We're live again. Welcome back to the first, and hopefully recurring, Bank of America U.S. InsurTech Conference. I am in sunny New York City, broadcasting from Bank of America world headquarters at One Bryant Park. If you're joining us now, this is the Future of Insurance Distribution panel, where we have distributors and producers. We got a really good group here to tackle this evolving issue, which I think in all of this InsurTech discussion, distribution is the area that I think there's the most debate and excitement over. The group that we have assembled here almost certainly is going to give credence to that. We have four participants on this call. I'm going to introduce every question to one of the participants, and anyone else can chime in. If you're watching this, you're watching this through an app called Vericast.
I would ask you to go look at the Vericast app. You can ask a question. Type your question in, it will come to me, and we can shake it up a little bit with your questions. Otherwise, I'm sure that I can manage to talk for 45 minutes without. I prefer your questions to my own. Joining us, we have four participants. The first person I want to introduce is Chris Wiebeck. He is the Chief Strategy Officer of Baldwin Risk Partners LLC. Before his role as Chief Strategy Officer, he was CFO, and he began his career at PwC and later joining MMA Capital Holdings, Inc. We're really pleased to have Chris. We have Mike Colby of Goosehead Insurance. He's President and Chief Operating Officer. Mike joined Goosehead back in 2006. He was formerly the CFO there. Early in his career, he was also an auditor at KPMG.
We have Yuval Harry, who's Hippo's Chief Revenue Officer, where he's in charge of overseeing the company's national partner program and its multi-distribution channels. His background is in various sales positions at LinkedIn, Microsoft, McKinsey & Company, and he was most recently at Shift Technologies. We also have Sean Harper of Kin. He is the Co-Founder. Sean formerly founded FeeFighters, a payments company that was bought by Groupon, and he also TSS-Radio, a serial entrepreneur. Before that, Sean was with Boston Consulting Group, and he was an investor with Longworth Venture Partners. Gentlemen, thank you all for joining us. I'm going to ask each of you to talk a little bit about your companies, explain what you do in a short order. Let's start with you, Chris, to talk about Baldwin for a sec.
Thanks, Josh. For those of you that don't know us, we IPO'd in the fall of 2019, about $150 million in revenue. We've been fortunate enough to kind of grow multiples of that now. We're focused in all aspects of insurance distribution. Our two largest segments are our middle market segment and then also our specialist segment, which hosts our MGA of the future, which is likely why we were invited to present on this today, and look forward to being with you all.
All right. Michael Colby.
Thanks for having me on, Josh. Goosehead Insurance is a national independent agency. We're focused on the personal line, P&C market here in the U.S. We believe the role of the expert agent is critical to the insurance purchasing process for the customer segment that we find to be most attractive. We've built a network of agents across the country, both through our franchising operations and our corporate-owned operations, and have equipped those agents with technology and product choice that allows them to engage the consumer the way they need to be engaged today. We've seen very strong, consistent levels of growth over the last three years since we went public. Really, I think our growth story really started with our establishment back in 2004. We've been around since 2004, and took the company public in 2018.
Yuval, can you tell us about Hippo?
Sure. Hippo is a modern home insurance company. We're focused really on three things. One is simplifying insurance. Whether you're talking about the purchase process, servicing, et cetera, insurance is still a very hard product to buy today, and that's one of our focus areas. The other, I would say, is providing modern coverage. Most insurance policies in the U.S. have been constructed a long time ago, and we focus on making the coverage more relevant and more modern to what people need today. Finally, I'd say that home insurance traditionally has been a very reactive industry. There's almost zero meaningful touch points with a customer. You wait for a claim and hopefully there's a positive experience. We're very focused on proactively helping our customers prevent risk from happening in the first place. Those are the four things. Company started in 2015.
At this point, hundreds of thousands of customers, meaningful distribution channels, and on the path to become a public company as well.
Sean Harper, tell us about Kin.
