April 22, 2025 • 41 mins
Fraud in the trucking industry has become a major issue for carriers, brokers and shippers alike. The Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) estimates that freight fraud costs supply chains over $1 billion annually in the US. The pandemic, market-participant anonymity and ease have helped spark a new wave of cargo theft. In this Talking Transports podcast, Michael Caney, chief commercial officer of Highway, joins Lee Klaskow, Bloomberg Intelligence senior transportation and logistics analyst, to share his insights about how the company’s technology-based platform is fighting abuse in the industry. Caney also talks about types of fraud, the importance of knowing your customer, double brokering, dispatch services, rising costs for truckers and how stumbling into the freight-brokerage industry led him to Highway.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi, everyone of This is Lee Clasgow when We're Talking Transports.
Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host,
Lee Klaskow, Senior Freight transportational Logistics Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence,
Bloomberg and House Research arm of almost five hundred analysts
and strategists around the globe. Before diving in a little
public service announcement, your support is instrumental to keep bringing
(00:29):
great guests and conversations to you, our listeners, and we
need your support. So please, if you enjoy this podcast,
share it, like it and leave a comment. Also, if
you have any ideas for future episodes or just want
to talk transports, please hit me up on the Bloomberg terminal,
on LinkedIn or on Twitter at Logistics League. Now on
(00:50):
to our episode and we're delighted to have today. Michael Cainey,
chief Commercial Officer at Highway, a Rollie's held since joining
the company in twenty twenty two. Michael has twenty years
of experience in leadership and advisory roles in corporate development, sales, brokerage,
managed services, technology and fleet operations. He also was the
(01:11):
founder of Growth and Nexus, a consultancy firm Michael, Thank
you so much for joining us today on talking transports.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Thanks Ley, it's good to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
So Highway we all drive on them, but I guess
a lot of people might not know it is a company.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Let's talk about what does Highway do.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, Highway exists to reduce the friction that existed between
motor carriers and freight brokers. We do that by providing
a really robust identity and access management platform. So we
really we do two things. We eliminate fraud between the
broker and carrier connection and then we improve the speed
at which they can connect and conduct business. Right.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And you know, one of the reasons why I wanted
to have you guys on as I met you guys
out at Manifest great conference.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
If you've ever been, you should go. You know, And
fraud is become such.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
An issue within transportation. Can you talk a little bit
about like how did fraud become such a big deal
for the trucking industry.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, so there was. What's interesting is there was always
there was always fraud in the trucking industry. I started,
I started in this business as a freight broker in
two thousand and four. And the thing that we dealt
with the most was the occasional theft and the occasional
double brokering, And for the audience is not familiar with that,
(02:31):
let's just kind of unpack that just just a little bit.
Double brokering is when a freight broker contracts a motor
carrier to move a shipment, and that motor carrier then
then brokers that freight out again, right, And that motor
carrier may have legitimate freight broker authority where they may
be giving it to a cousin or a friend or
another owner operator, and they may pay that carrier and
(02:54):
make a little money on the spread. And in that case,
you're just kind of upset about it as a freighter
because you overpaid, and there's probably some some liability issues
because you don't know who you actually contract with, right,
and that's there's risk there. The worst kind of double
brokering is when someone takes a shiment from you, acts
like they're a carrier, gives it to somebody else, doesn't
(03:16):
pay the underlying motor carrier, and just disappears. So they
collect the money from you, and then the other motor
carrier shows up saying nobody paid me, and that motor
carrier still owed that money. That's the worst kind of double.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Broker And just to back up, so double brokering in
with itself is not illegal.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
It's not it's not illegal if you have brokerge authority, okay, right.
But but every every every contract between a freight broker
and a motor carrier contractually prohibits double brokering, okay, right.
And so there's the problem that you have with double
brokering that the motoring public should understand is that you
you lose you lose the ability to vet the ultimate
(03:56):
underlying motor carrier. Right. So a freight broker is going
to sign up for all kinds of egregious indemnification with
a shipper and agree to do all of these things
when they select motor carriers. And then if if they
give it to an entity that doesn't do that, right,
there they've got they've just got some liability exposure contractionly
with whatever they've agreed to with that shipper, right and
then and then the worst kind of double brokering is
(04:18):
just when when they the broker ends up double paying, right,
because they have to pay for that shipment twice, all right,
So then there's there's fictitious pickup and and theft, and
that's always existed, okay, but what happened during the pandemic.
