Good morning. It's my pleasure to welcome you to Trupanion's Annual Investor Day. We want to thank those of you who have joined us in person here in Seattle, and also those of you who are tuning in from around the world. We have a great day planned for you. As a reminder, the unique feature of this event is that it's almost entirely participant-driven. So we have a number of leaders from across the business here today to answer your questions. We'll do so in a series of three Q&A sessions, with a few breaks in between. For those of you who are joining us in person, those breaks provide a great opportunity to mingle, to get to know the team a little bit better. I'll be back when we get to the Q&A sessions, to go through some helpful reminders.
But before we do that, I'm going to welcome our CEO and President, Margi Tooth, to the stage, and as she makes her way up here, I'll ask that you please familiarize yourself with our safe harbor statement.
Hello, everyone. Can you hear me? Okay, I'm seeing nods. Good. It is an absolute pleasure to be standing here in front of you today, as the President and CEO of Trupanion. Ooh, got some nerves! So, we're hoping that you're going to have a wonderful time today. As Laura just mentioned, we really want you to make this your event. You've got questions, we want to hear your questions. If you want to dig in more, please ask the team anything and everything that you have in your mind that you haven't had a chance to ask them in person.
You're going to meet 33 of our team members shortly, and before that, I'm going to walk you through a little bit of a story of where we've been so far, and just as a reminder of what we're doing and why we're here today. And hopefully those calls, especially the last one, really helped to paint that picture as well, 'cause that last one is a bit. It hits the heart a little bit. I'm very much looking forward to taking the company through the next phase of growth.
Before I kick off, I just want to say a huge thank you to the board, many of whom are here, past and present, I see, for putting your trust in me and allowing me to lead the company over the next few years. Board members, can you give us a wave? Thank you. Thank you for being here. Okay, you may have seen, as you walked in the door, our mission statement up there, loud and proud on the wall. "We are a company on a mission. We're here to help loving, responsible pet parents budget and care for their pets." You heard that loud and clear.
But we also do that in a way where we are passionate, where we have fun, where we enjoy what we do, and it means so much to us as team members, as animal lovers, as pet parents ourselves, to be able to offer the same value proposition and pricing promise to our members wherever you are in the globe. Without further ado, what I want to do is play a little video for you in celebration of National Pet Month. We played this on Instagram and on social media in April, and it just gives you a little flavor of Trupanion and who we are as a character, as a culture in our office today.
Okay, so we are today, we have proudly protected over two million pets with Trupanion coverage since 2000. That number is significantly greater when you add all the millions of pets that have also benefited from our Exam Day Offer, that have had that temporary cover for a period of time as well. So to do that, we need to make sure that we are giving everybody the same value proposition, the pricing promise, and we're excited to be able to do that. Now, last year, those of you that were here will remember that we were celebrating. In every break, we had a little ticker that was talking about our claims volume and how many claims have we paid in that hour or so far that day.
And by the end of the day, we got to the hefty sum of $1 million a day, and at that point, we were close to $2.2 billion when we finished in July. Now, fast-forward 469 days since we were all together in this room, that number has gone up to an average of $1.2 million a day, and our overall total claims paid to date is a massive $2.848 billion. That is why we are here. That is what makes a difference. That is the volume of invoices. Just as a quick reminder, in the year 2020, early in the year, in February, we celebrated our first $1 billion.
We're now in 2024 , and we're just about to cross the $3 billion mark. That's how much people need Trupanion, and that's the difference that we're making today. It's really starting to pick up pace, and just imagine, at 4% penetrated, the impact we can have as we get more and more adoption of what we're doing. So the tenets of our business, how do we make sure that more and more people have Trupanion? How do we make sure we can offer the same value proposition to as many people as possible? We just wanted to remind you all of the things that we build on to be able to create that solution. We start, of course, with the pet parents.
We start with probably all of you, and many more, and we start with thinking about: What do you need as a pet parent? The person who's gonna have their pet sleep on their bed. They're gonna buy them a birthday present. They think of them as part of the family. They probably have a picture of them on their phone right now. They're the people that we're talking to. They're the people that treat them the way that they would want to be treated themselves. Then we think about the veterinarians, the partners in our business, these are the people who slave for hours to be able to give our pets the care they need, to be able to offer them the chance to practice best medicine, the medicine that they all trained for years to be able to offer.
Of course, central to all of that are the pets like Tycho, the pet parents like Iris, that we really want to support. These three things come together to create the business that we are today and allow us to pay as many dollars in claims. Of course, we're a business, and this wouldn't be an investor day without this chart. This is. I think I've now spoken to this chart probably. I don't know how many years we've been doing this, but for a number of years. Daryl gave me the pleasure of speaking to this many years ago. It is one of my favorite charts, that coupled with the pet count. This one is the beauty of a monthly subscription revenue business. The predictability is there.
By the beginning of any given year, 80% of our revenue is baked. So we know what we're going to see at the beginning of a year, and then we build on it, but look at this chart. What you have on here is our total revenue. Our subscription revenue has got, since 2014, has had 36 quarters of over 20% growth. This is a market that is just getting started, and we're happy to continue that trend going up and to the right. Now, this is one chart that is interesting. Now, this is the second one. This is our total AOI and our, so adjusted operating income and our adjusted operating margin by quarter. It goes back to 2014, so you've got 10 years on here, shown by quarter.
And you can see, the AOI, as it starts to tick up back in 2016, moves along, and you can see quite sharply there. When we all met last year in 2023, we were seeing a sharp decline in our margin. Now, what this doesn't show you is the margin that really matters, our subscription adjusted operating margin. So the story here, our target, as a reminder, is 15%. We have hit it once. We intend to hit it more than once. And you can see it's moving quite nicely. You see a little seasonality in there by the quarters, and then it cut in half. It's really hard to get back up from that when you have that cut in half, because we use this money to grow our business.
Yeah, what we did is we focused, the team came together, they looked at the data, the actuarial team, many of whom, please ask some questions today, are here, worked like Trojans to get us back to a position where we now see our margins in Q4 hitting that 13%, and we expect to be at 15% by the end of this year. So that's a huge accomplishment, and we have not wasted the crisis that this presented to us. It allowed us to double down and focus, and I'm very pleased to say that we have more money to be able to, to spend to acquire pets now. So as a reminder, this event is for you. We want you to ask questions. So if you have questions, I'm gonna sow some ideas in your mind. Ask questions about our model P&L.
Talk to the team about expenses. Ask them about our IRR. Ask them about where we see opportunities in terms of spending to be able to grow, so let's talk about growth. There's a lot of under-penetrated markets out there. If you look at the chart where we have highlighted, I hope you can see them on the screen. So we've got some little gray boxes around countries that we are currently in, and we currently have an opportunity. We've taken our addressable market in terms of hospital count from 25,000-28,000 to 50,000 with our international expansions, and this is shown in the countries that you can see here that are highlighted in the gray boxes, but a massive opportunity, and we're really leaning into that with what we're doing today, and you'll get to ask all of our teams.
We have representatives here from the international teams. We have the folks from the North American team as well to talk about how we're going to go and do that, but you can see that with the exception of the UK and Sweden, the world is just getting started for this. Let's flip our attention to North America. We crossed a $4 billion mark in 2023. The NAPHIA report showcased that we are now at a $4.3 billion of industry revenue, and while this is not important to Trupanion, it's worth sharing for the second year, we had the number one revenue growth rate in the category. This is in a year where we saw that margin compression come through. Now, I say it's not important because this has never been a goal of ours. We have not looked to grow quickly.
We've looked to grow with sustainability to make sure we can offer the best value proposition. We do that to help 1.6 million, nearly 1.7 million pets today. They are under the Trupanion Income umbrella, so that's inclusive of all the pets that we underwrite, as well as our core products. So if we think just about our core products, we're over a million pets today. So that is our subscription pets. It's inclusive of our European pets. We finally crossed that magic marker. So we're excited to have that milestone to reach that milestone, and in a time when we haven't been growing particularly furiously. So let's talk about what's next. Those of you that are students of Trupanion, I walked through this, a similar slide about two years ago, three years ago.
The market opportunity is still massive, so there's around 200 million cats and dogs in North America today. That includes all of the pets, the puppies, the kittens, the old ladies, the old men. They're all there, and we love them dearly. There are 120 million of those that visit the veterinarian every year. Now, they are our target market at a high level because we are gonna obviously be solving a problem for them when they get their vet bill. 14 million has gone up a little bit since last time. 14 million of them are puppies and kittens entering the North American market. Now, they're the sweet spot. That's where we want to be.
That's where we are communicating, because we know when we speak to a puppy or kitten owner, they're trying to be the best pet parent they can. We want to get them before the puppy has preexisting conditions, before the kitten has fallen off a curtain. We want to make sure that we're there for them from cradle to grave, and this is the best way to do it. It's the best member experience, and we're looking to have the most sustainable value proposition for them... that translates to a little more than one million leads a month. So keep that number in your mind, that's our goal as we think about what do we have as a business to do. And at Trupanion, you will know that we like data, and we like numbers, so we create goals for ourselves.
That actually translates to around 1.16 million puppies and kittens entered into practice management systems every single month. That's quite a lot of leads. We're not there yet, so we'll talk about that coming up, but that number is huge. You divide that by around 28,000 veterinary hospitals that are our target audience. There are more hospitals in North America, but many of them are large animal and equine, so they're not our target audience. That's around 40 puppies and kittens per month in America, and that's easy. It's nothing. It's a really easy thing to do. Please ask the team about how easy that is when they come up on stage to talk about the fact that it's really bloody hard to get that habit building because vets are stressed, they're doing a lot.