Kin is also a tech company that does homeowners insurance. We're vertically integrated. Our philosophy about distribution is, first of all, that distribution is the most attractive, and possibly the most broken part of the value chain in insurance. Then second, that by being vertically integrated, you can reduce a lot of the friction and inefficiencies that come by having a separate manufacturer of the product and a separate distributor of the product. We've been doing this since 2016. Our business model is that we operate a reciprocal exchange. We have very happy customers, more and more of them every day. The Net Promoter Score is 84. Online reviews are 4.9 out of five, and we're growing fast.
Great. Well, I'm going to ask a bunch of questions, and remember, you can also ask questions in the audience through Vericast. Everybody can answer the questions, but just for the simplicity, I'm going to send a question to a specific individual, and everyone else can run after it. There are no wrong answers, but this is the way we'll operate. The first question is the category of when is the right time to prospect the customer? It's not going to be the same for every product, but there are a lot of new business models dealing with customer acquisition right now, and there's a lot of discussion about when to acquire the customer. That's both when is the time to insure oneself into the insurance process, also into the mind share of the customer.
When is the easiest way and the cheapest way to procure that mind share? I guess, how do you figure out when's the right timing? I guess we'll start with Michael Colby about, tell us about when is the right time, in your mind, to reach out to the customer?
We find the home insurance customer to be very attractive for a number of reasons. One is, they typically own other assets. The homeowner with two cars in the garage and an art collection is very interesting to us. They typically place a lot of value on that expert advice because, the insurance solution that they need is typically a lot more complex. The consequences of getting it wrong could be very costly for them. Our approach is to lead with the homeowner and cross-sell into other lines of business. We found that integrating into that home buying process or the mortgage origination process, sometimes it comes through a refinance, has been the lowest cost of acquisition approach, and an opportunity for us to really drive a high level of lead volume sustainably, that cross-sell at a very high rate.
We integrate into that new mortgage, new home purchase process by developing relationships with mortgage lenders and with realtors, really leveraging that trust that already exists with the consumer. As a trusted partner, we help those folks provide a better experience to the borrower, to the new home buyer. That has been our approach. If you look at our customer acquisition costs, we don't disclose this in our public filings, but based on the data available in the space, we see acquisition costs that are about a tenth of what the industry's seeing, leveraging primarily that model.
Yeah. If I can add to I fully agree with Mike. I would also just note the mindset of the customer, right? In homeowners insurance, what we find is they're not typically buying for homeowners insurance, right? What they're in the process of buying is, they're buying a home. In the process of buying a home, they need a mortgage, they need the title, and they need those things in order to close on the home. If you can catch them at that time, right, and make that process very simple for them, that is the exact right time to attach the policy.
It can be. I think you need to think about supply and demand with this. At Kin, we're much more algorithmic. We're really trying to figure out who are the customers we want, then reach out to them at the same time as they're considering a change of insurance. The home buying process is pretty crowded. About 25% of our customers do come to us when they're buying a new home. One thing we notice is there's a lot of competition there, a lot of voices in the room. Sometimes it's actually more efficient to acquire a customer later, when maybe they've had homeowners insurance for four years, and now they want something different for one reason or another.
Just to add one thing. I think it's overlooked by a lot of folks about how challenging the insurance process is in the mortgage origination and the new home buying process. It is very underserved, and it's on the critical path to getting the deal done. As you point out, you need to have the insurance policy to close the loans for the bank to have their collateral protected. What we've seen is, one, it's underserved. The personal lines industry has not been able to be as responsive in the process. It's a fast-moving process. It's very dynamic. The product options, particularly when you're not providing choice, can be very limited resulting in potentially a challenge to even finding a home insurance company that'll get on the risk or pricing that is so outrageous that it can actually compromise the borrower's ability to qualify for the loan.
What we've found is by tooling the business to be highly responsive, bringing choice so that the pricing is competitive, not only the customer but the mortgage originator, the realtor sees a lot of value in having that critical path item solved very efficiently and ultimately making them look really good in front of their customers so that they can drive repeat and referral business.