So fraud needs three things to exist and thrive prospective gain, anonymity,
and urgency. There's there's always been a very easy prospective
(04:42):
gain when it comes to I mean, the transaction I
just explained is pretty simple to pull off. There's a
very low barrier to entry for both a freight broker
and a trucking company, so you can kind of get
an MC number. And there's there's plenty of people that
talk negatively about the FMCSA I don't I don't need
to swim in that lane. There's other people that do it,
but there's a low barrier to entry. It's fairly easy
(05:02):
to get going. And you can hide behind a public
load board and a you know, back in the day
it was a fact summer, not it's an email address
and pretend to be anybody you want, and and and
we don't federally, we don't prosecute it. Like no, it's
not a big deal. You walk into a bank and
steal two hundre fifty thousand dollars, they're going to come
after you. You still two und fifty thousand dollars load
(05:23):
a cargo. They argue about whose problem it is, right, right,
So so the anonymity is easy. And then the urgency
has always been there, especially in a freight brokerage environment.
It's always urgent. It's a last minute, shit minutes. Something
has to happen. It's a it's a high, it's a
it's a boiler room type environment. At least it has
been historically. And the pandemic just we all know, like
(05:44):
everybody knows it just accentuated that m right, and so
fraud lives thrives an urgency, right, I mean, just think
about think about like the elder abuse schemes, right when
someone calls you and they're from Africa and they need
you to wire them ten thousand dollars, Like just think
about like this has to happen now, or the irs
(06:06):
schemes that make these phone calls, like, oh my god,
it has to happen right now. And if it doesn't,
like that's literally how freight moves. That's how about twenty
thirty percent of the freight market moves. Oh my goodness,
it has to happen right now. And bad actors have exploited.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
That, right, And when I think of theft and trucking,
you know, I think of good fellows and a guy's
strong arming a truck driver and stealing it. But in
today's world, that's not really how it happens, is it.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
No, it's it's not. And so again, if anyone wants
to go find Scott Cornell's interviews on the internet, He's
interviewed a lot. He's far better at explaining the history
behind us. He's been he's been helping put away bad
guys for twenty years. But strategic cargo theft did it
did used to exist that way, Like there were rings
(06:53):
of people in parts of Kentucky, southern California, Texas that
that would just show up and hook to a trailer
or wait for a guy to go into a truck stop.
But it's very sophisticated now. So so we're now being
told by lots of sources that there are there are
black market by orders for certain types of cargo before
it's ever stolen. So most people think like a thief
(07:13):
is like, oh, it's really easy to sell Tito's vodka. No,
there's an order for that, right, There's there's somebody going Hey,
go get go find me five loads of Tito's vodka.
Go find me. Tires are a really high theft right
now because they can move on the black market. So
there are there are rings that are they're filling by
orders for for things that are in high demand to
(07:35):
be resold on the black market.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
You know, obviously fraud theft a big deal. I guess
can you talk a little bit about you know, not
to make this so much of a commercial, but can
you talk about what does Highway do and how do
you prevent fraud because obviously if you're a broker or
a trucker, you kind of you kind of need products
like Highway to really help you combat fraud.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, so I think it's probably and yeah, we can
absolutely without it being a commercial because really what we
do is we apply the same k y C KYB,
Know your customer, know your business, the same principles that
exist and literally every area of life that you and
every listener engages in, we just apply that and contextualize
(08:17):
it to the relationship between a freight broker and motor
carry So so for people that haven't followed Highway, our
CEO Jordan graft ran a Payments business inside of Triumph.
So members of this audience is probably very familiar with
Trent Financial and who they are in the trucking sector,
very very large factoring payments business and what happened when
Jordan was running Triumph Pay. So Triumph Pay paid freight
(08:39):
bills on behalf of freight brokers create a payments network,
and Jordan was getting payment reversal requests or stop payment requests.
Well that you can't just do. You can't just not
pay somebody, right, you have you have a contract like
somebody submits pod especially when you're a bank. You can't
just not pay somebody because your buddy at the freight
brokers told you not to, right. So that's one aspect.