And we want to help them be their partners, but we do have some success stories, and we're looking forward to sharing them with you. Switching gears a little. Hopefully, you can see some of these things on the screen as they come up in front of you. This has been the backdrop of what's been happening in animal health for the last two years. Back in 2022, we talked about the fact that vets needed to increase their prices. We talked about an industry that was under stress. They had supported everybody, pets and people, through the pandemic. They had vaccinated human beings, they had continued to keep their doors open, and they were stressed. They needed to increase what they were paying their teams, they needed to charge appropriately, and they started to do that.
They did it in 2022 for the first time, when they doubled their veterinary inflation rate. It went to 12% rather than 6%. In 2023, they went to 15%, and in 2024, they put in 15% again. You know that story. That's where that margin started to get compressed, and these are the headlines these guys are facing. What that means for us is there has never been a greater opportunity for Trupanion than today. There is a growing need for what we provide, the solution we bring, and the help we can give to both the pet parents, the veterinarians, and ultimately, those pets. So we're solving a bigger problem today than we were two years ago, and we're solving a bigger problem next year, as we are - than we are today. So I mentioned those over one million leads.
Let's see how we're doing against that. We're just scratching the surface. Every single month, we get around sixty thousand veterinary leads into the business. This is not our total lead volume. We're just focusing on the vet moat here. That's a 23% lift year over year, from July to July, in a year where our growth rate has not been at 23%. So I just want you to think about that in context. The focus we've put on the vet channel deliberately, where we've leaned into our Territory Partners, two of whom are here today, they were able to get the conversation started. They were able to remind everybody the solution we bring, and we saw a huge increase in our vet leads year over year.
Our active hospital number last year to this year, it hasn't changed, yet our pet count has gone down, our new pet adds has gone down. The team is focused on continuing to keep the heartbeat in the active hospitals we have today. They have been diligently going into hospitals to explain the benefit that we have, and as a result of that, we've had a massive increase in our active hospitals that are using our direct payment. Please ask the team about questions regarding operational efficiencies, claims payments, and the huge milestones that we're crossing this year to support more and more of these people, but more vets that we've been working with for years are saying, "I need this software. My clients don't have the money to pay for this anymore." That's the solution that we bring.
Here is a little tidbit for you that I don't think we've necessarily shared. The vet leads, we have a vet channel and non-vet channel. It's like veg and non-veg, which I find interesting because that's, isn't that meat? But anyway, conversion rate in non-vet channel is two times the rate from a non-vet. We want to go and get those vet leads. We know we can talk to them. We know we have a solution to the problem. That's a massive impact when it comes to IRR. How much money are we spending to convert those pets? It's a lot more efficient to get a vet lead than it is to get a non-vet lead.
Whether that's a breeder, a shelter, social media lead, all of the different lead volumes that we get. And also interesting, that adds to the IRR equation, is the retention rate. 80 basis points difference on a monthly retention rate uplift for the vet channel than the not vet channel. That comes back to the conversation that you have in the hospital when someone's facing: "Should I keep it? My price has gone up every month, Doctor, I don't know what to do." That's what happens. The power of the white coat, the veterinarian saying, "You need Trupanion. This is really important for you now." It makes a difference. I already gave you a teaser here. Ask about our conversion rates.
Ask about what's happening on the phone, on the web, the combined, especially with all these rates, when you think that it would be really difficult to convert people. I'll give you a clue: It's not as hard as you think. So, it wouldn't be right to not have a reference to our Canadian TP, Shelley Skedden. Many of you have met her. This is one of her hospitals. She had a team, Skedden, out in Newfoundland, Canada. This is just a case study. This is not the only hospital we have performing at this level, but we don't have many performing at this level.
We want to just showcase for you that there are two and a half thousand enrolled pets in this hospital, which also, my understanding, and Jason can give you more context on this later, is serve as a bigger population, too. 45% veterinary referral rate year to date. They have a 70% Exam Day Offer activation rate. That is double the average of any other hospital that we have. Seven out of ten people that get their Exam Day Offer, they end up enrolling. We paid $2.6 million in invoices since 2012, and 93% of those are paid through our Vet Portal. That is why we're here. That's the reason that we do this, because we are solving that problem for virtually every single pet parent that goes into that hospital.
Please ask questions about Vet Portal and how it's doing, and 86% of invoices are paid through in less than five minutes. Imagine the difference that makes, those of you that have been in a vet hospital when you're swiping the credit card, the amount of time you'd have to take. In less than five minutes. It's actually less than three minutes, I think, isn't it, John? He's in the back. He'll answer later. Okay, so let's talk about how we continue to build on this. Vet Portal is a crutch of what makes us unique, along with some pricing elements that the teams can talk about later. But that's only part of our focus on member experience. Direct payment is critical. It solves a problem. Our service levels reduce the more pets that we're able to help directly.
The pet parents aren't calling in. They're not chasing an invoice, not questioning, "Did we pay something? Where is it in the process? Am I gonna get fully reimbursed?" Our value is felt. It's felt in real time, and we can add a lot more. The team will talk to you about the things they've been doing over the last eighteen months as those prices have gone up, to really reinforce the value, especially for those people who are not using the product. If they're seeing that increase, they may not even know the vet costs have gone up that much. We need to find ways to reinforce the value that we bring to their life. Of course, we still have our distribution channels outside of the vet. I don't want to forget these folks.
So State Farm, Aflac, and CarePlus by Chewy. Three distribution channels that we introduced as part of our 60-month plan. And you'll remember, the idea here is to be able to speak to new pet parents as they are finding their way, whether they're buying a pet bed, or they're sorting out their worksite benefits, or they're with their State Farm agent. In each of these ecosystems, we believe we're touching a different pet parent than we touch initially at the vet, and it gives us an additional opportunity to speak to them about who we are and why Trupanion is good for them. Ask about the distribution channels, please. And also how we're prioritizing capital against these opportunities, because it's not all the same. We model them to the same P&L, but they are not all getting the same amounts of money.
So with that in mind, we've got the distribution channels, we've got this increasing need for Trupanion, but how are we, as Trupanion, evolving as we grow? We are evolving our culture. Culture always evolves, it grows, it's a living thing. And we're also evolving our processes. We're not the scrappy little puppy that we once were and needed to be, but we're also still nimble and energetic and lively and probably a little Vizsla-like, for those of you that know what a Vizsla looks like. I know some of you do. So we are being very graceful in how we do this, and we're adapting who we are and how we are to be able to take advantage of this moment, to be the people that can lead the category forward.
At over $1.2 billion worth of revenue today, we cannot afford to let people down. With 1 million pet parents leaning on us, we cannot afford to not be here. So we're doing things a little differently. We need to take our time, and we're introducing some priorities. So I start with the little blue circle. We want to grow in more areas where we're actually priced appropriately to value proposition. We have a little demo that we hope that you'll enjoy later to show how we're thinking about that when it comes to our margins. How do we ensure we're leaning into pets that we can offer that value proposition to? We wanna spend in our most efficient channels, and we want to make sure we're putting profitability over growth.
When we think about growth, we're not growing at all costs. It's not just go and get as many pets as we can, 'cause remember, being number one isn't what drives us. Being the best and adding value to our members is. We want consistent growth. So there have been times in the past where we've been able to take the moment and take advantage of that moment. We will, of course, do that if something was to happen. But also, it's hard to manage our business when you've got you're almost kind of getting that growing pain of being a little company and being a big company.
What comes with that is a lot of different processes and needs and demands of that member, and you need to be able to help support every single one of them the way that, that we want to. So we're looking at consistency of growth, and we prefer that over spikes. Just like that model, we like that model when it goes up. It doesn't have to do that, it can do this. It's still gonna go up and to the right. And then finally, capital allocation. So prudent capital allocation. We've talked about free cash flow, we've talked about a little bit of a different thinking there from a balance sheet perspective, and we really want to reinforce that when we are allocating PAC, when we're allocating our PAC dollars as our AOI starts to go up, we will do it prudently.
There will be a lag. We're not gonna expect to see an immediate acceleration, just as there was a deceleration that came through slowly when we stopped spending. We expect the same on the way up, but we'll be allocating within our guardrails, and we'll do it very deliberately. So I promise you, I just have a couple more slides, and then the team will be here. So, our focus over the next twelve months. I think it's probably quite clear we're very member-centric. I hope it's quite clear. We want to ensure that we can continue to give people the value proposition, which of course, means that we need to ensure that we have all those data points coming through, to allow us to do that. We want to enroll more pets. We've got a million today.
I hope that we'll have two million in the not-too-distant future. Who knows? It may grow just like the claims cost. But we're gonna do it sustainably, and I really want to stress that we want to do this in a way that will help those pet parents recommend to their friends and those pets, the next generation of Irises, who I think is probably an advocate of Trupanion. And then we want to scale our expenses. So we've talked about doing this for a long time. We're on the verge of it. Really helps when you've got technology that's delivering. Please ask Fawad and John more about that. And provide exemplary partner support. We can't do any of this without our partners, our Territory Partners and the veterinary partners, and the partners that help support us in the industry.
We are part of the animal health ecosystem, and you're gonna hear an awful lot more from Trupanion in animal health land as a result of that, to really demonstrate the solution we bring from vet level all the way through to shelters, and to those who partner with us today. I kind of, I couldn't have this slide without having this point on here. You can't do any of this unless you're priced appropriately. Our pricing has to remain accurate.
