Root, Inc. (NASDAQ:ROOT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tommy McJoynt: Hey, guys. Good morning. Yes, my first question just continuing on that topic of capital, you talked about being capital self-sufficient with your current outlook. So in your internal forecast, how much of a cushion at the trough cash level do you have and at what year or quarter do you envision that occurring?

Rob Bateman: Thanks for the question, Tommy. Could you just €“ I am trying to understand exactly what you are trying to ask, what’s the €“ are you asking, yes, that’s the bottom of the cash burn?

Tommy McJoynt: Just when do you think you will be at the bottom of your cash level?

Rob Bateman: We haven’t disclosed that publicly yet. Well, we do expect it to be in the next 2 years.

Tommy McJoynt: Okay, okay. Yes, that’s sort of answered. And then the other thing, so your headcount is now down about 50%, year-over-year, do you feel that you now have the right kind of workforce and personnel in the fixed expense space going forward, or do you envision any further actions?

Alex Timm: Thanks for that question. I think what we are doing is looking at our expense base constantly. We have taken a number of headcount actions, but we do have work to do around our non-headcount expenses still. If you think about what the company was €“ we were scaling for commitments to a bigger company and we have some commitments in €˜23 that we have to take down for €˜24. We have done already some of that from €˜22 to €˜23, but we have got some more work to do there.

Tommy McJoynt: Thank you.

Operator: Our final question comes from David Motemaden from Evercore ISI. Please proceed.

David Motemaden: Hey. Good morning. I just had a question just in terms of selectively turning on the marketing spend and how you think about balancing profitability with that, I have looked at the improvement in the loss ratio over the last couple quarters and a lot of that. Obviously, you guys are taking rate and it’s sort of come through as just a higher portion of your booking renewal as opposed to new business. So, could you just talk about how you are balancing the sort of new business penalty as you think you can ramp up some of these new writings in 2023, within your outlook for showing continued improvement in the loss ratio?

Alex Timm: Yes. That’s a good question. And thanks for that. I will start and this is Alex, and then I will pass it over to Matt. I think where we are today, and the progression that we have made on our loss ratio, and reducing it almost 14 points in one year, is really tremendous. And we think that that is mostly because of the way how fast we were able to react to the environment and in the inflationary trends, leveraging our technology, and our really flexible pricing and underwriting stack. And what that’s allowed us to do is to get to a much better position, and to understand our loss ratios at a very granular level, and really by customer segment. We have also really improved our underwriting and so a lot of that first term, what we are actually seeing is a lot of our first term new business penalty has actually really come down.

And so when we think about deploying our marketing dollars, one, we are now and we have been deploying more marketing dollars, really through January and February, and we are seeing very good results. And we are doing that while we are continuing to see loss ratio progression. And I think that’s evidenced just really of the strength of our ability to one target, the right customers through our technology. And then two, making sure that we are just really disciplined on making sure that whoever we bring in the front door is the right customer for us. And so I believe you will see us be able to grow and continue that €“ grow new writings and continue to show that loss ratio progression.