(09:00):
And the second thing is, you know, payment reversals and
a payments business are really expensive. You know, it's it's
a it's it doesn't cost much to process payments, but
it's really expensive to reverse a payment. And so Jordan
looked at it and said, hey man, why are you
Why am I getting these reversal requests? And what brokers
were repeatedly saying, and then the growth was exponentials. We're
not really sure if they hauled the load right or
(09:21):
we can't find the load. And so he's saying, wait
a minute, you vetted on, you signed a contract, how
do you what do you mean they you didn't know,
you don't know who hauled the load. And when he
dug into the process, what he realized is that there
was no KYC. Like the very basic cybersecurity know your
customer principles that exist in every aspect of our life
(09:43):
did not exist in trucking. Right. It was very it
was very bottoms up approach. Hey, I found someone and
they're going to move this load for me. Now let
me go figure out if they're good or or hey,
I'm going to go put my freight on a on
a public load board, which is in these days tantamount
to Craigslist. Let somebody call me. I don't know who's calling.
(10:05):
I have no idea who they are, but I'm gonna
take their word for it when they give me an
MC number and just hope for the best. Right let
them let them go to a website and fill out
a form right in sensely, So it's like we're gonna
go from the bottom and work our way up and hope
for the best. And what we just said was like, wait,
a minute, hang on, time out. Nobody does this, like
no healthcare doesn't do this, banking doesn't do this. Let's
(10:25):
start at the top and create an identity management platform
that just allows carriers to operate in the light, helps
good actors go really fast and introduces friction to bad actors,
or introduces friction when we don't see things, and allow
allow an entity to self heal the gray areas that
(10:46):
we can't prove.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
So how does how does that happen?
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So what is your Obviously it's a technology driven solutions.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
So think about think about anything that you might engage
with that that it's a single stile experience, like like
when you use Google or you use something like stripe. Right,
you're gonna you're gonna be provided with a challenge that
forces you to prove who you are, and they're going
to put you through some hoops and give you some
codes and make you do a couple of different things
(11:15):
to not only make you prove who you are, but
you know, make sure somebody's on in personing you're not
using a different device. So so we did the same thing.
So when a motor carrier comes to highway, they have
to claim their profile claim their identity. To think about
like a like Like Google has profiles on every restaurant
North America, and the restaurant can go, hey, that's my restaurant.
I'm going to sign in and it's my restaurant. I
(11:36):
want to now manage that profile. It's the same thing.
We have a profile and every motor caure in North America.
And so when the motor carrier shows up, they sign in.
How we have to prove three things? One, who are they?
Who's the human? You can only authenticate one user to
one motor carrier. And we're going to look at all
kinds of things. Where are they logging in from? Are
they time traveling? Are they are they logging in from
(11:56):
Russia in the morning and Indianapolis in the afternoon? Are
they to use VPNs or verse residential proxies? Like? Are
they trying to hide? Who's the hum The second thing
is are they actually the motor carrier? So oftenimes people
will log in and they look kind of clean, but
are they authorized to represent that motor carrier? Right, they
may even be at the motor carrier, but they may
(12:17):
not be authorized to represent the motor carrier. Also, are
they a dispatch service. So one of the things that
a lot of people just in the in the in
your audience probably don't understand is there a companies out
there called dispatch services. They're not regulated, they're not freight brokers.
And I'll just call you and say, hey, Lee's trucking company.
You want me to dispatch for you. I'll go out
(12:38):
and find some loads for you. Right, And they may
be doing that for twenty different trucking companies and not
telling the people they're contracting with which company is actually
doing it. They're not. They don't carry any insurance. They're
just these wild West people with a phone and a computer,
all right, So we suck that. And then the third
piece is the motor carrier's capability. So this is what
didn't exist before Highway. One was the identity piece, and
(12:59):
three was the capability piece, which is a basic pillar
of identity access management. Right, who are you? Are you capable?
Trucking companies that have for example, five drive aands just
the NILA eighteen wheelers going up and down the road, right,
should not be booking twenty loads at a time. They
(13:21):
shouldn't be taking refrigerated freight, they shouldn't be taking flatbed freight.
So one of the problems that existed in fraud before
Highway is if you had a motor carrier number and
an insurance certificate and some trucks, and somebody could go
see that you had trucks have been inspected, they assumed
things about you. Right in the way that small asset
based carriers and even large ones have made money over
(13:42):
the years is by overbooking their markets. So anybody that
covers transports knows that you know, large public fleets operate
between a ninety five and a ninety nine operating ratio,
So the way they make money is by overbooking their
markets and then picking which freight they want to hauld.