The pricing team see and hear a lot from me, and they probably wish I would go away, but they are a brilliant team who've done a huge amount, and I think what they've started is gonna be a wonderful thing to continue, but it will be a massive focus for us as a business, and all of it ultimately helps us to help more pets. So last slide. I'm gonna talk about a 60-month plan. So we have got 15 months left of our 60-month plan, and as a reminder on here, you have our goals, which revenue and intrinsic value per share, both of which were 25% year-over-year growth by 2025. You can see the top is going quite well, I would say. It's above goal.
I remember we talked about we'd feel good if we were at 20%, we'd be doing backflips, and we're at 25%. We don't need to do backflips. I'm a little older. If I keep back, not that I can backflip, but if I could backflip, I imagine that my, I would break my back. We got to 26%. Our AOI is a little lighter. We would expect that, having just seen what that chart did, but I do think that the team has got significantly more confidence in terms of our journey towards making that greater. When we get to the CAGR at the end of 2025, we will continue to make progress this year, and we'll make even more progress next year. Of course, with the caveat that we assume inflation will remain at 15%.
Without further ado, what I would like to do... Laura, can I do this, or do you want to speak? No, I can speak. Okay. I'd like you to meet the team. We have a basket of kittens on the screen, but you need to not be looking at the screen. You need to be looking at the team. We're gonna go along like this, and then the folks that are coming out are gonna introduce themselves. You do have booklets in front of you that introduce the team, the bios, who they are, what they do, but I'd love you to speak to them and hear from them, and they are here for you to answer your questions.
While they're all settling in noisily behind me, I will just tell you that what you don't know about me is I actually have my eleventh-year anniversary next week at Trupanion. And I have two girls in my life. They are my precious dogs. I have Mabel, an English bulldog. Like Daryl, I got the bug several years ago, and even though we know we shouldn't, you can't help resist them. And I have a little maltipoo called Gertie. She is quite special and unique, as they all are, and she's one of the reasons they're both the reasons that I'm here today. So I'm gonna hand over to Rich, I think, who's gonna stand up and say hello. So, guys, this way around. Who are you? Where are you from?
How long have you been here, and what dogs do you have, cats do you have?
Hi. Well, I'm slightly larger than the kittens in the basket. My name's Richard Coe. I'm based in the U.K., founder of Smart Paws, or one of the founders of Smart Paws. We've been part of the Trupanion Paws family now for two years, just over. I'm now responsible for, underwriter relationships and underwriting development over in Europe, as part of our development across Europe and Trupanion. And I have two dogs. One is an absolute loon lurcher, cross between a Saluki and a Weimaraner. Got an old boy who's a Springad or, who's now 14 years, much slower, Angus, the angry cat, and three chickens.
Hi, good morning. My name is Denis Klinger. I'm the country manager for PetExpert by Trupanion in Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Belgium. I joined the company eight months ago, and I'm also a very proud pet parent. So I have a black Labrador, three-year-old called Yoda, a Maine Coon called Johnny, and a British Shorthair called Bonia. So nice to meet you all.
Hi, everyone. Good morning. My name is Mary Roethlisberger. I'm our Vice President of Growth Insights, so I lead a data analytics team that is really collaborating with all these folks here to, you know, really use data in conjunction with our growth strategy. I've been at Trupanion also for eleven years, like Margie, and I have one nine-year-old Labradoodle named Gretchen, who is still a puppy.
Good morning. I'm Dee Awald. I lead our learning and development team. I'm the resident pet sitter. I love traveling, so I get to pet sit pets around the world. I'm in the market for a Siamese kitten, which I'm very excited about an event that's gonna happen later in October, that I might be getting my kitten. So yes.
Hi, I'm Marcy Akiyama. I hit my four-month mark with Trupanion this week. I lead the people business partner team and the talent acquisition team here at Trupanion. I have two dogs and two cats, a Boxer Shepherd mix, Micah. She's the only other female in my family, and then we have Wren, our Shepherd Lab mix, and a tabby cat named Eli, and Sasha, who's my Siamese cat.
Hello, my name is Teddy Edmondson. I've been with Trupanion for a year and a half now. I look after. I'm a perritory partner in British Columbia. I look after most of British Columbia in Canada, and I have two pets. One's name is Stormy. She is a Dachshund Boston Terrier, fourteen years young, and I have a Dachshund, nine years old, who is alive because of Trupanion.
Hi, Steve Rose, leading Trupanion Australia. Been in the business for six years. Dad to Wiley, who is an 11-year-old Mastador, that is Mastiff cross Labrador, two cats, Pippi and Jelly, as well as 11 Peking ducks and two ponies.
... Hi there. I am Sven Eisenberg. I'm the managing director for Smart Paws in the DACH region. Basically, this means Germany and Switzerland. I have a boy, 10 years old, Weimaraner, Baloo, who joins me every morning for a nice run outside at the River Rhine in my town.
Hi, I'm Asher Bierman. I've been at Trupanion for over 11 years. I do corporate development and international, which means I work closely with a lot of the guys you just talked to, Rich, Dennis, Steve, and Sven, and Simon, who you'll meet in a second, and I have always had dogs, and most recently, I now have a four-month-old Shih Tzu Pomeranian who is fond of pooping in my office while I'm on a Zoom call. It's entertaining.
Hello, everyone. My name is Wei Li. As VP of Finance and Corporate Controller, I oversee accounting, financial reporting, treasury, and financial operations. I've been with Trupanion for six years. I guess I bring a little bit diversity to this group. I currently don't have any pet, but I enjoy being in the office, hanging out with all the lovely pets my colleagues bring into the office.
Hi there, everybody. Sarah Hillman-Sparks. I'm the Senior Director of our Financial Planning and Analysis team. I've been here for seven years. Anniversary's actually next week. And I'm a proud pet parent of a dog named Leo, a miniature Australian shepherd, and three cats, Sophie, Phil, and Frankie.
Hello, I am Jordan. I'm the VP of Data, and I've been with Trupanion for nine years. I have a 14-year-old husky, Tonks, a 15-year-old Lupin, who's also a husky mix, and then a cat who's 15, so.
Good morning. Just making a mental note, we need to send Wei a box of puppies or something, get him on board. I'm Jason Wasden. I lead our Canadian team. I've been with the company, so fortunate to be with the company for almost fifteen years. I've got three guys of my own. I've got a fourteen-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. I've got a seven-year-old toy Australian Shepherd, and if you don't tell the other two this, the love of my life is a, I think, three-year-old Australian Cattle Dog, but I call him an Australian Cuddle Dog because we have a special bond. I watched him be abandoned before my very eyes one evening, and took him home, wanting to find him a forever home. Little did I know, that home was gonna be mine.
So, he tugs on my heartstrings, so, we got a good thing going. So good to see you, everybody.
Hello, I'm Allan Schomberg, Director of Actuarial Insights. Been at Trupanion for seven and a half years now, and I have a six-and-a-half-year-old Goldendoodle named Harper, who you'll see around today.
Hello, everyone. My name is Aaron Konopasek, Head of Business Operations at Trupanion. I've been at Trupanion for four years now, and I have a four-month-old who also likes pooping in the house named Moose. He's a Labrador.
Hi, everyone. I'm Suzanne Cheadle. I'm the director of digital and direct marketing. I've been with Trupanion for just over two years, and I have a large and very lovable Bernese Mountain Dog called Turing, who thinks he's a lap dog, so creates lots of fun.
Hi, everyone. Good morning. My name's Erica Lee. I'm the Director of Sales and Retention in the contact center. I've been here for twelve years. Actually, yesterday was my anniversary. I have an eight-year-old boxer named Harley, a two-year-old cat named Marshmallow, and an eighteen-month-old American Bully named Ice Cube, and he is definitely the tornado of the family.
I guess I'm next. Hopefully, this is working. Hi, everyone. Fawwad Qureshi. I have been here almost a year, almost a year. It'll be a year, actually, next week, and of course, I lead our finance function, and as far as pets, we have a Siberian named Luna. She's a cat, and yeah, she's a cat with dog-like qualities, so and we don't quite have to walk her, but she's quite friendly, so we have a good thing going.
John Gallagher. I've been with Trupanion for eight and a half years, Chief Operating Officer. Two dogs, Willow and Milo. Willow is a Trupanion... She is here because of Trupanion. She's had over $55,000 in claims due to a blood disorder. And then Milo is my little shadow 'cause I can't go anywhere in the house without him being right by my side.
Good morning. I'm MJ Hewitt. I lead the US market, which means I spend all of my time awake and sometimes sleeping, thinking about growth across the US. I will hit fifteen years on December fourth with Trupanion, and I have a grumpy old man, a miniature Schnauzer named Rex, and I have a princess, My Little Pony, Pomeranian, Yorkie mix named Winnie.
Good morning. My name's Hayden Embree. I'm a Territory Partner in the Atlanta area. We have Georgia, and we go into Chattanooga, Tennessee, as well. I've been with Trupanion, it'll be three years next month. I have three pets: Maggie, a very masculine Shih Tzu with a pink collar that I walk around every day and get laughed at in the neighborhood, and then two cats, Oscar and Lily.
Hi, I'm Emily Dreyer. I've been at Trupanion for eleven and a half years, and I support our growth through retention, data insights, and the development of our new products. I have a six-year-old dog named Timba. She's a rescue from Spain. Unlike the opposite of Fawad, she's a very cat-like dog.
Hi, I'm Kelly Nielsen. I lead our customer marketing team, looking after member experience, life cycle, and retention here at Trupanion. I've been here for four and a half years, and I'm a proud pet parent to a 10-year-old Spaniel mix named Ollie. He enjoys coming into the office with me most of the time.
