All right, we're gonna go ahead and get started with our next session, and sadly, the last one of the day that we have to. This event does have to conclude. Sorry, we can't all come back tomorrow to keep this going. But we are ending with a bang, I would say. We are joined here by Hagerty. To my right, we have McKeel Hagerty, CEO, and to his right, Patrick McClymont, CFO. And Jay Coble is around here, Head of Investor Relations as well. So thanks to all of them for coming. In order to set the tone for this, they actually have a nice introductory video to celebrate their fortieth-year anniversary as a company. So let you guys watch that first.
When we collect, we aren't just keeping things. We keep memories, visions, moments. Perfect Saturdays on perfect roads. There's a fire we keep, too.
Did you find my GTO?
Happy birthday, Dad.
I can't believe it.
We won't let it burn out. The roar, and, man, that purr, it sparked early. This flame chose us. We proudly carry it within us. We are loyal torchbearers, every one of us. We are not just collectors, we are all keepers. Keepers of the flame. Hagerty.
Great.
Come on, you haven't seen anything like that all day, sitting in here.
Yeah.
That's fun, right?
Finally, some audio visual.
Thank you!
Thank you. Yeah. Let the-
Has there been a lot of burning rubber in here before?
Let the production team know that got a round of applause.
Oh, God, well, yeah.
I'm sure they'll be pleased to hear that.
And that's all in-house. That was all done by our media team, so...
Yeah. Yeah, so that was a great intro video, but perhaps it might be helpful for you, McKeel, just to give a little background on sort of what Hagerty is. Is it an insurance carrier, an MGA, a lifestyle brand, perhaps all of those? Give us some intro on Hagerty.
Well, it is all of those, and thank you for your patience for being here at the end of the day. Hopefully, you had a good day, a good conference. Hagerty is all of that, a lifestyle brand in the automotive space, where we also are an insurance risk taker. We're in the insurance brokerage space around collector car or enthusiast car, depending on what you call it. The U.S. is our main market, but we're also in Canada and in the U.K. We've been doing this a long time. We're the largest in the space, specializing in these kind of cars.
I think what makes us unique in the insurance world, how we think about it, is it's all based on this idea of at the core of it, is passion, and that there are tens of millions of people out there who actually love cars, and they own cars that are special for them. It's not. They don't treat them like a daily driver. Daily drivers are something else that they insure someplace else. We get to do the fun stuff, and we play in that space with them, alongside them. We don't just sell them an insurance product. We're right there. We own a number of event companies. We're in the automotive media space. We have an auction business, both live and digital, and that makes us, what we think is very authentic in the space.
What makes this, I think, also unusual from an insurance standpoint, of course, everybody loves direct-to-consumer business. We sell a lot of our business direct to consumer, a little less than 50%, and the rest of our business is divided between selling through agents and brokers and through partnerships with the largest insurance carriers out there. And you might be, of course, you're smart people, know the insurance world, I'm sure. Why would an insurance carrier partner with a company like ours? And it's because of a couple of things. One, these types of cars, like some of you saw in the video, they're difficult to value over time. And because unlike a new car that you buy off the dealer's showroom, goes down in values, ours go up in value over time.
And how much they go up, that's something that we're really good at, at estimating those values and also the claims. So, claims on a really vintage car, something that's really, really valuable, you know, you think about it, or something rare, it's difficult for a regular insurance company to handle, but that's what we do day in and day out. So it's our fortieth year. We're having a lot of fun. We've been public for just about three years, and that's also been a lot of fun, I guess, as such as it is, right, Patrick? And so, happy to be here.
