Get started here. This is exciting. It's the last fireside chat of the conference, so I had the distinction for opening it at 7:30 A.M. on Tuesday, and now I get the last one on-
The best for last.
On Friday. Let's save the best for last.
Right.
Exactly. So I'm Ron Josey. I lead the North America Internet Equity Research practice here at Citi, and today we have very special guests, I'm always psyched to see them, from ACV Auctions. You have Vikas Mehta, the head of COO, right?
Yes.
Tim Fox, the head of IR for ACV Auctions. And so, look, we, we've always said and believe that ACV is transforming the wholesale autos market. You know, digital marketplace for wholesale, it doesn't really exist.
Mm-hmm.
And so you all are highlighting and building that as we speak. And so there's a lot to go through. I think ACV's marketplace has sold, what? 600,000 units this year, thereabout.
Mm-hmm.
And more and more ancillary services are being adopted.
Mm-hmm.
And we're getting to, hopefully, to profitability at some point. There's a path to that, right? And I say, hopefully, we are getting, I would say, I'd say over time. So with that, Vikas, Tim, welcome to our Global Tech Conference. Thank you for coming.
Thank you for having us.
Vikas, let's talk to us a little bit about yourself.
Sure.
We've met a few times, right, over the years, but I'm not too sure how many clients or investors actually, you know, know all of your background. So, you know, I'm gonna sort of front-run you a little bit. You spent a lot of your time at eBay.
Mm-hmm.
So I wouldn't consider you a typical autos guy, more of an internet marketplace guy.
Mm-hmm.
Tell us more about your background. Tell us about how your experience at marketplaces like eBay have helped to build up what we have here at ACV.
Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, thank you for having us. We're very excited to be here. So my background in a nutshell, engineer by training. I'd say if I look back at my career, it's really been in two chapters. The first chapter was very much in product and tech, and very much enabling digital transition, transformation for a lot of smaller and bigger companies. The second chapter was very much on the operations, general management, scaling side. I did spend a decade at eBay before I came to ACV, and you're spot on, not a classic autos guy. So at eBay, I really learned about marketplaces, the beauty, the complexity, the power of two-sided marketplaces.
I also spent a lot of time really understanding about how does one think about building scalable global platforms. Both of those marketplaces and the platform view we brought, or I brought into ACV, from day one. Been at ACV for four and a half years, just flown by. It's been an amazing journey. And within ACV, as COO, I oversee, I'd say, three broad areas: product and tech, and that's the product and tech that enables our marketplace, our capital, our transportation, our MAX Digital IMS side of things, our R&D, our data side. Second broad area has to do with operations. So wholesale and automotive transactions are very operationally intensive.
Titles need to be transferred for every single car, and when you think about multiple states with different jurisdictions and different, even different counties that have different requirements, operations as titles, transportation and capital, which again are adjacent necessary operations to fulfill a transaction, but really interesting, attractive businesses of their own right. Arbitration, customer success. And then the third area is sort of central functions, business operations, continuous improvement, project management, and so forth. So super excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
So maybe another higher level question. Given your background, what brought you to Buffalo? What, why go to the wholesale autos business?
Yeah, great question. I mean-
Unless you did eBay autos marketplace, but I don't think so.
Yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, primarily to see the Buffalo Bills win a Super Bowl. What brought me to Buffalo? So interesting story. I was at eBay for a decade. We had just come back from Europe, and within eBay, again, I learned a lot and got to see marketplace businesses in multiple verticals. Automotive was consistently within the top three verticals I was responsible for. Definitely not over-indexing on wholesale at that point. And then I was back in the Bay Area, just getting my hands around some of the, some of the global functions that I was responsible for, and I got a call from George, who's the CEO of ACV. And our connection is, a while back, 20 years ago, I went to grad school with one of the existing ACV board members at that time.
Oh, okay.
ACV was Series C, hypergrowth, 200%-300% year-on-year growth, really scaling, and proverbially, the wheels were falling off the bus back then, right? Unit growth through the roof, looking to scale through people and process. I think George had just come back from a board meeting where the board had guided him around thinking about bringing in a COO at that point, someone that ideally was very tech and process-focused, someone that knew marketplaces and could understand pretty much a lot of the things that make marketplaces different, and hopefully has had experiences scaling businesses. Within eBay, I spent a bunch of time in our international markets and helped them scale.