Everyone, Dr. Steve Weinrauch. Really nice to see some familiar faces in the audience who feel like after so many years, are also part of the team. So one day, maybe we can have all you guys get up and introduce yourselves as well, too. But I'm a veterinarian, a Chief Product Officer, Chief Veterinary Officer. I've been with Trupanion coming on 11 years now. My dogs currently are Fergus and Flora, so a Russell Terrier and a Scottish Terrier puppy. We've got much like the other Dr. Steve, Dr. Steve Rose over here, I have 11 chickens now. Five of them are roosters, which is loud, and a bunny called Harry.
Hi, everyone. Chris Kearns, General Counsel, Legal. I have an all-white Husky named Moose, who is a rescue from Puerto Rico, and I joined Trupanion earlier this year. Nice to meet you all.
Morning, Adam Smith, SVP, Legal and Regulatory. I joined earlier this year as well, about eight months ago. My daughters convinced my wife and me to get a very fluffy, black and white Pomeranian puppy named Bandit.
Hi, I'm Brenna McGibney. I now think I can talk about my tenure in years because I've hit two, so it's no longer months. I have a small, miniature poodle named Angus, that wasn't initially mine, but we had a bit of a mutual love affair, so he became mine, and I lead the L&D People Ops and Actuarial teams.
Hi, I'm Mike Gray, head of Actuarial Department. I have a fourteen-year-old cat, Carlos. I'm in the market for a dog. Unfortunately, Carlos does not approve of pets, so I'm gonna have to wait on that a little bit, and I've been here four years.
Steve Ireland. I joined, I think, the same day as Adam, about seven months ago, SVP of Marketing. I have one very neurotic Shih Tzu, who is 10 years old and is now getting used to the fun Seattle weather.
Good morning. I'm Brian Daly. I'm fortunate enough to lead the contact center teams, including customer care, retention, and phone sales. Been here just about three years. I have two dogs, Rottweiler, Hudson Stripes, and Daisy, the Golden Retriever.
Hi, everybody, I'm Jackie Miro. I head up our claims team at Trupanion. I've been here just about 12 years. Jason, you can sign me up for a box of puppies, too, if you don't mind. We're in the market for a new dog, and I anticipate we'll be getting one soon.
Hello, everyone. My name's Simon Wheeler. I head up... I'm EVP for Trupanion's international business. I have two horses that are treated just like, large dogs, and I also have a beautiful little Border Terrier that, unlike Suzanne, thinks it's the size of a Great Dane and has the most uncanny way of knowing when I'm about to travel and giving me totally the cold shoulder. I've been at Trupanion just about three years.
Great. Thank you, everyone. Okay, so we're gonna get into the Q&A portion of the meeting. So we'll go for the first session, maybe about an hour. So if you have a question, please raise your hand. Gil McHugh, our Director of IR, he will get a microphone in your hand. So just for the benefit of the online audience, if you could wait to ask your question till you have the microphone, that'll ensure that everyone can hear. So who wants to kick us off with the first question? Get it to John. Okay.
H`i, I'm Jon Block at Stifel. No one else took it, so I figured I'd take it. Margi, thanks for the slides. I think I caught this metric right. It was one point zero two nine sub subscriptions, and that's running below our estimate. I think you talked about ramping some of the initiatives into 3Q, 4Q. We're not really seeing that convert, so maybe if you can just give us a little bit of color there, that would be helpful.
Yeah, thank you for asking the first question, John. Good to see you here. So when I talked in the priorities, financial priorities, one of the things that I want us to be really focused on is ensuring that we have an immense discipline in our PAC spend as we bring it back to market. It took a long time for us to turn it down. Well, it felt like a long time. It actually didn't show up as a long time in our numbers, but the impact of that was quite slow. It's gonna be the same, have the same lag effect as we go up on the other side. So we started to deploy more PAC in Q2, but it wasn't meaningful enough to make a huge impact.
We're starting to see that build, and so those numbers are not really reflective of that build that we're bringing up now. And towards the back end of the year, we're gonna see moderate growth, but we're gonna see... Really, my expectation is that takes big hold in Q1 of 2025. So it is the gross adds that are making that number look a little bit sloppier. And retention overall is looking strong.
Okay, so sorry, just to push you a little bit. I thought on the 2 Q call, I'd have to call the, you know, pull the script, but I thought you sounded a little bit more upbeat on gross adds. Not inflecting, but getting stronger, 3 Q, 4 Q. Now, you're saying more push that into-
No, no, we will, we will go up, and I am upbeat about it. I think from a growth perspective, you know, we have a massive opportunity. What I want to be very diligent is that we don't just throw money into it. It's very. If you throw money in, you might grow quickly, but the way that that money behaves is gonna be very different by channel, and there are only so many pets going through our channels right now that we see. We can't suddenly go and get hold of them quickly. So I'm upbeat. I was upbeat in Q2, and I'm upbeat now, and will be for the rest of the year, and probably the rest of time, sorry, team, because we are starting to deploy more. We're in a position. In Q1, we were holding back.
We were having conversations, being very disciplined about we're not ready to spend yet. In Q2, we started to relinquish it a little more back, and we'll continue to do that as we go through the back half of this year. I could see that. I could see it in Q2. The impact of that is gonna just have a lag, a delay, but we will see an increase in pet count towards the end of the year.
Okay, and just last one. And I think this gets at one of the questions that you wanted us to- or to go down the road. I thought you threw up there vet lead conversion was up 23%. I think it was July to July. You know, obviously, it doesn't look like gross ads are gonna grow with that, and I know that's one channel. So maybe just talk to us about conversion a little bit. And then the second question that I've got that I, I just can't reconcile is, you know, if we look at vet CPI, it has started to moderate. You know, it went up and to the right-
Yep
... but it's moderated, and you're still building in this 15% assumption, I believe, in inflation. So why would you have that sort of implied decoupling? You know, your ARPU used to be up 6, vet CPI was up 4, 5. It seems like now you're assuming 15%, and vet CPI might be up 8, so there's that premium-
Yep
... and spread. Maybe if you could talk to us a little bit about that?
Yeah, no, definitely. So, the first question, just as a reiteration, on that number where we saw 60,000 vet leads, and we had the 23% year-over-year growth, that's related to vet leads, not increase in conversion rate. So just to make sure that that point is clear. So we've seen our vet lead, so that's the exam day offers coming from the vet channel up 23%. That conversion is not up 23%, so just wanna make that point. Steve, do you wanna... Can you pick up conversion just in terms of what we're seeing? And then, Michael, if you can speak to CPI and the dislocation, to your point, between CPI and Trupanion experiences, please.
Yeah, so to Margi's point, we have seen more leads come in from the vet channel. We've seen more leads come in, too, in non-offer quotes, and I would say web conversion and combined conversion have stayed relatively flat from a percentage perspective, even with those increased leads, which I look at as a positive. Now, one of the things that we're working on closely to try to increase that is our messaging. You know, really talking about why we're here, why we're different, bringing to life, I think, the problems that we solve, not just for pet parents, but for the veterinary community. I spent the last seven years working for Mars in the vet side of the business.
I ran marketing and corporate affairs for PetPartners and for BluePearl, which was a large specialty group, and I think that we have a really big opportunity to take our messaging and make it hit home more and show that we're not just a unique solution to make life better for pet parents, but we're a unique solution that can really help the vet community practice the medicine that they know will save pets. So I think as time goes on, you'll see us start to infuse more of that messaging in and drive that conversion rate up a little bit, or drive enrollments up a little bit. Obviously, if we have more leads coming in, that could push conversion rate down, so I kinda look at the enrollment end of the stick.
Yeah, the CPI question is. I'm gonna answer it in two parts. One, CPI in August did tick back up to 7.6%. It had come down in June and July to 6.4%. We look at CPI carefully every month. I get up early the morning it's released because we do track directionally with CPI, but CPI is a different metric. It doesn't connect directly to our trend, and there's a couple basic reasons why. CPI is a wonderful statistic. It is research. They have a market basket of goods that they measure year over year. They sample the market very well, and it, it's very stable. It's a great metric. Our business is not done that way. We cover whatever claims come through the pipe.
As you heard this morning, we encourage our members to use the vets differently than they would if they were uninsured. And so we are naturally gonna see claims that don't align perfectly with this market basket approach. They are directionally correlated, but they're not the same amount. So we are still seeing trends in that 15% level. We did see a little moderation as CPI saw moderation, but then it leveled out, and we're still using 15% as our forecast. It's a bumpy road. It's not a perfect line that you could just follow. I wish it was a little bit more perfect, but we're following the bumps, and we're sticking with the 15%.
If I can just add to that as well, to give a bit more color. So you heard, hopefully, you heard the call where the lady called in and said, "My dog has had an accident in the dog park, has been attacked. What's the coverage? Where is it? Is it unlimited? It's unlimited, right?" She wanted to know she could say yes to the care that that pet was able to get when it needed it, when the vet said, "Okay, this pet needs something," whatever that would be. The difference with a CPI basket of goods is exactly that. It's not the services. We are there for the unexpected. We are there unlimited, which means that we're going to be able to give people greater access to care.
That's why the two don't necessarily correlate, but to your point, there is a trend. There is a correlation, but there's a gap because we provide more than a pet parent would otherwise get. Steve, would you add anything to that just to help bring more context around the differences in practice from a Trupanion product versus a non, and why CPI's got that disconnect?
Access to care and utilization of care consistently have increased. Our job is to shut up and pay the bill. Whether they go to somewhere that does a cruciate repair for $800, or whether they go somewhere else that charges $4,000, we don't create networks, we don't direct care. We're just there to allow pet parents to say yes to the kind of care that they're looking to.
... to have for their family. So these things are, they'll be consistently changing, and our methodology will not.