Mm-hmm. Out of curiosity, so forty years ago, presumably the company wasn't what it is today. Where did it get its start from? Did it start more on the lifestyle side and then add insurance, or did it start on insurance and add these other-
Yeah, well, it was literally started in the basement of the house I grew up in. My parents were general insurance agents in Northern Michigan. They sold that agency, and they wanted to be in a business nationally around some sort of passion. Their dream was to get into the classic car space like we're in, but they started actually in wooden boats. So if you think cars are a niche, wooden boats are like a tiny, tiny niche. But the world was. That's the world we played in. I mean, my dad was a car enthusiast and a boat enthusiast. You know, we went to car shows, we went to boat shows, and that was just always sort of the way we interacted with customers, being part of that community.
It was a long time before we could even dream of being big enough to start taking risk and think about buying insurance companies and doing all the things that we do. But I think the core of it was really there. And my mother, who just passed away earlier this year, my dad passed away quite some time ago. When you'd ask her: "Hey, Mom, why does this business work? What makes it so special?" And she would just tell you, "People take good care of their toys." And that's the core emotion underneath this. If you have a toy, you spent a lot on it, maybe it was something you inherited, that's something special to you, you take good care of it. And wherever there is care, there's good insurance risk, and that's the difference.
That's the difference. You can have pricing and you can have underwriting, you can do all those disciplines and have all the data really well, but if you can identify those elements of care and you interface with that, it really works.
Mm-hmm. People often like to talk about the sort of addressable market, and I won't ask about the addressable market of the wooden ships. But perhaps sticking to the kind of the classic collectible-type car, like, how big is that market, and how penetrated is it?
It's, I think probably the most surprising thing, that a lot of investors and people who follow us have realized, is that we're very, very data-centric. We have very large data sets around these specialty cars, and the total addressable market, the way we look at it, is based on registered vehicles of a certain age or a certain type. And in North America, the United States, that's about 46 million vehicles registered, specifically of a type of car that we would insure or that we'd like to insure. In terms of penetration, we started in really, really old cars. I mean, 40 years ago, we started getting into this. You know, the earliest decades were the ones we focused on, that's the safe bet, right? So you know, we have much higher market penetration in the earlier decades.
But as you get newer and newer, especially as you get past 1981, and there was a unique thing that happened in the car world in 1981, which is, after 1981, every single car had a 17-digit VIN associated with it, so the car is universally decodable, but from a data standpoint. Prior to that, those cars all had serial numbers, and so each and every car manufacturer had a different way to identify what the vehicle was. They started at zero and made as many of them as they needed to and ended at that number, and that's very difficult to decode. So for us, you know, we have a lot of, we just keep moving through the decades.
What's interesting, the market is telling us, is as younger generations are getting into it, and that's a big part of that video you saw, that's not... I mean, there were a few gray-haired people or people like me with no hair on the video. There is a new generation, and there are new generations of people getting into cars. They start in a different place. They like sports cars. They start by watching video games, playing video games. They didn't start by reading car magazines or doing the stuff like people used to do, going to the New York Auto Show, Detroit Auto Show, like I did growing up. They start in a different place, and we're meeting them there with these sort of newer, fun vehicles that they want to buy.
Mm-hmm. And so when you think about that, that market size, how many of those vehicles are mis-insured as daily driver vehicles?
Yeah
... and not properly, I guess, and-
Yeah, the vast majority of these cars are insured by standard insurance companies. And, you know, we all know the names of the ones who advertise everywhere. They bombard the airwaves and are all over everything, and a lot of those are our partners. That's a big part of our distribution strategy, is to partner with the biggest insurance carriers out there. But there are a lot more insurance companies than the ones that advertise at, on Super Bowls and put their names on stadiums. I mean, if you go across the United States, the number of mutual companies and small, single-state carriers or small, you know, sort of regional carriers that insure a lot of homes and a lot of cars, insure the vast majority of these vehicles. We have...
You know, we're the largest player in the space, specializing in these kind of cars, but the vast majority of them are all insured just out there, and that's, you know, what we're trying to bring into our world, and so a big part of our growth story, which has been substantial, is, you know, kind of taking share out of that standard market carrier, where we're not partnering with those big insurance companies along the way.
