Fred Eppinger: No, it’s a great question. It’s roughly ironically — it’s roughly about the same, probably more close to $19 million than $20 million. But there is some really important data initiatives we got going on, particularly kind of access to data that would make us more efficient. And then I have some operating technologies, just like in commercial, we have a dated operating kind of system, and so we are upgrading that. So it’s roughly the same amount of money this year, there is also some additional cyber investment in there as well. So again, one of the things we did do to your question is we went through each of those investments, though, and thought about the sequence of it, giving the challenge of the first six months of the year and what gives a quicker payback, et cetera, and trying to be thoughtful about the timing and the starting of those as well.
But it’s really important that we do invest in those things because we just — the company got a little bit behind on its invest — capital investments in some areas before this journey started. And we’re trying to sequence and make those investments and catch up in some of those base areas. And then some of these are us things we think that will create a better kind of, whether it’s an experience for our people or experience for the customer on how we access data and kind of make decisions. And so it’s good. Again, I feel like the teams — we made good progress this year on them. The ones coming up are equally important. They’re a little bit less transparent to the customer than the ones we’ve been doing in the past. They’re a little bit more back office and operating model stuff, but it all moves us forward in a pretty good way.
John Campbell: Okay, that’s helpful. And then kind of sticking with the growth initiatives, I mean, on the rollout of the agency tech platform, Fred, I think you’d mentioned that was actually — you pointed to that as a driver of share growth. I was hoping if we could maybe get a little bit more color on the platform itself. If you could maybe walk through what’s differentiated about it? And maybe from a bigger picture standpoint, the goals you’re attempting to achieve in agency and how that tech platform fits into that strategy.
Fred Eppinger: So, again, one of the things that we got behind on a little bit is kind of when you deal with the agents, right, it’s combined economics. And so it’s really about the efficiency of the end to end process. So it has a lot to do with you integrating kind of seamlessly into their TPS and providing the kind of information they need to kind of do their business. And the other part of what we — so we’ve done a lot of investments on both the integrations and with the kind of information we pass back and forth and the decisions that we can make instantly back and forth. But on top of that, we created — when we started, we only had three states where we could provide services — search services, and we now have the equivalent of the full country, just like the big guys services.
And that’s important to agents because they want to variableize their cost a little bit in a down market, so they’re using more of our services to supplement the work they’re doing. So what’s happening now is we have a legitimate — when we go into an agent in Florida or whatever, we have a platform that is as efficient, if not a little bit more efficient, than their other players and we have these services provider. On top of that, what we’ve done is provided for select agents, a concierge service to access to commercial, which makes it really efficient for an agent to be able to get access to commercial, that’s probably broader geographically, perhaps, than where he is. And so that’s the other part of this. So, it’s an efficient way to work with them and then provide these additional services.
One other point I would make, and it’s one of the investments we’re currently making, there’s 13 states that are attorney based and they have a different TPS type thing. We’re launching kind of as we speak, in the next few weeks or months, a new TPS offering for those attorney agents that make their workflows kind of efficient and easier to work with, which is a unique thing. That’s different than a regular agent, and it requires different things. And so, what we constantly are thinking about, John, is how we kind of can be efficient in our integrations and interface with them. And we believe what then happens is agents, we went back to the cyber point, agents — most agents are going to say, hey, it’s safer for me to split my business a little bit and give a fair share to Stewart, they now provide as good, if not better than the others.
And so that’s why we’re encouraged. We’ve had, I think, six or seven quarters of share increase in agency and we had one weird number, as you remember, in the second quarter. But other than that, it’s pretty constant. We’ve had steady share growth in some really good states. And as kind of these improvements really get solidified geography by geography, that should continue. I feel pretty good about that.