Josh Shanker from Bank of America. Trupanion has a number of constituents. Obviously, the customers are a very important constituency. You obviously have, veterinarians who are making recommendations often, and therefore you want to be a reliable service partner. Also, the regulators and the, and the pricing. If we go back in time, about eighteen months ago, obviously pricing was inadequate given what was going on. One party who's not a constituents are people who are not customers, and they might like the coverage. To what extent, did Trupanion engage in closing the aperture of access to new customers? Whereas they were happy to provide even underpriced business to existing customers because that was the guarantee. But when we look at these conversion statistics, to what extent is Trupanion saying, "We actually, in certain places, we don't want the new business"?
But that obviously affects the vets who want to be able to recommend the product. And so when we're looking at these conversion statistics, to what extent are they artificially being impacted by a lack of desire to onboard new customers who you currently have no responsibility to give care for?
Yeah, that's a great question, and actually it sets us up to showcase something that I've been excited to share with this group for a number of months. So one thing that's unique about Trupanion that I don't think is typically understood is the bulk of our lead volume comes from the vet channel. So we do not go onto social media, onto paid search and shout, "We are educating you about Trupanion for the first time." Our leads find us through the vet or through the breeder or through their friends. So there's already a level of control, if you will, around how we go and reach those pet parents initially.
If you've got a Territory Partner, and the TPs can speak to this far better than I can, they are going to very deliberately and purposefully route their hospital visits based on where we're priced appropriately. They will not go and knock on every door and actively, proactively generate leads. There is naturally fallout. You're naturally gonna get people that come through. We would still enroll those pets. We're just not proactively chasing them down. When you think about, we, we've talked a lot about lead convert keep. We generate the lead volume. Conversion off the back of that is then paid media, pulling people through the funnel and helping them to really understand why Trupanion.
If we're pulling back our PAC spend, we're not going to pull through the pets and chase down, if you will, the pets that would be mispriced. We think it's wrong to do that. We think it's misrepresentative of what products they will ultimately get. And so we've been able to turn off that PAC spend, which means you're not actually wasting the lead that you're getting, you're just not getting it in the first place. But Aaron and his team, Aaron, I'm gonna ask you to do a bit of a demo, if you will. Based on this thought process, Josh, we were trying to work out, okay, how do we give the team tools that will allow them to really lean into the information that we have to say, "Grow here, don't grow here"?
And so Aaron, with help of the actuarial team, he is an actuary himself, created the tool that he's about to demo. So, Aaron, do you mind showing?
Thanks, Margi. Hi, everyone. As a reminder, Aaron Konopasek, head of Business Operations. You might remember me from last year because you all asked me lots of questions about California, because I was part of the actuarial team. I worked with lots of brilliant people on the actuarial team, and those brilliant people came up with a fantastic, cutting-edge tool that I'd like to share with you today. As a reminder, this is a demonstration of data that is not real, for competitive and confidentiality reasons, of course. Just to explain it a little bit, this is a way that we can target our marketing spend in the same ways that Margi was discussing, that we can make sure we're acquiring the pets that we want to acquire.
And now to confirm, we obviously can't stop someone from signing up if they want to sign up with us, but this helps us direct our spend in the right direction. And so on this map, you'll see some different colors. As a reminder, it's dummy data, so it's not representative of the percentage of markets. We're comfortable and confident growing in 85% of markets right now. And so the colors that you'll see, the yellow color would be maybe cautionary, red might be, we don't want to grow in this area right now, and then green and blue would be places where we'd want to be targeting growth. And so as you can see, we can drill into a particular region. If we can push play on the video.
Can you play the video, please?
We can drill into a particular region, in a market, and then inside that market, we can drill into a state, and then down into the granular neighborhoods that we so diligently have priced and broken out. And so, as you can see, we go into Massachusetts here and then into our South Boston region, and we're able to really drill down and get granular with the way that we're targeting our marketing strategically. So that would be a layer two neighborhood, and then we get into smaller layer one neighborhoods here.
So, Aaron, as we get new rate approved, flowing through, this model gets updated.
Yeah, exactly. So, when rates go live in a new state, obviously it would update, and we're... On the actuarial team, they're spending a lot of their time trying to make sure there's as many green and blue areas that we can grow across the country as possible at any one time. But even in states where you find that we might be-
... mispriced in the state as a whole, it still gives us a lot of opportunities to target our marketing, such that we can still grow in that state.
Thank you, Aaron. MJ, as our US leader, how do you use that tool to grow? And I guess coming back to Josh's question, how do you make sure that we're not effectively reaching pet parents, that we don't necessarily want to give them the opportunity today to join us because of our pricing?
So what this tool does for us is it gives us a view under the hood. So gone are the days where we get a report that says, "You know, we're mispriced in this particular state. We need to wait for these rates to come through, pause on the resources that you're putting into growth there." Well, now I can look under the hood, and I can see and break that down to a neighborhood level to say, "The state's not closed to me.
I just need to figure out how to be smarter across our many, many pricing categories, and where pets are, what age they are, where they're coming from, what hospitals they're going in, what neighborhood they receive care or going to, what neighborhood they receive care in. What's great about our Territory Partner model is that they've spent years building relationships, and they know these territories in and out. So when I show them this map, they can name every single hospital that's within one of those neighborhoods. They know who to go talk to. They know how to focus the conversation of what's being educated and what pet parents are being communicated to.
And if you think about this from a growth perspective, we've grown in pet count, we've grown in leads, but what we've also done over the last year is grown in our footprint, where our leads are coming from. We've extended the number of hospitals that are actually proactively having the conversation and providing exam day offers to their clients by 13% across the U.S., which means we have a lot of new hospitals that Territory Partners have focused on because they have this data to say, "I'm gonna stop working necessarily so hard on this particular hospital, and I'm going to go expand my footprint to these new hospitals in this neighborhood that's priced accurately.
Let's presume that maybe the wrong word is conversion, it might be leads, that your appetite for leads was less in 2023 than it was in 2021 . To what extent, given the lead generation sixty thousand per month, is that suppressed that if you had pricing correct everywhere you'd wanna be, would you be looking for eighty thousand, ninety thousand leads per month?
Yeah, so we get over 110,000 leads on average a month. That's the vet leads that you were seeing up there. So when we're focusing on vets specifically because that's our heartland and really kind of they're the leads that we're working through, I think, you know, the goal would be to get to those 1 million that we shared. That's at least having a conversation. Then, as we...
You're right, we were not looking to grow as quickly in 2023 as we were in 2021, and a lot of the decisions there were around how do we deploy our PAC most efficiently, and we knew with Territory Partners, the beauty of the Territory Partner model, which has been really hard for these guys over the last two years, is that we do not pay anything unless we have enrolled a pet. So in terms of the ability to be more efficient with our PAC spend, Territory Partners have had to ride shoulder to shoulder with us as our partners, as they always do, and a huge thank you to not only those in the room, but they've had a really tough time in the last eighteen months.
It's been difficult for them, but they've been going out there, and that's testament to the model and how it works and how it feeds our lead generation. Our goal, though, is to speak to every pet parent, every puppy, and kitten that's going to the vet, and then we will overlay additional channels to speak to them. Emily, do you mind talking a little bit about PAC allocation and how your team thinks about planning, with that vet as a foundation, and how you overlay breeder, paid media, just other PAC deployment considerations you have?
Yeah. So when we look at our PAC spend, we're largely bucketing that into three different categories. We're looking at our lead spend, our conversion spend, and then our keep or retention spend. What you saw is we've gotten more efficient over time. A lot of that is to, you know, what Margi was saying, and that we pulled back on some of our conversion spend, not because it was inefficient, but because we had to. We had to make some tough decisions, and we knew that we would still get our growth through vet. So as we're thinking about planning and turning spend back on, we're leveraging tools like Aaron just showed you.
We're leveraging all of our data to figure out exactly how much can we afford to spend to acquire a pet in this area, in this channel, and being really diligent about measuring that against what we're actually delivering and being able to target our spend appropriately. So for example, we know that we can spend, you know, a certain amount to acquire a puppy in-
Sorry.
Bless you.
A puppy in BC from a vet hospital is a different acquisition cost than a puppy in BC from a breeder.
Thank you. Maria Ripps from Canaccord Genuity. Thank you so much for hosting this great event. I just wanted to ask about sort of the competitive, environment more broadly. Now, with JAB sort of acquiring Pets Best, how does that change sort of the competitive dynamics in the space? And, any color you maybe can share on what you think the strategy sort of may be in the pet insurance vertical with, with multiple brands, and sort of how, how would that impact the continued sort of growth in consumer adoption?
Great question. I'll grab that one. It's what a great opportunity when private equity comes in over the next five to seven or however many years and invests cash to grow this category as a whole, to get people to understand that insurance is something that they need, that's great for the veterinary ecosystem in its entirety. What a greater opportunity it is for us with a hundred and seventy Territory Partners in the field for many, many, many years with relationships with hospitals, where we can differentiate ourselves. So when we look at private equity that might own say fourteen to twenty different insurance brands that are branded differently, but could also be seen as a commodity.
To point out who we are, what we do, what our differentiators are, all at the same time as we have awareness going on in the channel, that is a fantastic opportunity for us here.
Just in terms of what we're seeing, I'm curious, Brian. Your team in the contact center from a sales perspective, have you felt that you are hearing more about competitors? What is the overall noise from pet parents?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think, in a market that's about 4% penetrated, our biggest competitor is still typically your credit card. It's Visa, Mastercard, Amex. So, we do hear about competitors. We have talking points to really showcase our, our differentiation to each of them. But again, at ninety-six percent not penetrated, that's the people that we're mostly talking to.