So it wasn't necessarily, you know, running a division or a business unit in the U.S., where eBay's been around for a while, but in countries like Germany and in countries like Italy, where we were kind of nascent around the time when I took over. So George called me up, a couple of really deep conversations around what they were trying to do in Buffalo, why ACV was unique and different, and really the disruption that was needed at multiple levels, right? Digital transformation at the highest level means allow something to happen online versus in person. But when you kind of think about foundationally, what does that require? That requires almost rethinking how do you confirm and how do you build the trust of the transaction.
How do you build the scalable processes that you need, not when you're doing 500 units a month, but 150,000 units a month? How do you think about building data and tech capabilities that didn't exist in the industry? So I kind of think through AMP and Virtual Lift and some of the things that are underway, and I was really drawn to the problem statement. I was really drawn to the opportunity to, to disrupt an industry that very much at a high level, needed disruption.
Sure.
The challenge of, you know, partnering with a great team and really being, you know, one of the people at the table that helps move this industry forward. And just a quick call out, have a very supportive wife, who basically was more than happy to move to Buffalo, and our-
We have a few Buffalonians, is that what we call them, in the audience? So, super, super.
And, yeah, we've been there for 5 years now.
That's great. That's super helpful. I want to get into ACV's competitive positioning here, but before I do, I want to maybe take a step back and get your thoughts. Given your role within ACV, just help us understand what is going on with the car market today, the autos market. We know inventory, new inventory is improving somewhat, maybe domestic OEMs, not so much, Asian OEMs. That should help you supply as new inventory maybe normalizes, but and hopefully unlock wholesale. But talk to us all these dynamics going on in the autos market, what are you seeing? How do we think about that?
It's a very fun, fun, fun topic.
It's a big question we spend a lot of time on. Tim, do you want to maybe kick it off, and then I'll follow up?
Sure. Yeah, sure. So at its fundamental, sort of core around thinking about inventory and supply, the wholesale market really is a byproduct of retail sales, both new and used vehicles, that transact, they trade, they come into the dealer, and then the dealer has a choice. They either take that vehicle, recondition it, and try to sell it themselves, retail, or they distribute it into the wholesale channel. 85% of wholesale transactions today are still done through physical auctions, pure kind of brick and mortar. But at the top of the funnel, it's all about trades and all about that wholesale disposition. So what's happened, obviously, since the beginning of the pandemic, is new vehicle production has been well known, been hampered by semiconductor supply chain challenges and so on.
It is starting to come back, which is good, but if you put it into context, you know, pre-COVID, SAR in the U.S. was about 17.5 million units. That got down to 13.9, right? In the middle of the worst part of the supply chain challenges. We estimate that, over the past three years, about 4 to maybe 5 million fewer new cars were sold to consumers, right? So think about that, puts an air pocket effectively into the used car market. So that was the single biggest headwind that we were facing over the past, call it, year and a half, was the lack of supply. We think the wholesale market contracted from about 11 million units down to about 8 million units.
Got it.
But it's coming back. So we're looking for SAR to continue to improve. We're starting to see incentives come back. OEMs were pretty much on the sideline because they didn't need to offer incentives, but if you watch Bills game this weekend, you'll see that they're gonna be talking about low, low interest financing, you know, incentives that were at one point $3,500, that are now $1,500. They're starting to move in the right direction. So new story, getting better. Let's say the one challenge that we're facing right now is on the used demand side, because of relatively elevated prices still in the both new and used car market, as well as interest rates, right? Well-known, so affordability challenges. So we definitely are seeing the consumer softening a bit on used, so that's applying some pressure.
But again, there, that's, you know, that we think is a relatively transient issue. Prices will continue to come down here over the next six to nine months, and then hopefully, heading into 2024, we'll see a combination of both new vehicle sales, as well as used start to come back and produce what we hope is the first year after really three years of contraction, a market tailwind.
When used comes back, wholesale should follow suit-
Correct.
- because then dealers might have inventory over X number of days?
Yes. It will immediately start to bring more transactions into the wholesale industry. It also creates an interesting dynamic with franchise dealers in particular, where when they had no or less new vehicle inventory, they were more apt to keep a trade, fix it up, try to sell it.
Yep.
Right? Because you drive by some of these lots, it was pretty ugly there for a while there in 2021, and early parts of 2022. So the other behavioral dynamic will be that we'll see franchise dealers start to flip more and more of this stuff into the wholesale channel, which will be a tailwind for ACV.