Mm-hmm. And is the underlying issue for them being insured as any other daily driver vehicle, that they're overpaying, that they're not getting as much limit coverage as they might need? What are the actual issues?
Yeah, well, again, you know, a typical insurance company, they just don't know what the values are. They don't know how to track the values up, and in general, over time, these cars appreciate in value. They're not depreciating. That's challenging for them, unless they go out and force somebody to get an appraisal on a car, which is expensive, it's time-consuming, but it was how it was done for a long time, they'd force people to go out there and get an appraisal, so that's one of the pieces, and then, again, on the claims handling side, it's just these cars can be very complicated to fix. You know, the modern insurance world is all about speed: fixing, paying a claim and fixing it very, very fast, and with modern cars, look, if the car is totaled, you pay whatever the...
You owe. But if you're gonna try to repair a modern car, you have a lot of component plastic parts that get kind of bolted back on them, you know, electronic stuff, glass gets put in. But if you're talking about a '66 Jaguar, you know, very complicated car to repair, the parts, believe it or not, you can find the parts. They're hard for you know, a typical insurance company to find. You can't go put a you know, a windshield glass program, windshield back in a '66 Jaguar. It takes you know, you have to have specialty sources for parts. It takes a lot of time and care to put that windshield in, and it's not $500, it's $5,000, or it's $15,000 to replace that windshield, and that's what we do every single day.
That's why those, like, kind of regular insurance companies struggle with it, and that's why we try to partner with them.
Mm-hmm. Yes, that idea, that sort of that claim example that you just presented there, leads me into the conversation of loss ratios. So we're seeing across the personal auto industry, the trajectory of underwriting results are improving, right? They've taken a lot of rate to offset this frequency and severity trends. Is Hagerty exposed to similar patterns, or is it not the same?
Yeah. Well, nobody's immune from the biggest things that happen out there. So, you know, we insure about 2.5 million vehicles. You know, we have cat exposure just like everybody else. Our vehicles are exposed sometimes differently than a standard vehicle, and mostly because if you think of, you know, somebody who really likes... Remember my mantra from my mother: "People take good care of their toys." So when the hurricane is coming, what do you think gets taken out of the garage first? Well, it's the family photos get loaded into the back of the vintage car, and they drive away, and then they leave the regular car sitting there to get smoked by the hurricane. So that kind of care is there. Now and then, we do have cars that, you know, we do...
Like, Hurricane Ian was an event for us, as it can. Wildfires, a little less so. So we have those kind of standard exposures, but the loss ratios tend to be very, very low, regular, in comparison to regular auto. And, but also the average premiums are lower, so it's a balance. You've got to be really careful, you have to run a good operation.
Mm-hmm. Operationally, I assume the benefits of having proprietary repair networks, sort of approved vendor lists for these types of vendors, has been very helpful from a claim severity standpoint.
It has. I mean, we even have, we have a team of people that find parts for repair shops to repair our cars with. You know, the last thing, you know, post the great financial crisis was a bloodletting of small automotive businesses, so 2007, 2008, and 2009, kind of an undersold, told story in the automotive world was how many repair facilities, paint shops, upholstery shops, went out of business. It was a really rough time. Same thing with COVID, despite, you know, all of the financial stimulus that got poured onto them, there were a lot of failures of businesses.
So what that means is shop rates went up, and one of the last things you want, you know, if you're in our kind of business, is to have somebody now making, you know, $100 or $150 an hour online shopping for trim parts for that '66 Jaguar. We find it for them, ship it to the shop, everybody wins.
Mm-hmm.
So.
I'm going to pause here just to see if there's any questions in the audience.
I bet there are, somewhere.
We'll come back in a second.
Okay, we'll come back. Yes.
Going over, I guess, stepping away from, like, the insurance-
Okay
... side and thinking about the lifestyle brand of Hagerty and the memberships associated with it. You guys run a lot of events between auctions and car shows, and you have media production. Do you think of that membership side as... Or sorry, that lifestyle brand side as a way to actually contribute to bottom line earnings? Or do you think of it as part of just the funnel to recruit and retain your, kind of your customer base?