I mean, I'll just add from personal experience, so there are two other people on this stage with me that were part of this journey when I worked at Petplan with Allianz, and the UK market was not at 25% penetrated in 2007. In 2007, Tesco, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with that brand, a global brand, came into the market, and they were, at that time, I think, one in every two pounds spent in the UK. As Petplan, the specialist pet insurance provider, we were scared. We were the leader, and we thought that suddenly they were gonna come and eat us for breakfast and lunch. The reality was, what they did is they normalized the concept of insurance.
They bought it to every single consumer at checkout, in the supermarket checkout, not at checkout in the vet. And they were able to instill a seed in someone's mind to then go off and start to research the best possible solution for what they were looking for, and that was Petplan. So we grew through that period, and the same thing will happen today because people trust their veterinarian. There is a strategic reason why vets are the moat of this business. It is critical for us to partner with veterinarians, because if you choose a product online, and then you go to your vet, and your vet says: "Why on earth did you buy this product? It's rubbish," the pet parent's gonna listen to them.
They will immediately go back, do their research, look up what Trupanion is and how we're different, and they will have a better understanding of why they would want good quality medical care that their veterinarian recommends, and that's why we focus so heavily on the vet channel. So I think JAB coming to the market is, to echo Steve's point, it's a wonderful opportunity for us as a category to finally have some more cash coming in to help educate and raise awareness. There is no doubt that they will do that. We need some good quality, high-quality competition, and with as many brands as they have, they will have to be focused on pricing appropriately. That's what we have lacked from a competitor standpoint.
We have consistently been up against people who come in, and they sell too cheap, and they skyrocket their rates at the end of life when pets need the most, and that's not good for the category. With JAB, I think we'll have a very different high-quality competitor, and I'm excited to see what it does for everybody, 'cause to Brian's point, a 4% penetration when there's 1.14 million puppies and kittens every month, there's a long way to go before that's a problem for us.
Got it. That's very helpful. And then as it relates to your other business, how does this acquisition sort of impact the pace of Pets Best subscribers migrating to a new underwriter?
Yeah, I can maybe give a little bit of color on that. So, we've spoken about it in the past calls. From a Pets Best perspective, our other segment, primarily comprised of Pets Best, that business is in secular decline, so it's been rolling off. We talked in Q3, it was the sort of the peak in terms of total pet count, and then subsequently, it's been declining Q4, Q1, Q2. In terms of the pace of that, obviously, it's dependent on first and foremost, making sure that we're doing the right thing for our partner and making sure that from a customer perspective, they're getting the right experience.
I think the benefit of that from our standpoint, and we've talked a little bit about this from a financial perspective, it frees up a significant amount of capital, and so the capital consumption that Pets Best has occupied, in part because of the growth. So as some of you may know, the way the risk-based capital works is one of the factors is the growth rate, and the growth rate has been very high. So if you look at Q2 year over year, a year ago, it was north of 32% year-over-year growth. If you compare that to this last quarter, it's 9.2%. And so I think that was the first single digit year-over-year increase in revenue, since, I think, 2016. So our expectation is that business will continue to decline.
The majority of the revenue, 'cause you'll note that revenue is still increasing, is due to ARPU, so they're going through the same thing that we have been going through in terms of flowing pricing through. For us, it's loss sensitive, so while it contributes a meaningful amount of revenue, it doesn't contribute a meaningful amount of profit. The profit profile that we talked about back in Q1, I'd said that was roughly gonna be the trajectory, so it was, I think, 1.6% adjusted operating margin. It was 1.7% in Q2. So it'll continue to grow slightly throughout the year, largely through ARPU, but that business we expect to decline at a pretty steady pace.
... Hey, everyone, Brandon Vazquez from William Blair. Thanks for taking the question. Can you talk a little bit about where the holes are in the conversion funnel? It seems like as you guys start to put incremental PAC spend back, that will be the key focus for you, is how do you close that? So do you have line of sight on how to do those things? And just talk to us about how those incremental dollars go towards improving that conversion rate.
Steve?
It's a good question. Do we have line of sight into the holes? I think that I talked earlier about messaging, and I think that's a big, big area of focus for us. We're definitely testing out more. I know Suzanne and team, and Suzanne can talk a little bit about some of the things that they've been testing. They have seen some really early results that are really positive around that messaging working, and it's starting to close that gap a little bit. But it's something that we're continually looking at and going to keep working on for the next few months to get it right. Suzanne, do you want to add anything?
Hi, everyone. So yeah, I think from a conversion perspective, as Steve says, we're really trying to lean into our messaging. What we ideally want is for the people that are going through our quote enrollment funnel and see a price already understand why Trupanion is different, and in the post-quote journey, continue to sort of dial up the proposition in a way that brings it to life. I think what we find is that there are two kind of key areas. There is the area that says why Trupanion is different, why you should beware of cheap insurance deals. Pet insurance, you get what you pay for. Generally, a low-cost deal means that you compromise on the coverage that you get when you actually need to use the coverage.
But on the other side, looking at, you know, the reason for insurance and making sure that the people are getting quotes, understand the potential cost of care that they might be facing, how Trupanion can help them, really because our biggest competitor, as Brian said, is non-insurance at all. So I think we need. We're coming at it from a sort of range of areas from a messaging point of view, and we've seen some success and hope to build on that as we go through the next few months and years.
I think, Suzanne touched on a key point there, which is particularly important in terms of the price point. So what is still misunderstood today, and we continue to work on refining this, is our age enrollment, and the fact that today, if you're looking at a price point and you see some competitor pricing, the odds are we are going to be more expensive than the next person because we are not going to guarantee increase your price every year because your pet has lived longer. We all want our pets to live longer. That is not understood well today, and we've been working hard to try and generate materials that will help to really reinforce that. The other component that still isn't known well is the difference between wellness and insurance.
Even today, if you did a research poll of pet parents, and there are many that do, and I'm sure you did one yourself. You know, do you have insurance? 25% of people raise their hand and say they have insurance, and we know that's not true because we have the NAPHIA reporting, and we can see it's around 4%. The confusion is between the wellness and insurance, and what then happens is people get the wrong end of the stick when they go in and it's declined. It's not declined. It was never covered in the first place.
So it's our job to continue to educate from the top of the funnel, which is, for us, that vet conversation, to help them articulate the differences between them and then talk about the solution we bring, which to this day, no one else can do when we pay that veterinarian directly at the time of invoice. That's the difference we make because no one has to think about their credit card. They don't have to think about what option A or B or C. I just take care of my pet. The vet team feels the same way. So those three components are really. I talked years ago about a leaky bucket at this event, and how we're trying to plug those holes. They're still similar holes, but we have been making progress. At that point, I think our conversion rate was around 8%.
It's now much higher than that, significantly higher than that. So we are definitely making an improvement. It just takes time to rinse and repeat, and as Suzanne said, look at the funnel in different stages to understand how do we move people in a more efficient way through every stage of that. And with the quote volume, the more we have, the more we can test, the faster we can do that. Now we're at a point where we're going to be increasing that quote volume to test.
And can I just follow up on that real quick? And we're talking, it sounds like a lot of this is messaging around conversion rates. From a commercial perspective, how do you better portray that message? Is it just simply more windshield time with veterinarians and letting them know? Do you have to skip the veterinarians and go to the pet owners to some degree? How do you guys think about that next step with incremental dollars around messaging?
I think it's all of the above. I mean, I think that we need to make sure that we're continually staying in front of the veterinarians. We're talking to them, we're sharing why we're different, but I also think it's utilizing different channels to communicate with pet parents, to tell them continually what problems are we solving for them, not about us, not about like we, but about you. And using different formats that they're comfortable with to do that, so not getting so tied up on, "Oh, well, it's a web conversion," or, "It's a phone conversion." It's giving making it easy for the consumer to interact with us in the way that they're comfortable and to learn from us in the format that they learn the best, so is that video? Is that podcast? Is that text on a page?
Is that calling in and talking to one of Brian's team? It's about taking what we do, making it easily digestible for veterinarians, for veterinary staff, and for pet parents alike.
... Maybe one last one for me, maybe for the actuarial team. We're focused heavily these days on vet inflation simply because it was so high recently, but I'm sure you guys can appreciate there's a lot of other moving pieces within the algorithm for the actuarial team. Can you guys talk to us, you know, to what degree can you guys factor in innovation? You have companies now talking about oncology tests, and then eventually pharmaceuticals. All of these things come with pricing. We have vet visits that are declining, presumably will eventually return to growth. To what degree can you guys bake all of these into your assumptions to give you comfort in future forecasting for our pools? Thank you.
We're pretty fortunate in that we have a pretty nice database that we're working from that's always growing, and that is our primary focus. We are also constantly looking for other data sources to add to our own data, to make sure we have the best forward-looking information. I mean, the problem with our own data is it's always, it's what's already happened, so I feel like we're doing a good job of staying on top of those things. We have not seen a decline in visits in our insured data, by the way. I know that in general for uninsureds that is the case, but it's not true of our pets that we insure.
So it's really a combination of monitoring our own data, being really good with it, and connecting with these other data sources as they become available. That is the more future work that we're working on.
Jackie, Steve, would you mind, both of you are from the vet profession. Obviously, today you're working with the invoices and the vet partners. When you see those new initiatives come through, how do you, what does your team do, and how do we make sure that we're ready for them? Because they will impact our invoices in future.