... And so first tell, as we're looking at this from the outside, that's pricing should continue to sort of come down.
Mm-hmm.
Look for new vehicles to demand there, and that should help unlock use. Like, that, that, that's the tell that we're looking for, and it's-
Mm-hmm.
-unlock wholesale. So that's helpful from a macro perspective, and all that sort of feeds into ACV. Because I wanted to come to you on just ACV's competitive value prop.
Mm-hmm.
Here's how we think about it. 3 million plus vehicles have been inspected, I think, over the lifetime of ACV.
Mm-hmm.
250 data points per inspection.
Mm-hmm.
20+ million images captured.
Mm-hmm.
This is a data corpus that not many people have.
Mm-hmm.
What I wanted to hear from you was, like, how does it unlock product?
Mm-hmm.
So what
Mm-hmm.
How does this data corpus, that gets bigger and bigger every year?
Mm-hmm.
make ACV's products that much better?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, I mean, this is one of my favorite topics, so there's no-
That's good.
There's a lot to unpack there. So if we sort of take a step back, the hypothesis here is collecting this data will definitely create a moat in the industry and help us gain more market share. That's absolutely what we believe. So what we've been investing in, even prior to me joining, is really capturing and structuring a lot of this data. And if you think about data as the tide that lifts all boats, it starts with the inspection. And we have a philosophy within ACV, which is, over time, our inspectors do less and less, and the inspection gets more and more intelligent. And we've been sort of creating software, hardware, processes to essentially aspire to that vision.
We have a fantastic inspection team that's really asking the questions of: What should we be capturing for this car at this time? How much do we actually know from third-party data feeds? How much do we know from our own internal feeds? What are the most important attributes out of the 200 data points or 250 data points that really make or break the ability for the vehicle to sell? And how do we laser focus on that? We think about technology informing inspection. We think about data informing inspection. And then, once the Condition Report has been captured, it basically has sort of two destinations. First is pricing. So we have to guide the seller, what should you be pricing that vehicle on? And that's based on a multitude of factors, condition of the car, local demand, supply nearby that potentially has similar...
And then you look at what recently transacted, what do third parties say, and then some sort of intelligence on, this car should be listed between A and B. Then, that then translates into merchandising of that vehicle on our marketplace. So we're now making sure that you look at that car, and you come to the conclusion of whether or not it makes sense for you as a buyer, with helping you get to that decision as quickly as possible, with reliable content that guides you on the pricing of the car. And some of this is where we're going, and some of it is where we are today, and that pricing should be informed by wholesale pricing, but also retail pricing.
So it takes some of that, "I wonder what this car can sell for over time?" The best Condition Report leads to the least risk in terms of recon costs for the buyer, which should mitigate or reduce as much of a trust hedge as possible that the buyer needs on that transaction. We should also inform, which again, we do in a majority of cases, the amount of time it will take for you to get that car based on leveraging our transport network, our carrier network, and SLAs. So as a buyer, you're now looking at the most important things about the car, getting confidence on the pricing, and then having a clearer perspective of when you want to get your shop ready to try to assess or recon the car.
Finally, once you now have the transaction consummated, you then need to make sure that all your back-end processes are ready, right? Title needs to come in, payment needs to be transacted, transportation needs to be set up, and then we just want to make sure that everything sort of, you know, happens as, as quickly and efficiently as possible. One other thing on the, on the marketplace conversion side, the data that we capture isn't just about letting the buyer assess the quality of the car, but putting the right car in front of the right buyer at the right time. So the data point that, again, we, we shared at Analyst Day, which I'm really excited about. Discovery and search, really important in any marketplace.
Recommendations platform has been something that we've been doubling down on, and in Q1 alone, our recommendation platform, meaning Ron, doesn't matter what you've entered in the search criteria or what you're looking at, but here are the cars that we think you're interested in based on your previous buying behavior, based on cars you've looked at. In Q1 alone, that drove 80,000 bids on our platform. And we're only getting started. So the more we know about the buyer, the seller, what they've transacted, the more we can take some of the pull and essentially make it a push. Finally, the data on the transport side and on the capital side also has significant benefits. Transportation will allow us to accelerate carrier adoption because we can fill the load.