Yes. Both. It has to be both. You know, look, every business, you know, like ours, if you want to grow, you're going to have to spend money on marketing, we know that. I think the thing that I have been very, very, very strategic about from the beginning is, I didn't want to get ourselves, as we grew, backed into just an advertising model for how to grow. I think it's, it's great if you're one of the big names that you see on television all the time, if you want to spend $1 billion or something like that on advertising, and we do, do advertising.
But I'd much rather invest the money either in our own engagement channels, which is either media or events, or in the community sort of around it, because it creates a lot more word-of-mouth sort of preferential marketing, rather than just trying to buy eyeballs out there. We do buy, you know, like everybody, we do a lot of direct-to-consumer, performance-style marketing digitally. But one of the, I guess, sort of declines that we've noticed is that, you know, for many of us here, I've mentioned, say, video games, how the next generation is engaging with cars. When I started in this business thirty years ago, there were over 150 car magazines in the United States, out there. There were a number of publishing companies.
Most of those magazines are gone, or most of them are kind of a shadow of themselves, and which is sad to me. I happen to like car magazines. But we actually publish a car magazine, and our car magazine that goes to our members is the highest circulation car magazine of any of them now, bigger than Road & Track or Car and Driver, and I'd rather invest in those channels than just back into advertising. So, you know, of course we sell, we sell advertisements. We have brand partnerships with things like our, with our events, with, you know, with our media properties. The auction business is a little bit different. So we got in the auction business, after we went public, just under three years ago. So we acquired a newly formed auction company called Broad Arrow.
Broad Arrow was a new company formed by a bunch of industry veterans, and they run a schedule of live auction events in the United States, and we'll continue growing that out over the coming years. We also launched a digital auction platform because, let's face it, that's how most cars are sold today. A couple of really good ones that are out there that we like, they're friends, they're that also run digital auction platforms. Post-COVID, the number of cars sold on digital auctions has just expanded dramatically. It's not the majority yet, the most of cars are sold are not on digital auctions, they're sold either through live auctions or through a dealership network. There are hundreds of car dealers out there that specialize in these kind of cars.
But that's why we wanted to not just play in that space, but invest in the space, bring in a great team. They help kind of feed the funnel at the top. Those businesses are designed to be profit makers, and it's actually the part of the world that Patrick came from. He was previously CFO at Sotheby's when it was a public company, so he has a lot of experience there, and it's been really fun to watch. It's also brought an order of magnitude improvement in some of our areas of automotive expertise.
The type of people that work in an automotive auction company are just absolute, unbelievable experts in the car space, and we had a lot of them in the insurance world, but it's really been amazing to bring in this kind of talent into our world. So I really have a lot of fun people to talk to on a daily basis.
In the auction space, do you strictly serve as a marketplace function, or do you guys ever provide liquidity in terms of, like, taking inventory of automobiles?
So we have a, you know, kind of a subsidiary of the auction business called Broad Arrow Capital. Again, it was something that Patrick was part of creating at Sotheby's, and we do finance vehicles on an asset-based lending program, and it's been a really. It's an important part of that mix because there are an awful lot of people when they get really excited about buying a car, no matter how wealthy they are, sometimes they borrow some money to get the deal done fast, so that then they can go get the car into their garage, and then sort the rest out after the-
... after the event happens.
Mm-hmm.
And in our world, at the top end, you know, we sort of have our sort of core business, which is cars averaging under $50,000, but in our high net worth or private client space, that plays very, very much into the auction strategy, where, I mean, I think the average car we had for sale in Monterey a couple weeks ago was $600,000 or something like this. And, you know, cars north of $1 million or, you know, even close to $10 million and beyond are pretty normal in that auction world. And it's hard for a lot of kind of civilians to imagine, but in the car world, that's the fun stuff. That's, it's a fun part of our world.
