, I'm going to, I got to, I got to give you my push there.
But, you know, I think you're on the right path.

Speaker 7 And I'm glad you came on and shared with us.

Speaker 10 Well, Ryan, if I could too, you know, we, as we were starting out with agents, we were trying to understand each other.

Speaker 10 You know, I'll give a shout out to Chris Becerra at Cleveland Insurance Brokers, scratch agent,

Speaker 10 just as you described, looking for new and

Speaker 10 better ways to do things.

Speaker 10 But we've got a number of those relationships and we're excited by them because they're excited and they're thinking about things differently.

Speaker 10 And, you know, the old guard has tended to spawn old guard, right?

Speaker 10 Mutual assurance company I mentioned came from the Philly. Geico was ex-USAA employees.
Nationwide exists only because of State Farm.

Speaker 10 And I had one of the big insurance companies. uh refer to us as uh yeah the all-state group uh and we have no affiliation with all state but a number of us were employees there.

Speaker 10 And if you know the problems well, just as you know, right, just as you articulated, then you can engineer solutions that are unique and solve them.

Speaker 10 And so I would ask folks to think of us as folks that come from the old guard because we've got that level of depth.

Speaker 10 And if anybody wants to talk about it, I'm Steve at ourbranch.com and happy to engage. But, you know, wish you the best and the best of the show.
I will definitely be in touch as we approach New York.

Speaker 7 Awesome. And guys, so you know, it's our branch,

Speaker 7 O U R, like our,

Speaker 7 I'll, I'll enunciate ourbranch.com. And give it a check.

Speaker 7 I mean, I, uh, you know, I know a couple people in your organization, and obviously this is the first time we've met, but very impressed with you and your background.

Speaker 7 And anyone, um, anyone who can nerd out as far beyond me as you can is someone who, who we thoroughly enjoy and has an open invitation back to the show. So thanks, man.

Speaker 7 I wish you nothing but the best and I look forward to watching your success in the film.

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