I fully agree, I'll also add to that the customer has already provided the originator or the realtor or whoever it is. They already provided all the information that is needed to deliver the right policy with the right coverage at the right price. It makes it even, if you do use technology and APIs, et cetera, and you integrate well within that process, you are delivering a much simpler process for them, which is extremely still cumbersome today. I fully agree with that.
Josh, I'll add on. The one thing too is, I agree with that segment and that comment. Loss ratios are also related to when you get your client, right? Which is important for folks that are full stack or reciprocal or important for distributors. Theoretically, if you're going to write a bunch of insurance that the next day the people defaulted on their mortgage, I'll venture to guess that people in default on the mortgage have higher claims than people that just closed on the new house. Where you're getting your leads are ultimately going to impact your LTV.
That's a great point.
That's a good transition to customer acquisition costs. I might not be right, but my guess is that the incumbent industry is running at about somewhere between a two to three and a half times long-term value to a customer acquisition cost ratio. How should we think about what is the right LTV to CAC ratio? If it's too high, does that mean we're not charging enough? If it's low, is that one of the concerns that this industry is not a great industry for creating value? It's interesting, of course, this tends to be a number that I guess people look at more as the carriers, but I'm sure the brokers have a view also about how to procure customers with good long-term value for their business as well.
I guess let's start with Yuval and Hippo on how they think about LTV to CAC, but everyone might have an answer for this one as well.
A few comments. First of all, in my opinion, it is an industry with a very positive baseline ratio, if you will. I tend to agree with the numbers you're quoting. If you have a $1,200 a year premium with a customer stays on for seven, eight years, that has the potential for that very positive ratio. Where it exactly should sit, I could tell you, I started my career in SaaS-related businesses, and I was taught there that whenever the ratio is over two and a half, you're probably not spending enough in sales and marketing, and you should probably hit the accelerator on that. I don't know where exactly it should fall in relate to that, but I think that the potential of the industry is very strong. That's point one. In terms of the CAC itself, a few things.
I think one is connected to the question that came before. How do you attract those customers at an attractive CAC? At least what we've tried to do from the start, right? When you start and you're a startup and you don't necessarily have brand association, a lot of the ways we've done it is by creating a brand by proxy, right? What do I mean by that? I mean partnerships with companies that are in the process of where it is home buying and customers are in the process of home buying. If they're buying a home from Lennar, for example, they already trust Lennar with the home that they're buying, it makes sense that Lennar would know what type of insurance policy they would want and you create that type of brand by proxy association that way.
I think again, I fully agree with Chris's comment in terms of the high LTV customers, right? If you are going after customers that are already vetted for a mortgage, they're already vetted for a new home purchase, et cetera, these tend to have a more positive selection. I would add to those, by the way, people that one of our focus areas has been people that have already installed a smart home system in their home, and those are potentially more responsible homeowners. I think the last thing is, I think on the question of with regards to emerging and mature business and how this ratio should evolve over time, you do tend to see maturing cohorts perform better. Their retention tends to be better. You can expect that ratio at a business that is maturing to improve over time.
LTV to CAC, anybody else want to chime in?
I think it's really important to be precise about the terms. LTV to CAC is a really difficult thing to calculate in insurance because so much of the CAC, at least from a carrier perspective, so much of the CAC is actually what gets paid to the agent over time. Now you're in a situation where you have to
Extrapolate what that's going to be over the life of the policy and discount it back. I think a lot of the times people just take sort of the first-year cost of the agent and use that as the CAC, which is not intellectually honest, in my opinion. You just got to make sure that you're taking into account everything. I agree with what Yuval said. If it's 3+, that's pretty good. That's a good business.
