2016: Can Berkshire sell commercial insurance directly?
CLIFF GALLANT: Berkshire has an online portal for commercial insurance business. I believe it’s CoverYourBusiness.com. Is there an opportunity in commercial lines to go direct akin to what we’ve seen GEICO do in personal auto insurance?
WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Well, the answer to that is we’ll find out. We have actually two online arrangements. I’m not sure whether they’re both up yet.
One is called — I believe it’s called Big. I think we got that domain name, B-I-G, and that will be run by the Applied Underwriters, which is a subsidiary of ours that writes workers comp.
And the other is run by Ajit [Jain]. And then, actually, we do commercial auto, some commercial auto, through GEICO as well, so we will learn soon —
I guess my message about inherited wealth is getting delivered here. (Laughter)
The kid probably wants to put himself up for adoption now. (Laughter)
The — so we will be — we have been a little bit, and we will be experimenting more with various insurance lines.
When you look at what has happened, you know, just take Amazon, you have to — you want to try a lot of things, and it amazed me how fast the inquiries on personal auto migrated from phone to the internet, and, you know, I would’ve thought that the younger people would do it, but the people like myself would be very slow to do it.
But the adaptation by the American public of internet response has really been pretty incredible and shows no sign of slowing down.
So the answer is, we’ll try various things and we’ll make some mistakes, and my guess is that 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, it’ll be a lot different.