We've spoken about a few different sort of pieces of the business model.
What does the actual revenue mix look like, and how has that evolved over time?
Yeah. So right now, it's overwhelmingly insurance-related, and the way that we attack the insurance business, we have a risk-taking entity, where we're actually, you know, taking that risk into a Bermuda entity. So that, and then alongside with our distribution entity, the traditional MGA, are 90-plus% of our revenues right now. The other parts of the puzzle, the marketplace is the one that, over time, should turn into a very meaningful contributor, both in terms of revenue and earnings. So each year, globally, something like $100 billion of collectible car transactions take place. Roughly $3 billion of those are live auction, roughly $3 billion of those are online auction. Everything else is either dealers or peer-to-peer, and the dealer and peer-to-peer is migrating towards online auction.
In our insurance book alone, so the 2.5 million vehicles that we insure, over the last 12 months, $14 billion worth of transactions happened. Either somebody sold a car that we insured, or somebody bought a car and brought it onto our insurance. So we have tremendous visibility into these transaction flows, and it's a big market, and our brand is really powerful in this ecosystem. So the concept of having a marketplace, so instead of just helping people by protecting and celebrating their cars through the traditional business, but also helping them buy and sell when it's time to sell, makes a ton of sense. So that one, it's ramping up, both on the live and the digital side, and over the next handful of years, it'll turn into a pretty meaningful contributor.
The other parts of the ecosystem, as MicKeel described, think of them as self-funded marketing. So we run events. Those events produce revenue, both from ticket sales and from sponsors, and they're a wonderful opportunity for us to interact with the people in the community. And so we think of those as they ought to be, you know, in the neighborhood of break even, maybe make a little bit of money, but the real goal is to continue to build relationships in the ecosystem, continue to build the brand, and that will flow into insurance business and marketplace business as we ramp that up.
Remind us, has the risk retention or the risk premium piece of your revenue pie changed over time? Oftentimes, we see companies dependent on third-party capital that cede a lot of insurance to third-party providers, and then over time, as they get more comfortable and, you know, more diversification, more scale, they start retaining more. Has that phenomenon played out with you guys?
Yeah, so starting in 2017, we started taking on risk, and we do that through a quota share with our partner at Markel. And initially, it was 25% of the risk came back to us, and now it's up to 80%. So the vast majority of the risk is on our books. And then just Tuesday of this week, we closed on the acquisition of what will be called Drivers Edge Insurance, and it's a Colorado-based entity that's licensed in about 40 states. We're gonna use that to launch a new product that we call Enthusiast Plus. Still collectible cars, focused on our target market, slightly different pricing, slightly different underwriting standards, but in that instance, we'll be taking 100% of that risk on the front end, and there'll be some reinsurance on the back end, obviously.
The way we think about it is, we want to own all the risk where we see attractive opportunities, and we want to be in a position to help partners, where we'll do it more through the MGA on a distribution basis, and perhaps take some risks through a quota share or not. So, for example, our big partnership with State Farm, where we will be running their five hundred thousand vehicle book of collector cars, that's when we'll be doing that on an agency basis. So to us, it's where can we add value, and does it make sense for us to take risk or not?
Is the 80% number where you expect that to stay on the risk retention for the foreseeable future, or is there any reason that... I, I'm trying to think across the industry, maybe 90% is maybe kind of typical across really established, you know, legacy personal auto carriers. So 80% is pretty close to that, but-
Yeah, the long-term plan is anywhere where we see the opportunity to own 100% of the risk, we wanna do that.
Mm-hmm.
We've got a wonderful relationship with Markel for many years. They're actually a large owner of the company, and have been very supportive. So we'd envision that over time, it'll likely evolve. We've proven we're really good at this, and, you know, it makes more sense for us to take on that risk, but don't have a clock on it.
Mm-hmm. Jumping a little further down on the income statement from-
Mm-hmm
... talking about the revenue side, when you think about the bottom line margins of this business, there's been some progression over the past couple of years.