Yeah, I would agree with both comments and the comment that Sean had on it being more complicated than people think, right? Your retention rate, your loss experience are probably going to be more important than even what you spend upfront. I think that's where some folks have maybe not spent a lot of time really dialing it in and knowing what it will be in the future. I think when we all look back 10 years from now, we're going to have a lot better information than we do today. People that are building the models that are taking time to understand those things, my guess is they will be on the winning side.
Yeah, I'll just add that. Client acquisition costs are relevant to us, retention is the long lever that we really focus on. It starts with addressing an attractive customer segment, capturing full share of wallet. We know that you're going to be 7 times more likely to renew with us if we have three policies than one. Delivering a client experience that is, in what the phrase we use, is the best client experience imaginable. Particularly from an independent broker's perspective, helping the customer understand that as the market changes, we have a broad product portfolio that we can redesign as your life changes, as rates in your area change. The relationship can stay in one place. I think that's an important area of value that we bring to the customer that drives higher levels of retention.
I'm going to paint a picture, I guess, which you can certainly disrupt, in terms of thinking about distribution models, Auto is the only model that so far has successfully translated itself to a direct channel, and obviously, that's evolving with other lines of business. If we look at agency business versus direct business, it's tended to be that the agency business has had a lower loss ratio for the industry and that the people who shop direct tend to shop more, and this might be specific to Auto. I guess I'll start with Sean here.
Given a direct-to-consumer approach versus having a frontline underwriting mechanism in the form of a compensated agent who is there to find good business for a carrier, how do we get the highest customer quality on a direct platform versus a customer quality that's generated out of a sort of agency platform?
Yeah. Selecting the right customers is really important. We think probably the worst situation for that is one where you're competing for business with many other carriers with an IA. In all likelihood, the IA sends the business to you only if you're the lowest price. It creates some really problematic selection trends. For us, we really like to be able to target specifically the customers we want and outreach to them directly. That's been a good equation for us. At that point, when you control the whole customer relationship, you can also do some clever things around making sure that the coverages and pricing are appropriate to the customer. I don't really buy the idea that IAs are doing a lot of frontline underwriting, especially on behalf of a particular carrier. It's hard to see how they would do that.
If they're putting the good business with one carrier, they're going to be putting the bad business with somebody else. At Kin, we really like to be able to control that whole experience. We also think it creates some really important benefits for us on the claims side to have that direct relationship. We think it creates some really important benefits to us on the retention side because you don't have an agent who is really compensated to churn the business as part of their value proposition.
I would challenge that notion that it's a race to the bottom. I can understand, Sean, that the independent agency channels maybe created a reputation for that. At our organization, what we've found is by leveraging technology, by leveraging expert agents who can really understand a carrier's risk appetite, understand where the risk appetite for the customer is, and where their risk exposure is, we're able to actually be a lot more precise with placing risk with carriers who find that risk attractive. It's not an adverse selection. It's more let's find the company where this risk is in their wheelhouse. You have to do it smart, and we leverage technology to guide our agents down that path.
Provide insight. As a result, we're able to deliver, despite having high levels of growth and a new business bias, very strong underwriting results for our partners and differentiated from other distribution partners they work with. Yuval, we've been a partner of yours for a long time. I don't know if you have any follow-on comments.
Yeah, I do. You've been a great partner. I'll say this, I don't know that these things necessarily contradict each other. In homeowners specifically, there was no real direct channel up until a few years ago, right? You could not go to an incumbent's website and easily get a quote and definitely not bind the policy online. Eventually, it had to be completed with a phone call, and those options just didn't exist, right? Companies like Kin and like Hippo are making that into a possibility. I don't know that it contradicts with what forward-looking technology-oriented agents are doing. I think it's a very big market. Direct channel is relatively new in homeowners insurance. Agents also have their place, and I don't know that these things necessarily contradict, is my viewpoint.
I think our view would be that they're just different customers. The customer that wants to go direct is a different customer segment than the customer we're going after. To the extent that partners like Hippo have direct and agent channels or companies like Progressive, we don't really see channel conflict. There's very little overlap in my opinion, just because you are addressing the different customer segments.
