No. of Recommendations: 6
According to Ajit that gap with Progressive has been reduced a lot, GEICO is doing much better with Telematics specifically and seeing strong results from its recent large investments in technology in general. GEICO just came off a stellar, much improved Quarter. Still work to be done, but GEICO is the Comeback Kid in 2024.This is an interesting question, and prompted me to watch the clip answering this question at this year's annual meeting:
https://www.google.com/search?q=jain+progressive+g... (worthwhile 5-minute listen, btw)
It doesn't entirely contradict what you say about GEICO narrowing the gap, but I get the impression from Jain's comments that this is really a work in progress. He says at one point that this has been an advantage Progressive has had over GEICO for several years, and that at GEICO "...we are
trying to still play catch-up. Technology is something that is unfortunately a
bottleneck, but then again, we are
making progress. But equally importantly, we have hired people that are much better than what they inherited, ... Yes I realize we are
still behind, we're taking
steps to bridge the gap, and
hopefully by the, certainly by the end of '25, we should be able to be
along with the best of players when it comes to data analytics."
Buffett added that GEICO has the lowest cost thing and it "does have to do a better job of matching rate to risk, but our low costs have masked the fact that, for a while, we could do without progressing as much as we should have in the matching of rate to risk, and now, Todd has been working intensively at that and he's made a lot of progress, but there's
still work to be done."
My thoughts are that once they catch up with the technology, it may be another decade before they can really realize all the benefits of that technology - low risk drivers that have gone to Progressive to get better rates will be the hardest to get back, since they're already paying very low rates.
dtb