Mm-hmm.
Perhaps you could sort of remind us of how that's progressed, and then when you think about the long-term aspirations of the margin of this business, what does it look like?
Yeah. In the last couple of years, really what we've done is, this is a business that has a lot of embedded operating leverage, and so over the last couple of years, we've just made sure that that's actually working and flowing through. So we took all the normal steps you would think in terms of let's kind of shift the cost curve down in certain places where it makes sense and be really disciplined and kind of bend it down over time, and it's worked. So in 2023, and now into 2024, we're on this steep profit expansion curve, but we're not where we ultimately will get in terms of margins. You know, the way we think about it is the risk-taking business, we run about an 88-89 combined ratio, and so, you know, that'll be an 11% or 12% business.
It's pretty stable. It can bounce around with cats and things like that, but that's a big chunk of our business that will be on an operating profit basis. I call it 10%-12%. The MGA business, so the non-risk-taking part of the insurance business, that's the one where we're seeing the real rapid margin expansion, and over time, that ought to get to kind of a high teens %, maybe a 20% type margin business, and so the remaining piece really is marketplace. How quickly does it grow? Marketplace, when you think about live auctions, digital auctions, it ends up being a pretty high margin business, and so it should be probably in excess of that 20% level once it gets to stabilization. You put it all together, and you're probably talking about something in the high teens %.
Is there a way to think about how this equates to an ROE, perhaps if some of these margin conversions?
Yeah. So the risk-taking business right now produces an ROE into the 30%, combination of really attractive underwriting returns, and then what we're able to earn on the float, and so that, that business is very attractive on an ROE basis. The other parts of the business don't really consume that much capital. The insurance distribution side, the MGA does not, marketplace does not. We do have the lending business, where we lend against people's cars. Currently, it's a $85 million book of business, and we borrow about 80% of that through a dedicated back leverage facility. So, you know, we're tying up 15-20 points of equity in the loan book, so that will grow over time. But the unit economics on those loans are well into the twenties, ROE. It's still relatively small.
We've got an overhead to support it, so the blended ROE is less than that right now, but over time, that should end up being a high teens type ROE business. So again, you put it all together, this is going to have a very attractive return profile.
Mm-hmm. Last year, Hagerty raised a little over $100 million of capital from existing investors. Can you talk about the impetus for that decision to raise that capital? Would you consider it offensive, defensive? How is it getting deployed? A little background on that.
Yeah, so the main reason that we did that, it was split up into two different pieces. $80 million, think of as going into sort of the core Hagerty, the MGA side, $25 million went into Hagerty Re. The Hagerty Re was simply as we've been taking more and more quota share and getting up to that 80%, and we knew that we were going to launch this new product where we'll be taking 100% of the risk, and we were going through the process with AM Best of getting a rating, and we had a desired outcome, it made sense to add capital. So think of that as, you know, growth capital for the risk-taking business, and we got an A-minus rating from AM Best, which we were very pleased with.
On the other side, the outside of Hagerty Re, the $80 million, that was really. We kinda looked at what we were doing in terms of restructuring the business and where we were headed and how long it would take us to deliver the margin expansion, deliver the profitability, and we wanted to have some flexibility in the system. And so that was really to make sure that we were able to de-risk what we needed to do in terms of driving margin expansion. And, you know, we have some big projects on our plate. We're going through a technology transformation. We're moving to a Duck Creek implementation, and so we just looked at it and thought it made sense to have shore up the balance sheet and make sure that we took any of those risks off the table.
You know, in hindsight, we probably didn't need to raise the $80 million, or at least not all of it, because we actually achieved what we were looking to do in terms of profit margin expansion and then also just cash flow. One of the things we did last year is we worked with our partners at Markel, and we recut our deal with them. In essence, we used to have to wait a full year to get paid our contingent commission, and now we get paid that on a prompt basis, on a monthly basis, and that alone was a very meaningful swing in free cash flow. So I think that one was a combination of, you know, just being prudent and thoughtful and making sure that we're de-risking things.