I guess along these lines, I don't mean to disparage anyone's business model, I'm not. About 20 years ago, State Farm was the largest insurance carrier in the U.S., everyone says they're mutual, they're slow to change, they're slow to embrace new technologies. Today, State Farm is still the largest insurance carrier in the U.S. It just seems like switching, even in a consumer-driven product like home and auto, is something that's not happening frequently enough that you can take a company like State Farm and they're still going to be dominant even 20 years later after their model has been described as antiquated. I'll start with Chris, because you look at the organic growth rates at Baldwin.
Baldwin has shown a success in moving customers from one agency to Baldwin, which means that they've found ways of getting customers to change. Where do you find customers? How do you get them to change their distribution choice? Where is the nexus getting someone to break with inertia and do something different than they did the last time?
Sure. We kind of do it both ways, right? We have aspects of our business that look much more like Goosehead in a traditional kind of agent model. We have our MGA business that's tech integrated. You never really talk to anyone, we've grown that by hundreds of thousands. It depends on the risk, right? As you mentioned, auto or home or on the commercial side, there's a lot of other risks involved and the complexity of the risk. If we talk about home, writing a home insurance in Ohio or Indiana, where State Farm may be doing fantastically well, versus writing it in Florida because of the cat risk, they're almost two different businesses, right?
The knowledge that an agent needs to have, the design of a product, the catastrophic risk that can happen that can really. You can have four or five years and all of a sudden you could be out of business. Where we're having success, is trying to look at the markets for where they are, right? I agree with the Goosehead comments that there's some clients in home that are going to have an estate planner, right? We have in our middle market business a high net worth segment, they're selling through estate attorneys, just as much as they are a mortgage person because that person has multiple homes. They might have trust involved, and they really need to have someone that understands the comprehensive risk solution that's going on. I would say both businesses are successful.
We're having a lot of success on the tech side and the direct side that I know Kin and Hippo are going after as well. I think you really need to know your marketplace when you're trying to do that. That's key.
I think it's important to point out, Josh, that while State Farm is still the largest 20 years later, they have lost share to the directs. The independent agency channel, interestingly, has stayed very consistent at about a third of distribution, which I think speaks to people's, a certain segment of the market desire. They desire an expert agent. They desire choice. The directs are gaining shares, specifically in auto, at the expense of the captives.
Yeah, again, yes, they're the largest player, but they're at 17% market share, right? It's not a winner takes all industry.
Right.
It's fragmented. By the way, the next player is less than 10% market share.
Right.
You can establish a very large company in homeowners insurance, a $105 billion market. It's going to grow faster than inflation. There's a lot of opportunity to create meaningful large businesses while you don't have to topple State Farm in order to do that.
Billion-dollar ad budgets can allow a broken business model, in my opinion, to survive probably a lot longer than it should.
Yeah. The thing customers want is, I think it's safe to say people don't like spending a lot of time picking out insurance, and they really want a value proposition of simplicity and ease. Historically, one of the ways that you're able to deliver that is by having a person who helps you sort through all of the options to make the right decisions, et cetera. You don't need to think about it too much because the agent's thinking about it. Now we're getting to a point where for many of these products, you can have technology think about it for you instead of the agent, which in some cases is better, in almost every case is cheaper. It's the same value proposition. It's not like customers are just sitting around wanting to read their insurance policies and think about it. That's not what they want.
You need to deliver them simplicity one way or the other.
I have an audience question. I think everybody will want to answer it. I hope no one takes offense at the question. I don't think that you will. It says that California, Florida, and Texas seem like very difficult markets, particularly in homeowners. Why focus on these states? What skills are needed to allow you to be profitable there? To this group in particular, it's Florida, it's Texas, and we've got all our hands up. I don't know who wants to start with that one.
I'll just start as a distributor.
I'm sorry. I want to start.
Good.