It'll allow us to have better pricing for our buyers and allow us to be able to bundle loads and be more efficient.... And then on the capital side, you know, capital is very much a service revenue function, but it's also a risk mitigation function. It'll help us get much more intelligent about assessing buyer risk and buyer profile. So all in, obsessed about collecting data, of successful transactions, of buying intent, of supply that sells, supply that doesn't sell, bids that go on, unanswered. And what we're looking to do is a series of micro-optimizations across the funnel over time as we scale, as the data gets richer, as our intelligence gets smarter, to try to basically drive more seller and buyer success.
Two, two quick follows on that. Just on the recommendation platform, can you talk? What was the—I wanna make sure I heard the stat, the cars-
Yep.
You might be interested in.
Yep.
What was the number again?
80,000 bids.
80,000 bids.
In Q1 alone, were driven from the recommendation platform. We've again algorithmically tested similar cars. We've tested cars that other people that look at the cars that you've looked at have looked at. We've tested cars based on, you're a dealership that typically tends to sell these cars. You're probably looking to buy similar cars. We're looking at, you know, retail profiles, wholesale profiles. So we're scratching the surface, but the idea is to take the entire data set of buying decisioning criteria and serve up to you what we think you might be most interested in.
This might be a more remedial question, but as the inspectors go and look at the car, say, it's a Honda Accord, and maybe the engine doesn't sound as it should or something that's based on the data that you have.
Yep.
How often do inspectors say, "We're not gonna have that on the marketplace?
Right. Right,
So the car doesn't meet the criteria that-
Yeah. Yeah. So at this point, we never reject a car. We think every car has a buyer. It's about qualifying and pricing the car appropriately. So even if it's a Honda with an engine problem, there's probably a dealer that specializes in fixing that engine. As long as we confidently assess what the problem is, the dealer can make a decision on what he or she wants to do from a pricing perspective on the sell side, on the buy side.
Got it. I mean, this data is... The data corpus is so differentiated and specific to ACV.
Mm-hmm.
A question we often get from clients is: What else can ACV do-
Yep.
to leverage this data?
Yep.
And so, I mean, my goodness, every quarter, we hear George and the team talk about, you know, Monk AI, vehicle pricing core, Condition Report, ClearCar, I think, was a new one coming out.
Mm-hmm.
SaaS and data services over time, but I think the value is... So talk to us as in your role, and it's your favorite topic, right?
Mm-hmm.
Like, what gets you so excited about what might come?
Yeah.
Where can you go from here?
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you're, you're, you're 100% right. We are scratching the surface of the use cases that this data could be leveraged in, and what I spent five minutes on is the ACV ecosystem. But if you sort of take a step back and say: What is an adjacent use case for this data? ClearCar is an important one, and I'll take a second and explain what that is. But then we also have, within the platform and within the paradigm, the ability for non-ACV transactions and future ACV customers to have access to this data-
Right.
-in non-wholesale use cases. So ClearCar for a second. So what is ClearCar? ClearCar is effectively a product offering that we launched a few months ago, that allows dealers to assess and appraise consumer vehicles to make the trade-in or consumer purchase decision. Foundationally, it's anchored on a very similar paradigm of gather these X data points. It's done by the dealer themselves, and guiding and leveraging our intelligence as to this type of car typically has these issues, validate the stuff, taking the images of the car, then that gets run and compared to our Monk AI platform, and is fed with our pricing engine, which is dynamic and regularly updated. Effectively engenders the buying dealer more confidence of the condition and the pricing for that car.
It should lead to higher consumer-to-dealer transactions, and then it's almost like the first part of a potential wholesale listing, that if the dealer decides to, they can then sell the car on ACV. So it's sort of another entry point there. We acquired a company called MAX Digital a couple of years ago, and it's an IMS inventory management software system software platform, where customers or dealers use MAX Digital to manage their inventory. Gives us a very unique view on retail data. How long are cars sitting on the lot? Which cars are selling? What does this dealership do well? And that core inventory model then also helps us inform that dealership on what they should be wholesaling and what they should potentially be retailing, and how to do that best.
Lastly, we're in very early stages of some pilots, but we've created endpoints for some of our customers to access ACV capabilities directly for themselves. And some of these capabilities are inspection, AMP, Virtual Lift, and these are outside of the ACV ecosystem. Again, getting initial feedback, trying to understand whether they value and whether it's something that they can absorb as part of their normal operational process. Super early, feel very excited about it. But yeah, that's definitely the direction we're looking to go, partially because the more widespread adoption these tools have, the richer our data becomes.