Small carries do the same thing. So I'm gonna go
out and I'm gonna I'm gonna take my five trucks,
I'm gonna boo ten loads, pick the ones I want
to move, and either double broker or just not pick
(14:04):
up the other five. And so one of the things
we do is we say, hey, we're going to look
at your equipment and represent to the broker your actual capability,
and we're going to allow the broker to hold you
accountable to what you're capable of doing and not over
extending yourself. And so we do that by looking at
both the equipment account and the veins that are scheduled
on the insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
And so at highways. So who are the customers? Are
they the broker, are they the carriers or are they both?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, so we only so I would say that that
carriers are absolutely a customer and that we have to
give them a great experience and we also have to
protect them. But we don't monetize that relationship, right, So
we do have a dual side of network. We do
have motor carriers using highway every day, hundreds of thousands
of times a day, hundreds of thousands of users. But
the paying customer is the freight broker. Okay, so the
(14:52):
customer that shows up and engages in the service to
protect their network is the freight broker. And we do
business with most of the top one hundre freightbrokers in
the country.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
And then can you just like just talk about you
know what a what a typical fraud that you guys
are able to prevent looks like.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's all aspects of it. Double broker and fictitious pick up,
the impersonation of a carrier. So all of those, all
the impersonation of the carrier leads to thefter double broker,
and so there's multiple layers at which we engage. And
one of the things we do lead it's very interesting
that know the provider does, is we we put all
(15:31):
of our technology, we actually get to the load level.
So so sometimes bad actors are very very very very good,
and they it's a it's a game. They love to
try to figure out how to thwart any any new
fraud prevention efforts. So sometimes a bad actor will get
all the way to the point of getting a load,
but all of the things I just explained to you,
(15:52):
we boil them down to the load level. So when
we look at their equipment, if they're out of range,
if they're doing something that's uncharacteristic, if they suddenly begin overbooking,
we can alert a customer that something's going on in
that load. And so we catch people both at the
at the signing level, we catch them at the load
booking level, and then we'll look for anomalies and transit
(16:13):
and actually catch a load that's potentially being stolen and
allow the customer to intervene. When we see a.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Flag, right, and then when you guys see something that's fishy,
did you let the authorities know? Or I guess a
crime hasn't been committed yet, So.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, that would be a little bit like minority report,
like I think there's going to be a crime and
you should go arrest this guy, which I mean most
of the time we're right. So we do a couple
of things. One we're a little bit different than most
SaaS or software businesses is that we will we will
absolutely provide labor to a problem to service our customers.
So we do two things. One of the other reasons
that fraud was able to thrive is because freight brokers
(16:53):
didn't have the ability to manage exceptions when it came
to motor carrier compliance. They had to constantly dig through
all of the data in multiple screens. So we do
is we just say, look, here's what you need to
look at on a carrier. We just need to look
at these three things, and so we provide them really
robust exception management, and the biggest brokers in the country
they just consume that into their system and they are
(17:14):
building AI and automation around that, and it's really beautiful
for a mid market broker. We provide them a really
beautiful screen where we just tell them here are the
things you need to go look at. That's what we do.
From a product side, From a service side, we actually
call them. We'll call the motor carrier if we think
there's an anomaly and say, hey, this is what it
looks like like. We've called carriers before and they've said,
(17:35):
I don't that's not my load. I don't have that.
Nobody gave me that load, right, And so oftentimes what
happens is if a bad actor can get one load,
they can get ten. So if we can stop them
at the first one, we prevent them from getting the
other ten. So a lot of what we do is
very dynamic. So to plainly we give them exceptions to manage,
but we also support them by calling the carrier and
(17:58):
calling the broker and saying you need to look at this.
We will our customer success team will actually alert the
freight broker to help them understand the exceptions were given.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Over right, you mentioned earlier that you know it's gotten
pretty sophisticated, and from what I understand, like a lot
of this fraud, it's not just you know, some guy
in his basement. A lot of it as is out
of the country. It's like Eastern European like, it's.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Teams of people overseas. I mean downloading, downloading the FMCSA
database and running complex sequel queries to look for anomalies
and email addresses that they can. Then I mean we
saw what was the We got the L and I
file one day and I think we saw.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
What's the L and I file for those.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Licensing and insurance from the FMCSA. They produced a licening
and insurance file and in that are changes to motor
carrier records, right, and we saw mass changes in like
like ten or twelve thousand phone numbers one day, like
just mass changes, all changed to different phone numbers with
the same area code prefix. Like is people don't you
(19:00):
don't do that over now right? Right? So now, okay,
so when I talk about how they're adapted, well they
figured out that we're hip to that. So now what
they do is they they are trying to buy MC numbers.