Mm-hmm. So to be clear, a lot of time, when you hear the term capital raise and a company might be burning cash, which you're not, you would think of a sort of runway in terms of how many years that provides you. That question is not even relevant in terms of, like, what this capital provided you from a runway perspective.
Yeah. So we currently, it's an incredibly simple balance sheet. All we have is a revolving credit facility, and we're in a net cash position right now. And then we've got this small piece of debt at Hagerty Re, that was part of that capital raise. So we are, you know, strongly cash flow positive now. It's. There's none of those kind of questions.
Mm-hmm. Got it. A quick scan of. Do we have any questions out there? So you touched on the State Farm partnership. That's been in existence for a little while now. Maybe give us an overview of what that structure is. Is it exclusive? Why is it mutually beneficial to both parties? That'd be helpful.
Yeah, you know, the impetus behind it was really to follow on the fact that we had a number of these other partnerships with big insurance companies. As I mentioned earlier, you know, the challenge a regular auto insurance company has with these types of cars is: How do you value the car, and how do you handle the claim when it comes in? These are great companies. They do a really great job at regular cars, homes, all that sort of thing, but these are just unique risks. And, you know, our view, and I've seen it since I mean, the first partnership we launched of this type was with Allstate a little over twenty years ago, is that the kind of...
I define it as the sort of department store versus boutique, and it used to be that the big insurance companies kind of viewed themselves not just as a department store, but they had to manufacture everything on the shelf in the department stores. And even the biggest, smartest, most data savvy companies out there in the insurance world were finding it hard to be successful in every single line of business that they wanted to write. And it's just kind of true across the board. So we're very much this boutique, and being able to come in and say, "Look, we're either gonna be the, you know, the LVMH store next to the department store, or we're gonna be the little boutique inside. We'd rather be the little boutique inside," and that's what we... That was the strategy.
State Farm was the latest, and it's the biggest partnership of this type you could possibly have in our world. I mean, State Farm is the largest auto insurer by quite a lot, but because they're a mutual company, they're kind of hard to figure out how big they are, and what they do, or even who they are sometimes, right, and they're very unique in the insurance space. So it was through a, you know, long-standing set of partner relationships. We started down the path of this partnership, which was, they knew they had this huge amount of cars that we were interested in, and they were trying to figure out how they could serve them better, and started down the path of this integration, which continues. We're live with them after a few years in four states.
We'll be turning on a, you know, we'll get past the sort of halfway mark, hopefully, in the next few months. We're working on accelerating how we can get to that, you know, full implementation across the board. It's all about technology implementation. State Farm is very large. They're very careful when it comes to testing these types of things. They've never, ever let a partner have access to an insurance risk. They have lots of other products that they offer, sort of outside of the core insurance risk. They've never had a partnership of this kind in their 102 years, and so this is unique. They're being careful. We want to be careful. Ironically, as we went public, they were a very, very large investor in our... when we went public.
So, you know, to us, when we've talked about State Farm, it's a great opportunity for Hagerty. We think it's gonna be great service to all those Hagerty or State Farm customers, but, you know, they have invested a huge amount in us. Just, they wanted to be good partners, they liked the opportunity, they wanted to be owners. So, you know, it's really been a win-win across the board. We're just waiting to turn more states on right now.
Mm-hmm.
So, like, almost everybody in the insurance world, you sort of let sometimes the technology drive the timeline.
Mm-hmm. Just to make sure I'm clear, does a State Farm customer see the Hagerty name or ha-
Yeah.
It's fully co-branded?