The flywheel. Tim, I wanted to ask, and maybe this is in line with what Vikas was saying, but conversion rates, I think, rose 150 BPS sequentially in 2Q. Just, you know, what—talk to us on what's driving this, and then I have a question around auction innovations, around, like, the two-hour and where we go from here. So conversion rates first.
Yeah, so conversion rates, obviously, a really important element of the driving volumes. Historically speaking, the industry's been in sort of the mid-50s-60% sort of conversion rate. Those conversion rates skyrocketed in 2021 across the industry, sort of collapsed in the back half of 2022 when pricing started to drop pretty dramatically, so you had the buyers and sellers at odds about what the value of a vehicle was. That's when you see conversion rates really start to come down. We did anticipate heading into 2023 that they would stabilize, and they did. We're actually quite strong in Q1. And to your point, we're up nicely year-over-year in Q2. We are expecting conversion rates to remain in a relatively normal range.
What is interesting is that above and beyond just sort of the more macro-related issues, is that we're actually driving net new technology, new auction formats, new pricing, guidance to both the seller and the buyer to help structurally drive conversion rates up over time. We have seen some really nice returns on offering two-hour auctions-
Right.
- versus our standard 20-minute auction. We've opened that up to certain segments of our seller base. It's proven to be a very nice lever. Conversion rates are anywhere from 300-500 basis points higher in that cohort for that group. About 50% of our listings today are running at 2 hours. So that's just one initial example of things that we're doing and using data to tweak our marketplace offerings. So in general, feeling pretty good about where conversion rates are today, where they're gonna be for the balance of the year, and, you know, maybe, Vikas, if you wanna expand a little bit further on some of the other-
Yeah.
-conversion-related, things.
If I could just do a quick follow-up, Tim, on your comment. The 2-hour auction, I think you said, driving higher conversion rates on average. What... Giving buyers more time does what? Like, what—why would that be?
So particularly for more expensive vehicles, they wanna take the time to really dig into the condition report.
Okay.
You know, as Vikas was mentioning earlier, our Condition Report is a gold standard in the industry. They wanna take the time to look at the different pricing recommendations, the ACV Market Report, maybe take a look at their inventory, take a little bit longer to decide whether that fits what their kind of core inventory needs are. So it's just gives us a little bit more time to match what they may be looking for, so using some of these other techniques, so it's not just a 20-minute auction, and they perhaps miss that opportunity. So it's both the seller is advantaged because they're getting buyers to be able to spend a little more time, offer a better price.
For buyers, just gives them a little more flexibility, time to investigate, price, price investigation, as well as just core inventory needs.
Got it. And, I mean, two-hour auctions are now 50%-
Fifty percent.
plus of the mix.
Yes.
Did I hear you right, saying it's a subset of dealers? These are the dealers that can do maybe more. Who are these subsets?
Traditionally, more, that have generally higher conversion rates. So we wanna make sure that whatever is being put into that two-hour auction has a pretty decent chance of actually transacting.
Got it.
We tend to try to go with our kind of gold-standard sellers.
That's helpful. And Vikas, Tim was about to ask you a question on.
Yeah.
other conversion rate improvements.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as a company, we look at conversion or sell-through rate, as you know, one of our core focus areas. It's obviously great for the seller. What are sellers looking for? They're looking for price realization and conversion, and then buyers are basically looking for ability to find the car and then transact on it. You know, we think the 50%-60% in the industry. There's many factors for that, but part of the factor, whether it's at a physical auction or a digital auction, is discoverability. I'm looking for that car. What's the likelihood that I show up at the time when the car is running? I think the other one is decision-making, and that kind of leads to show me the most important things for that car easily so I can digest it.
It's about trust and confidence in the condition report, which, again, we're very proud of where we are today, and it's about price guidance. So it's kind of all of this stuff. Auction formats, just high level, is a big area of investigation. We've been doing micro-optimizations and investigations in auction formats for a while now. The auction duration, which we started to talk about last year, was the biggest, I think, biggest result or the positive benefit so far, and it's exactly what Tim said in terms of the benefit. Other auction formats we're looking at is Buy It Now versus auction.
Okay.