We call them seasoned. They're seasoned dem C numbers. They've
been existing for a few years. They've actually had trucks
on them, and they'll call some owner and offer them
(19:21):
twenty five thousand dollars anywhere from five to twenty five
thousand dollars to buy their company. They're not buying the company,
they're buying the log in information to their to their
to all their accounts, and they'll go out and they'll
they'll they'll purchase as many of those season dem c's.
So what happened before is you just went got mc
numbers and it was really easy to get to a
broker's network, and you just you burned them and you
(19:43):
just kept going. And we've made it really hard. You
can't do that anymore. We just can't. So now you
have to go buy season mc numbers and there's a
very short window of how long you can do that
before you burn them. And so the reason one of
the things is it's gotten more expensive. Right, So the
the operating costs of the bad actors actually gone up
(20:05):
because they're having to get more sophisticated and they're having
to invest more capital in their own in their own
theft business because they have to go purchase seasoned m
C numbers. So now you actually have collusion and like
these owners, they're not innocent. Man, you meet a guy
in a McDonald's parking lot and sign a shady bill
of sale with no asset transfer. They don't want your trucks,
(20:27):
they just want your logins, like they know. Yeah, these owners,
these these sellers that claim to be legitimate, they know.
I mean, come on right, Like then that's literally how
these things happen. Meet me in a parking lot. I
don't want anybody to see me. Here's your bill of sale,
here's your twenty.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Five thousand dollars cash.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Write down all your log in information, not your customer list,
anything else.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
Just to log in.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, I'm just curious, you know. It seems like double broking.
It kind of like creates a lot of fraud in
the industry. Is like the TIA, which is like for
those that don't know, it's the industry trade group for
for freight brokers. Are they actively trying to pass laws
or get laws passed where double broking is illegal or
do they like double broking because sometimes there's a need
(21:16):
for it.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
So there's let's talk about double brokering. So double brokering
is the word we use when we want to talk
about co brokering in a negative sense. Okay, but code
brokering is very different. So like here's what people understand.
All contract logistics is double brokering, like like federally like
they you don't. You can be a motor carrier, commoner
(21:40):
contract you can be a freight forwarder, or you can
be a freight broker. There is no designation for three
pl contract logistics. So when you when you look at
a Penske, a Writer, Robinson, TMC, these are all people
that have contract logistics businesses that contract other freight brokers.
(22:02):
That technically is double broker. But that's a legitimate contracted
co brokering agreement, right, it is papered. There are agreements
in place, so that exists. Right, contract logistics where two
three pls are sharing business, that is technically double broker.
So that's not bad. It's the unknown, shady double brokering
(22:25):
that's problem. Now back to t TA lobbies has been
lobbying Congress for years about double brokering and dispatch services
and Congress doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Man. Yeah, but it's a big issue, right, you know,
you're huge. We were talking about offline. You know, it
impacts the cost of to consumers because you know, it
is not a victimless crime.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
No it's not. And so and the thing that that
would be important to understand is when I got into
this business, not a ton of freight moved through through brokers.
You know, the company I started with was about an
eighty million dollar top line revenue business when I started,
when I when I left that business about one hundred
and fifty million, and it was a it was a
top one hundred freight broker. There are many, many, many
(23:15):
one hundred and fifty million dollars freight brokers out there, right,
and so and there are many billion dollar brokers. So
fragmentation is increasing within small motor carriers. So a lot
of people don't know that ninety six percent of fleets
going up and down the road are comprised of ten
trucks or less. Right, So the the transports that your
(23:35):
audience may cover, they they're they're four percent market right right.
Most of the market is the small owner operator. And
so there's a lot of fragmentation in that business. And
then and brokers, brokers scooped that up. Brokers make help
try to help balance those networks and large large fleets,
and that's only going to get that's only going to
(23:56):
continue because large fleets are moving more and more away
from what we would call it irregular route or one
way moves and concreasingly moving to either exclusively dropping hook
or dedicated mm hmm right. So like like, I don't
want to out of because are my customers. But there's
a lot of there's a lot of large public trucking companies.
