2023: How will GEICO and BNSF face telematics and precision scheduled railroading?
BECKY QUICK: This question comes from Ben Knoll in Minneapolis. He says he’s a Berkshire shareholder of three decades and he’s attended many Berkshire meetings. He’s here again this year.
And this is addressed to Ajit and Greg. He says, “Last year I asked you about how GEICO and BNSF appeared to lose ground to their leading competitors, GEICO on telematics and BNSF on precision scheduled railroading.
“Ajit, you responded by saying how you expected GEICO to make progress in about a year or two. Greg, you spoke about your pride in BNSF, but you didn’t directly address the threat of precision scheduled railroading. Will each of you please provide perspective on these competitive challenges and our company’s strategies to address them?”
AJIT JAIN: In terms of GEICO and telematics, let me make the observation that GEICO has certainly taken the bull by the horns and has made rapid strides in terms of trying to bridge the gap in terms of telematics and its competitors. They have now reached a point where on all new business, close to 90% has a telematics input to the pricing position.
Unfortunately, less than half of that is being taken up by the policyholders. The other point I want to make is even though we have made improvements in terms of bridging the gap on telematics, we still haven’t started to realize the true benefit.
And the real culprit of the bottleneck is technology. GEICO’s technology needs a lot more work than I thought it did. It has more than 600 legacy systems that don’t really talk to each other. And we are trying to compress them to no more than 15, 16 systems that all talk to each other.
That’s a monumental challenge, and because of that, even though we have made improvements in telematics, we still have a long way to go because of technology. Because of that, and because of the whole issue more broadly in terms of matching rate to risk, GEICO is still a work in progress.
I don’t know if any of you had a chance to look at the first quarter results, but GEICO has had a very good first quarter, coming in at a combined ratio of 93 and change, which means a margin of six and change. Even though that’s very good, it’s not something we can take to the bank because there are two unusual items that contributed to it.
Firstly, we’ve had what is called prior year reserve releases. We’ve reduced reserves for the previous years, and that contributed to it. And secondly, every year the first quarter tends to be a seasonally good quarter for auto insurance writers.
So, if you adjust for those two factors, my guess is the end of the year GEICO will end up with a combined ratio just south of 100, as opposed to the target they’re shooting for is 96. I hope they reach the target of 96 by the end of next year.
But instead of getting too excited about it, I think it’s important to realize that even if you reach 96 it will come at the expense of having lost policyholders. There is a trade-off between profitability and growth, and clearly, we are going to emphasize profitability and not growth. And that will come at the expense of policyholders.
So, it will not be until two years from now that we’ll be back on track, fighting the battles on both the profitability and growth fronts.