Fully co-branded. One thing that we don't do any white labeling. We think the Hagerty brand carries-
Mm
... a lot of weight in the automotive world. It really does. If you're a car enthusiast out there, you, of course, you know State Farm, you know all those big insurance companies, but we're viewed as an automotive enthusiast lifestyle company, really. It's that lifestyle aspect of it. So State Farm actually saw the benefit of co-branding this program. So, you know, when a State Farm customer comes into their, their agent with one of these types of cars, they're gonna see State Farm Classic, and they're gonna see Hagerty right next to each other, and that was by design. They wanted that, and of course, I insisted on it.
Mm-hmm. And is that relationship exclusive, or you're able to offer this with State Farm, with other mutuals, with other insurers?
Yeah, it's not. We're able to offer this to other partners. You know, the main thing with all of our other partners is that they know we will not cross-sell insurance products to those customers. We think it's gotta be part of what we do, is that, you know, we help them, you know, we wanna help them retain as much of their business as they possibly can, and we never want them to feel like we're a threat to their core business. So we will never cross-sell anything to those customers. That's, that's really key to what we offer, and I'm sure they wanted it, and that's all we do. We just do this one thing. We do it really well.
Mm-hmm. And then this last thing we'll touch on. You mentioned a little bit the technology transformation that's underway now. Hopefully, you guys aren't losing too much sleep over that. Give us a little background on sort of where you're coming from, what you were using previously, how you're implementing Duck Creek.
Yeah, I can give you the long, broad history of technology. First of all, you know, where the whole insurance industry tends to, you know, kind of fall into a few categories of which system you use, right? And on the agency side, there are just a couple of them, and on the company side, there are just a couple of them. But what I can tell you is there is no MGA system out there. There isn't one. There never has been. Maybe, I mean, there are pieces of it. So the challenge you have when you become an MGA, let alone one that kind of scaled beyond most people's imagination as an MGA, is there isn't a system that you can use. You have to piece together different offerings to try to make it work.
So, you know, there are lots of agency management systems, but agency management systems don't handle claims, they don't issue policies, they don't help you do rate forms and filings for auto insurance. Those are company systems. So we ended up designing our own. We've been on our proprietary system for a long time. It works. It's worked at scale. It won't work adding millions and millions of more customers on top of it. So we started on the journey, made the big decision to, you know, go with the Duck Creek solution. You know, it'd be fully cloud-based, and to have something that could kind of work at scale. And Duck Creek, like, you know, there's Guidewire, there's Duck Creek. We decided Duck Creek. They're pretty excited about this, 'cause this will be a big specialty implementation for them.
Our new system that for Driver's Edge, our new insurance company, that will go 100% native on the Duck Creek solution. Of course, we're automotive in nature, so we call it Apex-
Mm-hmm
... internally. Like, everything is car-oriented at Hagerty. But nothing against the Duck Creek branding, but I just like the way Apex sounds-
Mm
... better. Look, these technology implementations are big, they're time-consuming, they're scary, and we've had a lot of dedicated teams working on these things. They're big investments, as Patrick shared. We have a fantastic leader in Russell Page, who was at the General Motors OnStar Insurance program before. He also had a lot of, you know, both technology implementation experience. He actually worked in the State Farm implementation before. This is somebody who's built the team to be able to really do this for the future, and it's been exciting. Now for us, though, we lead with membership. I mean, insurance may be the first thing somebody buys from us, but membership is how we want our customers to feel.
We want them to feel more like members, like family members, than just buying a policy from us. So our technology implementations take a lot more into consideration than, how do we issue a policy? How do we handle a bill? It has to contemplate going forward. Does that customer go to events for us? Do they read the magazine? Do they gonna be buying and selling cars via our member marketplace offerings? So we have a lot to think about when we're doing technology implementations, but we're excited to get this next one, next phase of it up and running with Project Apex.
Mm-hmm. So it's a true customer-first mentality, it sounds like.
It has to be. You know, again, you start with the passion, the toy that people care for, and you move backwards. First thing somebody does, they take good care of it, and then what we hope is they want to add another one to the garage, and that's our job. We feed that.
That's great. McKeel, Patrick, thank you. We're out of time.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it.