It's almost like a, "Here's a fixed price." There's use cases for cars where people prefer that. Depending on buyer persona and seller persona, that, that can work. And then the last sort of overarching philosophy, and that'll kind of give you a, a vision for where we're going, is moving away from a one-size-fits-all... every car runs for the same duration, every inspection's exactly the same, every car's displayed and merchandised exactly the same, to much more tailored experiences. And kind of the, the comparison here would be the decision-making process and the data you need for car A is different from car B, so let's capture the data differently. Let's showcase and merchandise it differently. Let's recommend it differently. And we think there's opportunity both on buyer friction and buyer effort that we can optimize and just drive seller success appropriately.
Another product question I wanna get into dealer adoption, but, you know, chat just launched last or was announced last week.
Mm-hmm.
you know, we can't not talk about generative AI-
Mm-hmm.
in everything and anything that we do.
Mm-hmm.
Just tell us a little bit more about how chat can just improve the dealer experience, like the vision there?
Yeah.
And then more nuts and bolts, is there a human on the other side of the chat today?
Mm-hmm.
Where does it go in the future?
Absolutely. So, Ron, what you're referring to is sort of our customer service function, which, till a few months ago, was effectively, you called someone if you needed help, or you emailed them. And, what we introduced in a fairly classic ACV fashion is start with the chat, but build the knowledge repository to first move more to self-service, and then potentially to leave the door open to some more intelligence or AI customer service functions. Some of the tech that we're using and we're starting to lean in is pointing us in that direction. I'd say right now, probably between now and the end of the year, it's really, let's make chat be much more efficient, much quicker. It's much more effective from a customer service rep perspective versus a call, because all the information gets pre-populated.
You know what the outstanding cases are, and we're seeing response rates, time to first response, closure rates on the issue, like, be far better than traditional ways. Self-service is another area that we've gone into now for a couple of quarters now, which allows the customer to basically get to what they're looking for, leveraging similar philosophies like the recommendation platform. But yeah, absolutely right. It's early for me to talk about what that generative AI marriage with customer service is, but machine learning intelligence, be it on the chat side, be it on the transaction side, be it on the post-transact- post-transactional side, is very much how we like to look at the world.
Super helpful. I wanna get back to maybe, the more traditional ACV, if you will. This is product specific as well, but, look, dealer adoption, rooftops.
Yeah.
This comes up every, every time, you know, how many rooftops, et cetera. What I wanted to understand, if you have any more data to share, we're always ears, but what I wanna hear more, you know, we heard Central New York has 85% of franchise dealers, I think, are on ACV Auctions. This is from the Analyst Day. Pasadena has, like, 27% of the franchise dealers. So just walk us through the process of adding dealers, and maybe blue field, blue ocean, 10 years from now, does every franchise dealer on ACV, that's the goal?
Mm-hmm.
Why aren't franchise dealers on?
Mm-hmm.
How do you get to that 85%? Question one.
Mm-hmm.
What's the blue ocean going forward?
Mm-hmm.
So yeah, it'd be great to have 85% rooftop penetration. I can tell you that's certainly not embedded into our 2026 targets. But, more than anything, the penetration dynamic as well as frankly, wallet share, which is how much of the wholesale business we're getting in any one dealership, is often a matter of time more than it is anything. Now, obviously, our product set has evolved dramatically in the 7 years that we've been in business, so the pace at which we can drive both penetration and wallet share, differs. It's accelerating in some places a little faster than in the past because of some of the new technologies, private marketplaces. Over time, ClearCar will help drive adoption further.
But basically, you know, we move into a new territory with a territory manager, so effectively, I think of an enterprise salesperson, one or two vehicle condition inspectors, and really just start hammering away at the sell side of the market, predominantly the franchise rooftops. At the same time, we leverage, inside sales and marketing to build the buyer base. And, over time, we go knock on rooftop doors. We say: Let's give me a couple of those units that, that didn't sell at the physical auction. We prove our, our, our capabilities, prove the return on investment. It's a very simple transaction for a seller. They don't have to ship the vehicles anywhere. We come to them.
Right.
So it's an incredibly efficient model. Over time, we basically continue to get more and more of the rooftops. It's a classic network effect situation. You mentioned, you know, two different kind of territories. The characteristics of a particular territory can dictate how quickly we gain market share, and it can come from a combination of either more and more rooftops or fewer rooftops with more penetration. Some of that can be dictated by large dealer groups. You know, we used Austin South as example. They're very dominated by a handful of very large dealer groups. Once we knocked down a couple of those, our share doubled literally within the next six months.
Mm.