They're not gonna pick up your one way freight anymore. Yeah,
(24:18):
you're gonna pay them for all their miles, or they're
gonna they're gonna build a really robust network with dropping
hook freight. So it only increases fragmentation, which only increases
the need for freight brokers. And so so what happens
is the freight broker ends up picking a lot of
the expense and the liability because the shipper pool pushes
all the liability to the broker. The small motor carrey
doesn't have any money. It's a penny's business, and so
(24:40):
the cost fraud drives insurance cost up, it drives operating
expense up. Okay, so the broker then has to raise
the rate just to be even able to cover themselves. Well,
the shipper doesn't absorb that. It goes to you, it
goes to me, right right, And so all of the
the expense of fraud and the liability that the shipper
(25:03):
pushes and forces onto the broker all gets pushed to
the consumer.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Right, and insurances for those listening, the insurance has become
a major issue for a lot of trucking companies.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Their premiums have gone up considerably.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
And not only their premiums, but you know, when there's
a lawsuit, those verdicts tend to be extremely high relative
to you know, where a typical verdict might have been
five years ago. So Planet off Attorneys, if you're driving anywhere,
you see some of those billboards on the side of
the roads for the Planet Attorneys going after trucking companies
(25:39):
because they're viewed just having deep pockets and it really
does impact their margins and the trucking company's ability to
reinvest in their fleet. And to your point, that's kind
of why, like the large companies like the JB Hunts
of the world, would rather do dedicated or push stuff
into their brokerage business versus buying trucks.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
For the regular route business.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah, because for a large string company, consistency reduces risk,
right right, I know what I'm doing, I'm doing it
more and more and then the the insurance cost is
also high for a broker. What's interesting about insurance cost
because what you're really talking about is is auto liability,
like the liability insurance of the and that was always
the big one, and brokers were always straddling this line
(26:23):
between vicarious liability and negligent hiring. Right, you're gonna assume
me because I didn't do enough, or're gonna assume me
because I did too much. Okay, that's that was always
the one. But now we've also seen really really the
cost of cargo insurance has gone up. Right, So if
you're a freight broker, a lot of times your contingent cargo,
(26:46):
they're not great policies. It's very hard to trigger coverage.
There's a lot of exclusions, and so now you're kind
of getting if you're a freight broker and a carre
you're kind of getting double hit. Your liability premiums are
going way up because of the religious nature of just
our society, and your your cargo premiums are going way
up because of the amount of theft and losses associating
(27:07):
with fraud.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Is is there like one thing or maybe two things
that the industry can do, whether it's the broker industry
or the trucking industry. Besides using services like Highway to
reduce fraud or are there like like easy wins out
there that the industry should pick up as best practices.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah, I mean what we're really advocating for is even
even outside of Highway, just adopts standards. Right. So there's
a there's a freight fraud symposium that Freightwaves is hosting
in May, and one of the things that we're going
to try to advocate for is just not to understand
that like this is this is a product to go buy,
but but it's a kyc kyb. It's a standard the
(27:47):
industry should adopt, and so shippers should do the same thing,
like I think I think carriers are doing are doing
everything they can. That's a again, it's a penny's business,
so they're already they're already strapped.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Right right, Actually in this environment.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Yeah, I mean, the best brokers in the country they're
doing this. They're doing everything they can to fight for
their shipper, to fight for their business because it erodes
their margins and it then when the more you have,
the more fraud you have in your business. If you're
if you're a large three pl it impacts your the
service to the shipper because you're you're wasting time on fraud, right,
(28:23):
I think I think shippers could get more engaged and
own their part of the problem, right and and and
that has to do with some of the the unrealistic
expectations they put on the freight broker and what they
do at the top. Like there there are things that
a shipper could do to collaborate with the broker at
the point of pickup that would greatly reduce the instance
(28:46):
of theft.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Can you give it like a simple example.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, I mean one of the easiest things is just
just verify the driver. I mean, we've seen theft events
where the shipper makes a photocopy of an expired driver's
license and lets the ship then go right right. So,
one thing that's really common in theft is a bad
actor will take all of the bolts on the trailer
(29:11):
locksley and on the outside of their smooth rivets on the
inside the bolts, they'll reverse them. So for six bolts,
you can unmove the whole lock mechanism, the bolt seal
stays intact. You can pill for the load, put the
lock back and the bolt seal shows up in tact,
shippers should just like look at the trailer and not
load that trailer. That trailer is configured for one reason
and one reason only. Hey, I'm gonna strip it and
put it on the rail, or I'm gonna pill for
(29:32):
the freight, or I'm gonna steal the freight. That's it
is the only reason you have that configuration. Hey, just
how about just don't load that trailer. Yeah, I just
don't do that, right. I mean, let's think about an
electronic bill of lading. Right, so there's a there's a
big problem with pil fridge. Right, Whereas something like like
what I just explained happens. Somebody goes and picks up
a load of one hundred TVs, an eighty show up,
(29:54):
but in transit, they've doctored the bill of lading. Right,
So Johnny on the dock at the receiver signs of
bill A says eighty TVs and he counts eighty TVs
and he's like, man, work it to go. So why
why are we still doing like why do we still
have a paper bill of lading?