What does it say for our country if we can't provide insurance to the three of the four largest states? That's not a good sign. That's where the need is. I can say as an entrepreneur, what makes me excited is using technology and data to deliver a product that is very needed by customers. That's why, aside from just being huge states, that's something that gets us really fired up about doing something great in California, something great in Texas. That's what users need. That's why we're here.
As a distributor, in these more challenging markets, I think the value proposition that the agent brings, like Chris pointed out earlier, is just more pronounced. Certainly the more challenging markets are going to see higher insurance premiums, which is how we derive our revenue. We find those markets actually can be quite attractive.
Yeah, I would add, those are the three most populous states. If you ran a presidential election, I think everyone would say, "I'll take those three." Yes, it's competitive. Yes, you have to be better at what you do. I think the folks on this panel are all focused there because you know if you win there, you're ultimately going to survive, and you're going to have a nice piece of market share and a durable business into the future. I think we're all thinking about it similarly, which is you have to be there.
Look, eventually we're trying to create a balance, right? Balancing the risks that we take. This is one portion of it, and there's other states as well that we're trying to grow just as much. In the end of the day, you got to take balanced reward and balanced risk, and for us, it's not focusing on this versus focusing on the other. It's how do we create a balanced portfolio overall.
I think one thing that's important for us to think about is that one of the reasons why those states are perceived as difficult is because of the impact of climate change. That is not a change that will be isolated to those states. In fact, that's a change that is having an increased impact everywhere in the country and everywhere in the world. I guess perhaps more and more of the country, it's safe to bet that more and more of the country will look more and more like Texas, like California, like Florida in the next 10 years, unfortunately.
Next question is about owning the customer. Does the carrier own the customer? Does the agent own the customer? Does the MGA own the customer? I'm going to start with Chris because he's an agent and an MGA. How do you maintain ownership over the customer? What business model has the highest ability to get that recurring revenue stream in the mind of the customer?
Sure. I think historically, the data has shown out that the agents own the customer. I think they all, parts of the value chain have the data that is needed to try to interface with that customer and to win them back, if you will, if they're moved. Over the last two decades, I think the agents had the better winning argument. Certainly, you see that changing, right? You see us as a large broker having an MGA solution where at times we're creating proprietary product or supplying that product to others. You see insurance companies like Progressive having an agent channel and having a direct channel.
I don't think it's new, I think there is value chain compression and people are trying to say, "Okay, how do we own different parts of this ecosystem?" Probably just like having a client that buys more policies, if you own multiple parts, you're probably going to have a better retention.
I think we view it as a shared relationship. We are partners. We partner with companies like Hippo that are philosophically aligned around the client experience and treating customers fairly. We're aligned at retaining those customers for as long as possible. At a time where it makes sense for the customer to move to a different insurance company, it wouldn't be without the current incumbent company perhaps maybe wanting to get off the risk or not having a product that's adequate as the customer's life evolves. We think there's a lot of value that we can bring working closely together. We're not thinking about how we can, I'd say, advance our brand loyalty over Hippo's. It's saying, "Let's work together to deliver the best experience.
100%. When you're servicing the customer, right? Goosehead might have acquired it. We might be doing some of the servicing. It's a joint ownership, it's exactly the aspect of doing what's fair for the customer. If what's fair for the customer eventually is moving them to a different carrier, that's perfectly fine. If we have a shared vision that we're trying to serve the customer in the best possible way, then I think, and it's a joint ownership, then that all works together.
I think to the extent that we're more tightly integrated, and Yuval, we've worked closely with your firm to be tightly integrated in how we serve the customer, the more effective you can be.
Sean, your mic's a little different than everyone else's, so please go ahead, Sean.
Am I faint? I could go. Cool. Thank you, guys. In that relationship then, I'm just curious, I actually don't know how this works. If Goosehead wrote a policy with Hippo, can Hippo then move the customer away from Goosehead?
No. The agent owns that relationship. They brought the customer. We will do everything we can to help them maintain the customer, and we will do everything we can to service the agent so that they can serve the customer as best as they possibly can.