So it can differ a little bit by territory and region, but it's a pretty standard playbook. We've shared some cohort data in the past that shows that our penetration and wallet share grows pretty consistently over time. We shared at our Analyst Day in June that we had about 30% penetration across the country of franchise rooftops, and similarly, about 30% wallet share. So that effectively, the multiplier of those two gives you about a 9% market share today. Our 2026 targets assume that we have about 12% share of a healthy market. So it's two components. One, continue to gain share at about the same pace that we have, but also see some tailwind as the market returns, we were talking about earlier.
So, maybe we have two minutes left. I definitely wanna ask about the path to 2026 revenue targets and how we get there, but I also wanna open it up for questions. So you can ask that question, or if there's another question in the audience, feel free.
Including the bills?
Including the bills. All right, well, let's talk about the 2026 revenue targets. I mean, I thought the team did a very good job at Analyst Day, laying out how you get there, the idea, you know, the 12% share, whether you hit that or not, but regardless if it's a healthy marketplace or not, hopefully you get there. Just walk us through, you know, that path to 2026, and maybe you can do that via the 12%.
Sure. So, 3 big buckets of revenue, right? The biggest being auction and insurance revenue. The second, marketplace services, which is transport and capital, and the third smaller piece, SaaS and data services. So concentrating on the auction and insurance business, there's really 4 ways that we're getting from where we were in 2022 to 2026 targets. Half of that growth, we believe, comes from market share alone, right? So gaining kinda mid-teens market share year-over-year, as we have now for the past 5 or 6 quarters. So consistent rinse and repeat, penetrate wallet share-
Sure.
and deliver that over the next three years. 20% of the growth, we think, comes from higher ARPU, right? So raising fees, introducing new fee-based products. We've demonstrated over the past three years, including a few weeks ago, that we still have a fair amount of headroom relative to our biggest competitors in the market, which is physical auctions. So we'll continue to modestly raise fees each year. The implied ARPU for 2026 is about $500 per vehicle. We're, we were at $450 in Q1 and Q2. So again, not a lot of incremental need there.
You said something a few weeks ago. I wanna make sure I didn't miss anything.
September first, we did another fee structure.
Thank you.
Modest, but similar. And then the last two components, one is that we do build in about 20% of the growth coming from the market recovering.
Mm.
Right? And then the fourth piece is about 10% contribution from the consumer to dealer and commercial markets, these new adjacencies that we're moving into. So in a nutshell, about 80% of that growth is within our control, right? So it's just constant execution. So that's the revenue.
That's perfect. Well, with that, I think we're in overtime. We do have time for one more question, given it's the last session of the day, and, you know, but otherwise, we might just wrap it there. But I think those four points are very clear. Any questions, any follow-ups? Oh, we have one.
Sorry, just to double-click on the 2026 targets, could you also talk about EBITDA and just maybe the path to the profitability? Great.
Yeah. So the simple way of framing the profitability is about 10 points of that improvement comes from revenue margin, what we call revenue margin, so effectively, gross margin. So we'll end this year somewhere in the 50% range, which will be up about 600 basis points year-over-year. That's been primarily from the great momentum we've seen in our transport business. To get to 60%, we need transport to go from, call it, mid-teens gross margin, if you will, to the high teens. ACV Capital going from about 10% attach rate today to the mid-20s. Those are really the two primary drivers. Also a little bit of reduction on arb costs over that timeframe. And then below the line, we laid out four basic OpEx line items.
We also shared for the first time the percentage of that OpEx that's fixed versus variable. So if you look across those four, three of the four, 70%-80% of the cost base today is fixed, right? So volume leverage is significantly as you start to scale the business. Obviously, the operation side is a little less fixed component, a little bit more variable. Vehicle condition inspectors as volumes grow, but it's very much a fixed operating model, so as you get to those volumes. We did share some of the territory-based EBITDA and regional EBITDA numbers. Today, we have five, perhaps maybe even six territories that are 25% or more in adjusted EBITDA. That's today, right?
That's without ACV Capital, without transport, you know, getting to those high teens, without SaaS and data services at scaling. So I think the good news is it's a proven model, right? And we think as long as we can continue to drive the kind of volumes that we're looking at driving, it's just naturally gonna continue to fall.
That's great. Vikas, Tim, thank you very much.
Thank you, Ron.
Always helpful to hear-
Thank you.
Everything going on at ACV. Thank you very much for coming.
Absolutely. Our pleasure.
All right.