Speaker 3 (30:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:11):
And just we just take there, Like what does somebody
not have a computer that can like send in a communication.
Is like they're supposed to be a hundred of these.
If the piece of paper says something different, that's a problem. Like, like,
how in twenty twenty five, is that the way we're
still doing things. It just blows my mind.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yeah, especially everybody.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
You know a lot of old trucks have to have
pretty much little computers in their in their trucks already.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
H oh, we're putting cameras on them, right, I mean
what we've done to the driver and the cab. But
yet a shipper can just kind of willy nilly ship
something on a on a piece of paper, right, So
it's that that piece of paper is electronically produced from
an ERP and it goes out, but there's nothing to
verify that that document hasn't been altered between the time
(30:59):
that it leaves the shipper and gets to the continue. Now,
nowhere else in commerce do we treat critical documents that
way right Nowhere everything's docu signed er behind a wall,
Like so, why are we still handing a physical piece
of paper that can be doctored to a driver and
(31:20):
then like just letting that be signed for it the
other end? Like that blows my mind that that still exists.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
So how does that change? That means that change from
from a.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Federal supper has to take some responsibility.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
But does there have to be a federal regulation that says, well.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
God, I would hope not. I mean, I'm I'm the
rigging guy. Like when the government shows up says they're
here to help, that's a really bad thing. And so
I just I think.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Some regulations are good, not all.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Some regulations are good. Some regulations are good. I think
it's I think it's standards, right, Like, this is one
of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately.
You know, the two thousand and eight financial crisis produced
these standards. You look at Robinhood, do you look at Stripe,
you look, you'll get the fintech boom that came out
of that and it it it created a lot of
really positive downstream effects for the consumer and the way
(32:09):
that we just interact with financial institutions. And I think
the industry just has to get together and adopt standards.
And look, one of the things we say at highway,
like we have a lane we exist between the freight
broker and the motor carrier. I can't go fix problems
that aren't that aren't mine to solve. You know, if
we kind of go extending ourselves into things we're not
good at, we're just gonna make a mess. Right. But
I think we have to look at the other cracks
(32:30):
in the system, and the industry as a whole has
to start adopting some standards around the way that we're
going to communicate and transference information.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Well, let's talk a little bit more about about highways.
So it's a relatively new company. When was it When was.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
It founded twenty two? Sometime in twenty two, okay, twenty two,
I think, very new.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
And are you guys pee owned or is it the
founders still have all the ownership?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
We are not. The founder owns the majority of business.
We raised a very moderate amount of capital and are profitable,
so we we control our own destiny, so to speak.
We're not We're not a fundraising company. We're a for
profit company.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
And growth is coming from getting more into the that
fragmented brokerage industry, or is it offering more products that
are related to fraud.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
It's a little bit of both. The majority of the
growth we kind of there was no category of carry
identity before us Lee, so we were able to create
in trademark category and really talk about carry identity. And
so what we like to say is as a startup,
we're blessed to be born with product market fit. We
(33:43):
didn't have to kind of go figure that out, and
so our growth was really rapid. I've been in the
industry for a long time, Jordan had a tremendous amount
of credibility coming from the payments business, and so what
we were able to do early was just leverage our
personal relationships and promise our friends we would help them.
