Porch Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:PRCH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Adam Kornick: And just, I’ll just €“ ask second one, I’ll take keep the third one offline. I mean, the idea that for you to have kept going under the current model for the economics of reinsurance, given all the recent weather we’re going to become unattractive and going in this direction ends up being, in your opinion, kind of the more effective way. I mean it’s like, I mean is that ultimately the catalyst, like multiple quarters of kind of bad weather and the industry’s had to deal with and kind of how that’s impacted reinsurance along with like higher rates, just like specifically the catalyst just talking?

Matt Ehrlichman: Yes, that’s great. It’s actually Jason, something that we have been talking about for quite a while. In fact, Adam and I, it’s a conversation we had almost immediately after acquiring HOAs. We just looked forward over a long period of time to talk about strategically, how would we best structure, how do we believe an insurance company would best be structured to scale into the level of scale that we think we can grow, this business into. Again, one of the things that was attractive about HOA is that it was, capital light, lower volatility and that it would seed at the time of acquisition approximately 90% of its premiums to third party reinsurers. Well, as you get to larger and larger scale seeding, that levels is more difficult.

And certainly to your point with the changes in the reinsurance landscape that also, becomes more difficult or more expensive. I feel very fortunate that those conversations for us had started, that long ago so we can kind of get out ahead, start the work because, it’s a material amount of work that goes into getting to this point, ready to make these filings and moving forward, with this structure. But at the end of the day, it’s our belief, Jason, that this structure positions us in the optimal way to be able to do what we want to do, which is to scale a very large leading homeowner’s insurance company and to do so without having to essentially being able to, essentially seed 100% of premiums in some respect, where we aren’t the direct bearer of that, the claims, cost and weather volatility.

And so that’s a big change for us that it can be we believe very impactful both to margins and valuation overtime.

Jason Helfstein: Thanks.

Lois Perkins: Great. Thank you. And next we’ll go to Dan from Benchmark. Over to you, Dan.

Dan Kurnos: Great. Thanks. Matt, you’re going to have to forgive a little bit of my ignorance on this. But if you go through this process, A, obviously you believe there’s a highlight, we bit of it getting approved and it sounds like this is sort of the future path to getting call it, let’s call it 100% asset light or limit your claims downside. When you go through this, how do you maintain your ability to transfer the data advantage you have to the exchange? Do you charge them for that effectively or help me think through kind of that process because you have almost a totally different go-to-market strategy as you kind of go through this. You’re somewhat reliant on them. You can still be a lead driver obviously through your own platform, but they own the exchange. So just help me think through a couple of those things.

Matt Ehrlichman: Yes, happy to. And Adam, I’ll take the first crack and then layer in if you have anything to add. So you’re exactly right, Dan, that we would not announce insurer this news today if we weren’t confident in it being approved by the TDI. So we’ve had discussions with the TDI already. We believe that that €“ yes, we’ll be able to work through that process to get it approved. I’ll also note that again there’s many other examples of reciprocals out in the industry. So farmers is one that we gave with Zurich as the operator behind in a very attractive model for Zurich, but others as well. USAA folks might not know, but they are members/owners of USAA if that’s who they were used for insurance or ERE or pure a variety of others.