Yeah, when we see Steve, I'll let you talk to you, but when we see something new, we do if it is a known treatment that is proven and accepted, we just make sure that we're covering it and in close communication with the actuaries to make sure that they're aware of where we're seeing these trends, who's using these treatments, so that they can get ahead to the degree that they can. If it's something brand new, we also have a vet panel that we work with to understand whether this new treatment has you know studies behind it, evidence behind it, to make sure that we are covering things appropriately in line with our policy.
Just anecdotally, also, just this morning, I was talking with some of the people in the room here about some new drugs that their dogs were on, and we were talking about how while this new drug is very prevalent, it's actually replacing a bunch of, like, try seven different drugs and see what helps. Instead, people are going to this one. So while the one may be more expensive, if you understand the context behind it, it can help you to know that the care for this particular condition is probably gonna come down with this one very effective drug. So, Steve, what would you add?
Yeah, we have over a million people that are insured with our product. In addition to those million people, we call on every single hospital in North America on a 60-to-90-day call cycle, boots on the ground, in person, and we've been doing this for years. Our Territory Partner force is bigger than all field forces, combined with all other companies. So between our Vet Portal, that's in more than one in three hospitals in North America, between our field force, between all of our partnerships, we know pretty well damn near immediately, even before anyone's even tried a drug before. So we can see these things real time. Let me kind of switch gears and remind everyone that there's a 3.69% penetration rate of insurance in the U.S., right? It seems microscopic. It's not.
A number of years ago, at meetings like this, we were talking about 1%, right? So we've increased by quite a lot. What we have done to future-proof ourselves is taken this Vet Portal, where we can have real-time data, access to real-time data. We've put it in hospitals that maybe will see one out of a hundred pets with a Trupanion-insured client. So by future-proofing, I mean, we're starting to flex this muscle that most didn't know existed. The more pets that come in because they've heard more about insurance will have access to the care that we can make accessible to them, that we can provide, that their veterinary professionals can provide as well.
The more they will utilize that, the more our product will grow and snowball really in a good way that we've been hoping to have happen, so we see these things before the rest of the industry does, which gives us an advantage as first mover. We know what they cost, we know what they do, we can share them with the veterinary profession, and that's a pretty cool place to be.
And just as a-
It's only gonna get better.
Tee up a question later, 'cause I think we have another question coming, but, as a result of the fact we can see so much from our database and the early insights we get, Steve has spearheaded an initiative, which you may have seen a release about, called the Public... It's got the longest name in the world.
Pets and Public Health Early Warning and Detection System.
It rolls off the tongue, but it does what it says on the tin. So please ask questions about that, too, because that's exactly an indicator of the fact that we can now play that role in animal health, and we couldn't do that before. We have so much data that we can help improve the lives of pets over the long term.
Wilma Burdis at Raymond James. If the business heads of the international businesses could stand up and just talk a little bit about your market, the products you have in that market, that would be great. Thanks.
Shall I kick that one off for a start, and then I'll introduce the team, and they can talk about their marketplaces and where we are? So I came on board three years ago with a mandate to expand out of North America. So to start businesses that would start to, you know, drive serious growth in a number of years' time, but also to look at these businesses and nurture them to the Trupanion model. So very veterinary-centric and also establish a way of growing and a way of applying that Trupanion model without distracting North America. So I think with the market that we're in at the moment, now we've achieved that foundation, and we'll talk a little bit later about one of the key milestones that we achieved this month.
But just kick things off, if we just look at the territories in isolation, maybe we start with the territory we've been in most, if we start with Steve in Australia.
Yeah, we started with Australia, the best place in the world to be. If I go back to the history of Australia and what we were aiming to achieve, it was really about proving out the concept of Trupanion as an end-to-end, not just product, but service. So that's where we started six years ago. Does Trupanion as a concept work? We started as a same-store sales proof of concept. That was our stage one, and which we did succeed in. Our stage two was about our new store sales, which was, how many hospitals could we partner with? Do hospitals, on a broader sense, accept and want to recommend and choose Trupanion to be partnered with? Our third phase, as we are now, is scaling that new store and same-store sales approach into the broader market.
and so Australia is, as an addressable hospital market, about two and a half thousand hospitals, and we're now at that stage of adding to our Territory Partner model, adding our Territory Partners from three up to 12. We're looking to add from our 300 odd hospitals up to 1,500 in the short term. So, as a market, it's all about scale. It's about, having a deliberate and considered approach in terms of our hospital distribution, primarily. So again, proving out the concept and driving the same concept that's made Trupanion successful here in North America.
I think our next step was to look where else we wanted to go, and mainland Europe, we saw a lot of emerging pet insurance companies who seemed to be doing things quite strangely, you know, without the focus on pricing, and you know, for every one that came into the marketplace, one was exiting the marketplace, some driven by technology and by online marketing, without really any grasp of establishing the foundation for the category, so when we looked at those marketplaces, we looked at two, you know, for partner companies that we could probably have the same aspirations and mission that we did, so starting with a vet and really growing from there.
So it's not especially, you know, it's not gonna be a tap you can turn on really quickly because you have to establish that relationship, gain the trust, and then put the processes and proposals in place with the hospitals so that they can, you know, have the confidence with the products that we're selling, products that will support them and their pet parents, so you know, just under three years ago, we started a dialogue with a small company called Smart Paws. And Sven leads Smart Paws. Smart Paws are in Germany and Switzerland, very much started by Richard Coe and another eminent vet, Dick White, who had established the largest veterinary referral hospital in Europe.
So a really good pedigree with some great contacts around the marketplace. And we have, we acquired Smart Paws, and this month we have Trupanionized Smart Paws. So Smart Paws is now Trupanion Switzerland and Germany. They have a Trupanion product, Trupanion pricing, Trupanion processes, totally veterinary-centric, teams out calling on vets, starting to build that network and those relationships. Mandate to pay the vet directly, and as the experience builds, we'll be paying directly at the point of checkout. So maybe, Sven, if you can just say a little bit about those two marketplaces.
Absolutely. Thank you very much, Simon. First of all, it's very fun to speak as a German to so many Americans in this room. Thank you very much to have this opportunity for that. Let me give you some facts and figures about the market in Germany in particular. We have some 10,000 vets in Germany who which, grammatically correct, are waiting actually for a proper pet insurance in the market. So it was very fun and enjoyable to see that we have a product now which we can establish into the market. We are seeing in total 45,000 vets working in these practices, which by our network actually are very known from our side. And we have a fantastic team.
We have a fantastic international team. I wanna also mention that at this stage, which helped actually to initialize and to make it possible that we were able to launch Trupanion, to Trupanionize Germany and Switzerland same time, which happened last week. With a very diverse and international team, we are now aiming for and preparing, already prepared the market for being able to issue EDOs and have a product in place, which is very unique across the competition a nd, market situation in general, if that makes sense. And, maybe it helps, if you ask me directly questions, and I can answer that to, summarize a little bit more from that side, if that's possible.
I'd like to know how you're Trupanionizing in Europe, with what I would expect to be a much, much smaller data set for pricing, and especially with age at enrollment pricing, how you're making sure you're not signing up, you know, underpricing for a long time and basically creating a really large contingent liability?
I think I rather pass that question concerning pricing over to the people actually who work on the pricing thing, and this is Alan.
Yeah, no, that's a, that's a great question. I think given the kind of limited data set we have on mainland Europe, we do have some good information from vet clinic invoices comparing costs from our North American business, from our Australian business, and then we're able to also make some similar assumptions on utilization ranging through the whole pet's life. So, hoping to address that, coming with prices that are appropriate for our age at enrollment pricing.
Yeah, and if I can just, you know, embellish that as well. Obviously, we have a huge amount of data from North America. Things in terms of breed and species, mortality and morbidity don't vary tremendously, from territory to territory, you know, when we have specific breeds. We had businesses, you know, across Europe already that were trading, so we had some of our own data, and we did a huge amount of market research, looking what some of the competition were doing, how they were adjusting prices, and that's sort of the blend of experience we put into the marketplace with our pricing. I think the difference in Europe is that we don't have to file for pricing.
So we have ongoing analysis in terms of the claims we're seeing, and we can adjust those prices on a month-to-month basis if we need to. Of course, we have to manage that really carefully, but we haven't got to go through the process of filing prices and perhaps getting, you know, a part of the increase we're looking for. We can charge the price that we need to without any recourse to regulators. Rich, if you want to add to that?
Yeah, I can add a little bit more. In Germany, in particular, if we look at veterinary prices in terms of invoicing, they are circa 50% of the UK, which makes them probably 60% less than US in terms of cost, but it's also controlled with... I'm not gonna even attempt to mention the German to pronounce the German word, but it's in abbreviation terms, it's the GOT, and that's a government-based chart pricing point for treatments in Germany. So that gives us a lot more control, chamber by chamber, through the different states in terms of what vets are gonna be charging. So we're not gonna be-- Germany's been caught with the veterinary inflation, as is across the world, where vets have been accelerating inflation way more than standard.
We are in that situation, but we have control with that. Coupled with some, like Simon said, the existing data, and we can react. We're trying to be as proactive as we can be, but that we can react. If there are trends, we can spot them. We haven't got to file and wait for a regulator to give us the okay. We can make that decision there and then. Does that cover it?
So we've just covered off the German and Swiss marketplaces, but we are also in another four territories in Europe. Shortly after we acquired the Smart Paws business, we were looking what else was in Europe, and we found a business of all places in the Czech Republic, somewhere where we probably wouldn't have looked for a start, but they'd had a storming start to the marketplace, had established a market from nowhere, driven 3.5% penetration, quite quickly dominated the marketplace, and they were very much focused on integrations, technology-wise, with the veterinarians. So the seven PIMS platforms that support the Czech Republic, they had integrations with all of them, giving them you know access to virtually the whole of the marketplace.