It's more so than I think people-
The agent does own the customer. It's not shared or something. I was just curious.
Contractually, you can get into the contractual terms, and I think that's what you would conclude. The way we operate, and it's more fluid than I think people truly appreciate. Customers may start with us and be handed off to Hippo or vice versa. They may start online with you, and then we need to get involved to help maybe explain something to the customer. It's very fluid. To the extent that we are tightly integrated, importantly aligned on meeting what's the best needs and providing the best experience for the client, that's the outcome we're working towards and not focused on who owns the data, who owns the relationship. I think that ultimately, if you're focused on the best client experience, that's what's going to allow us to win.
Final question I assume everyone wants to answer. I'm going to start with Yuval, though. How has technology enabled your business to operate in a way that is disruptive to the current market?
Well, I think it's the core of it. It's the core of what enables what we're doing. Our stack is complete. We started building the company six years ago, and probably most of the stack was written in the last two, three years, right? I'll give you a very simple example, maybe to bring it to life. We today have a smart home program that's integrated into our insurance policy. It's actually a filed and regulated program. It's part of the policy. It's actually mind-blowing, but what enables a higher level of discount is that we actually get the activation signal from the customer, so we know whether it's active or not. If it's active, we can deploy a higher level of discount. The way it works is it's connected to our policy management system in the backend.
It sounds pretty trivial from a technology standpoint. Okay, you get a signal of an IoT device, and you connect it to your policy management system in order to apply a discount for the customer. That's something that for an incumbent is a very challenging thing to do, right? The stack was built 20, 30 years ago. Actually taking a live signal and connecting it to your policy management system, determining in real time what the discount needs to be and whether it needs to be maintained or not is a very challenging task for them to cross. On a simple thing like this, we've basically managed to create, I think, the most differentiated smart home program in the industry today. That's just one example. You can go on and on, but I hope that helps explain it.
No, that's good. We can't get everything, but I want to hear our This is InsurTech accountancy. We want to hear a little about your technology. Whoever wants to go next, give a few words. I see you smiling, Sean. I'm going to call on you.
All right. Thanks, man. For us, it's a lot of things, but the common theme is speed. The world is changing faster than it ever has before. It's changing really fast. One issue, really the main cause of many of the issues that cause inefficiencies in insurance and other places, is the inability of companies to be able to react to that speed. Having really modern tech that's flexible and allows you to react quickly benefits us in lots and lots and lots of different ways.
Yeah. I would add on to that, our tech stack for MGA was built in the past five years. We can quote a [UVine] in 90 seconds. We just demoed our flood product, and put it in beta. I remember when I demoed it in March, it was basically four minutes. I said, "All right. How's it going?" I sat down at a computer and said, "Okay, I'm going to give it." I started watching. It was four minutes. Literally three weeks later, they came back. They're like, "Try it again," and it was under 90 seconds. A lot of times that's a process that's taking overnight for a lot of others still. The ability to put new products in your tech stack, to integrate new things using the software development that's available today versus 30 years ago, is really different.
I think the folks here understand that.
I think speed, efficiency, simplicity can only be accomplished through smart technology. If you believe that customers expect choice, I believe that a customer expects choice, and tomorrow's customers will demand it. In order to deliver that efficiently and to simplify working across 170 different companies that we partner with across the country, you have to have very smart tech to deliver that experience that they expect.
Well, I'm going to say this is about the best 45 minutes that I've had. I had too many of you on the panel. You guys have such interesting stories to tell, and I hope you have good meetings with everyone today. Thank you for presenting the panel. What can I say? We'll continue the dialogue. I know some of you guys are public companies, some of you are smack in the conversion process. Kin is still a private company. Everything's in different stages, and this industry's in flux. Thank you for your time today, and I'll connect you to any questions that come in later. Be well.
Thanks, Josh. Cheers, Sean. Appreciate you.
Cheers.
Take care, all. Next up is better.