In, you know, a very similar way to how we operate in North America in terms of, you know, paying the veterinarian directly and at the point of checkout, you know, we had very, very similar functionality in the company in the Czech Republic, which was called PetExpert. I think probably I'll ask Denis, who is Country Manager for the Czech Republic, to talk a little bit more about Czechia, and then we'll talk together probably about the other three territories of the PetExpert.
Yeah, good morning. Yeah, in fact, PetExpert was founded by two persons who couldn't be here today. So I'm the Country Manager for Czech Republic. Czech Republic is a very interesting market for those who know. As Simon says, it's probably not the one that you would target at first, but it's the country with the highest proportion of pets per inhabitants in Europe. So clearly, a very interesting marketplace for us, for Trupanion, for PetExpert.
What was done over the last years is an incredible work with a partnership with over roughly 90% of all the veterinary hospitals in the country, and a very high level of acquisitions of new policies subscribed every day. So it's still a very under-penetrated market. If we include Slovakia, which is the nearby country, we are at around 2%, even less than 2% of penetration, so clearly a high potential, and we will be working more and more on Trupanionizing this unit. Yeah.
I think if we look at the Czech Republic, the business model varied slightly, whereas we had a really strong relationship with the veterinary profession on the service and claim side, you know, delivering that same level of service and efficiency, you know, making and supporting the veterinarian in their day-to-day life, and obviously the pet parent. And what we hadn't done was really optimize the, you know, the recommendation for enrollments from the veterinarian. So, you know, what we've done since and it was a very much an online and social media-driven business, which is great. You know, you can turn it on, you can turn it off, but the bottom line is, when you turn it off, the enrollments stop.
So, you know, establishing that distribution through vets and breeders it was paramount because when you have that trust, when you have the process working, you know, the new puppies and new kittens that are coming in for primary vaccination, that process just works, and they introduce them to you. So we're concentrating now on really establishing the enrollment side of the veterinary world and also bringing breeders into the distribution as well. So it's beginning to shape and look far more like the North American business and tie in with the way we operate in North America.
I think you know the other thing that is that's notable about the Czech Republic is you know the product was positioned for a start-up marketplace, and now we're sort of four, five years in, and now the veterinarians are getting very used to having insured customers. They're now asking for a much better product, one that's far more comprehensive, that allows them to prescribe and to treat animals up to the level they've been trained to do. So you know just as we put the Trupanion brand into Switzerland and Germany, you know we now look at how we do that around the rest of the marketplaces we're in. So you know that's the next steps.
You know, we stabilize Germany and Switzerland, and then we step and repeat elsewhere. You know, the platform that we've put into Germany and Switzerland was primarily the Czech platform with some additional functionality around marketing communications, some AI language capability. So, you know, we've built a platform that is a foundation for the European expansion, that's configurable. If we talk about the other territories that PetExpert have, so we have... and Denis also very recently looks after Belgium. Belgium marketplace is quite established. Of the territories we work in Europe has the highest penetration level of pet insurance and some quite strong competition.
So, you know, we've started, but nobody really distributing pet insurance through the pet sector channels, through the veterinary channel and through the breeder channel. We're starting to do the same thing, establish that veterinary network. We've got strong PIMS integration, and building, you know, that integration with the claims side and with the lead generation paramount. Lastly, we're in Poland. Poland being quite an interesting territory. There are probably 11,000 clinics in Poland, a lot of them quite small. One PIMS platform that has about an 80% penetration that we have integration with. We have some other software platforms that support that platform, so a strong foundation to go in.
But one of the other things that was notable about Poland was a lot of the veterinarians in Poland have practiced in the UK through a combination of, you know, some bad luck and bad decisions by the UK, so Brexit and COVID, a lot of them have gone home again. So they've worked in clinics that have experienced the benefit of having insured clients, and they're in a marketplace that has very, very low pet insurance penetration. So already we have a lot of advocates in the Polish marketplace. So again, same as before, you know, step and repeat Trupanion into those marketplaces.
So the brand, you know, the product that's appropriate for the marketplace, some pricing, and the processes, so we can start to harmonize processes, and as we start to gain scale, start to get an operational efficiency by looking at how we service several territories from one operational base.
Is there a question down here? Okay, I think we're gonna take one more question, and then we'll go to a break. So down here.
Thank you. Anne Tomsic, an individual investor and owner of a pet health-related company as well. I'm gonna take us back to some of the things that were said. You're paying out a lot of claims. It's going up. Utilization does affect pricing overall. You're, like Dr. Steve, Steve said, you're not in the business of dictating medicine, so you're gonna shut up and pay, and that's, you know, a wonderful part about this company. Do you have any insight into your member personas? One of the data points you mentioned is that your members are not lagging in going to the vet, they're going to the vet more often. The industry as a whole is still seeing a lowering of wellness visits. Those continue to lag, you know, 16, 18, 19 months.
So people are avoiding the wellness portion of care, which, if your members participated in, could recognize things earlier and maybe not just use insurance as a fail-safe option. Do you have any data that understands your membership in terms of are they seeing the vet more often from a wellness perspective? Because you're certainly not a wellness plan.
Thank you. I didn't prompt that question, but now I wish I had, so thank you for asking it, so there are a few people on this stage that probably are jumping up and down wanting to answer it. I'm gonna hand it, first of all, to Steve Ireland, and then Emily, if you wouldn't mind kind of sharing a little bit, and Kelly perhaps as well, as the work that you two have done in tandem in looking at the member experience, who they are, how we speak to them, and I'm guessing that Dr. Steve is gonna want to share some stats around wellness and insurance and how the two come together, so Steve, do you mind kicking us off, please?
Wellness. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think Margi said earlier, people still confuse kind of the wellness and the insurance. In fact, I... When I first started, there was an article in a consumer magazine talking about pet insurance, and they had a Banfield wellness plan listed in there as insurance. What we saw in the practice was the insured people were coming in, the people who were the responsible pet parents were still coming into the practice. From our perspective, I think it's good to understand how we can educate those pet parents, our members, to know that wellness is an important part of it, and using insurance as a stopgap isn't just. It's bad, it's not good, right? It's it is not what responsible pet parents do, right?
So as far as our personas go, I mean, our personas are the responsible pet parents. And we try to drive them to the vet any chance we can, whether we're talking about something serious or we're talking about taking your pet on a camping trip. If there's something wrong, take it to the vet, because that's what responsible pet parents do. And I, in my conversations with people in practice, they're still seeing people come in, and they're referring to... They're telling me that it's people who have Trupanion are still coming to the vet.
From a data perspective, you can imagine we have a plethora of data on our members over the past twenty-plus years. We certainly have demographic data. We understand, you know, the personas of who our members are, who our leads are. For us, the most impactful way to segment our members is actually based on their experience. So how did they come to us? What is their claims experience? What was their experience in the hospital? What's their rate experience? So I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about how or maybe offer some examples of how we've done that.
But, for us, if we're talking about moving the needle in terms of conversion and retention, it's really around the experience that those pet parents have had with us.
Yeah, we're absolutely looking to understand our members, who they are, whether they're a first-time pet parent, whether this is the fifth pet they've had enrolled with us. You know, we're gonna speak to and communicate with those members differently based on that. And one thing, kind of speaking to wellness and education, that we're really aiming to do is to position ourselves as a partner to those members and their pets as they go through the journey of pet parenthood. And we have a wealth of data and years of experience, so we want to be the expert that they can lean on.
We want to educate them about things they can expect throughout their pet's life, which hopefully is going to help us with retaining them, so that they know, you know, your pet may be healthy now, that's wonderful, and here's also what you can expect throughout their entire life. And where we've seen a lot of success is through some of that educational content, where we're telling members, you know, "Here's what you can expect in your puppy's first year," if it's your first time having a puppy, even if it's not, members are looking for that information.
So being able to provide it, being able to elevate the voice of the vet, encourage them to see their vet, forge a relationship with their vet, and it's also helping us as a brand to create stronger relationships with those members right from the start.
It's a great question, Anna, thanks for asking it. Our product demands that people use preventatives, that you get your preventative vaccines, that you do your routine deworming, et cetera, so these are things that we check along the way as well, so yes, we do have data on what people are doing, so we can apply our policy and pay for those services that are needed later. We all know that early detection leads to early cure. It's in our best interest to detect things early, even though we find things early. Think about it from a human perspective, things that are near and dear to my family's heart. If my wife or my mother found a lump in their breast, we'd want to find that early.
Why would we want to find it early? Not to punish the insurance company, right? We'd want to find it early to keep them alive for many, many more years. The lifetime value will go up, we'll have done our jobs, people will add pets, they'll refer friends to us. What we don't want to do is take the wellness component away from the veterinary ecosystem, right? Ours is not to insert ourselves in the middle. Ours is to allow the vet to practice at the local level in a way that they feel is appropriate to have clients become sticky to that veterinary practice. They will come in more for the wellness, they will come in more for the insurance. We'll all have done our job, and the ecosystem thrives when we do that.
Okay, we're gonna go ahead and take a break, so for the folks who are joining us online, we'll be back in about 20 minutes. We are going to broadcast a slide up here for those folks who are online. If you want to go ahead and join us on an online webinar, it will give you the option to submit some questions online, and we can take those throughout the day as we have time. I also wanted to note for the audience here in person, there's actually a QR code, so if going through the day, you have a thought or a question, or just some feedback, please feel free to use that, and again, I think we'll start the next session with one or two questions that we get from either the in-person or online audience.
So we'll be back at about 11:20. Thanks!