Personal friends of ours that were losing hundreds of thousands
(34:03):
of dollars and millions of dollars because they had incumbent
providers that fell asleep at the wheel, and so we
just said, hey, what will help you? We promise will
help you. And so we really focused on early was
just getting five customers and then getting ten and solving
a problem. And those customers told our story for us.
And so you know, our first our first one hundred
(34:25):
customers were all referral and that's really grown organically in
that way. Now today there is growth expansion because you know,
we're building more products. We needed to get into the
inbox and fight the fraud that exists at the inbox level.
We needed to get into the phone system. Bad actors
will flood phone, so we have a phone product. We
(34:45):
needed to get into the visibility space to be able
to tell if locations were being spoofed. But everything we
do is around fraud, right, Everything we do is around
protecting the broker. Then and then we focus on the
downstream efficiencies that come from now.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Right And are you just right now, your your service
available just in the US or do you are you
guys in Canada and Mexico or other other parts of
the world.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Yeah, so only in the US. Obviously we service Canada
and Mexico because our customers cross freight in and out
of those countries. But we don't I wouldn't say we
have a presence there, you know, you know, buy some
transports customer, they're Canadian company and there they cross freight
and now logistics. So so in that way we service
(35:30):
Canada and Mexico, and that we serve freight brokers that
are moving freight in and out.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Of those markets. Gotcha, And so you know, you mentioned
that you've been in the industry for a while. How
did you stumble into transportation or.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Like everybody so nobody goes to college, at least not
in my demographic and is like, I'm going to be
a freight broker, right, you know, we're all told to
I get into commerce or computer science or something like.
I literally stumbled into it. I was in college and
engaged and needed a job, and I just started looking
for sales jobs and I got recruited when I was
(36:07):
in two thousand and four, and I fell in love
with the I fell in love with the business. I
fell in love with the idea of being able to
just solve a problem between between two really different parties,
you know, shippers that are just trying to find things
moved and motor carriers that are just trying to make
a living and be efficient. And I just I fell
in love with it. And I tried to get out
of it a couple of times, and I just ended
up backing it. So yeah, I've done that in a
(36:28):
variety of context for almost twenty years now.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
And I guess what do you miss most about your
days of being a freight broker?
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Don't miss it at all? What I because what I
love is I'm so the business is so ingrained in me.
But I actually love is being able to serve freight
brokers from a position of having been one. Is what
I suffered from as an operator were tech vendors that
didn't understand my business and didn't want to take the
time to understand it. So I think one of the
(36:58):
reasons how he's been successful. I know one of the
reasons how he's been successful is we weren't founded out
of Silicon Valley with a thesis and a fundraise that
told brokers we were smarter than them, and brokers suffered
from that for about ten years. And if you look
at a lot of those companies, they haven't they haven't
had an exit, they haven't gone public, they haven't done anything.
They've sold at a discount or been absorbed by an
(37:19):
operating company or something like that. And so so as
a broker, like I lived that, I lived paying freight
bills for people that didn't listen and wanted to or
these digital brokers that wanted to come on the scene
with you know, millions and millions of dollars in capital
and say they were smarter than the freight broker, and
that hasn't gone well for them. And so what I
love about having been a freight broker now serving freight
(37:40):
brokers is we served them from the context of their seat.
We served them from the context of their business, their
p and L and what they need, rather than than
treating them like they have some existential problem that we're
going to be the hope for. That was never the answer,
and we just we just won't treat our customers.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
That way, right, And so I like to ask my
guests this questions. Usually do it towards the end. You know,
is there a book on leadership or business or transportation
that you know stuck with you through the years?
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh? Man, other's several. I've never read a book on transportation.
I've never been asked that question. Maybe I should go
find one. If someone's written a great book on transportation,
send it to me. I think. I think the first
book that everyone should read and reread a couple of
times a year is How to Win Friends and Influence
People by Deale Carnegie. I had to read that in
(38:31):
my first job and the first sales training I was
ever in, and I reread that every couple of years.
My favorite chapter in that book is how to talk
in terms of the other person's interest and really understand people.
I think my favorite business book on execution is Great
by Choice. Most people love good to Great. I prefer
Great by Choice. It's a follow up to that book,
(38:53):
and in that book, Jim Collins really talks about concepts
like the twenty mile March and how to really get
specific about creating a flywheel in a business, and things
like capitalizing on luck events. I just I've learned so
much from his research. Yeah, those are those are probably
two of my favorite books. And I'm reading a book
right now that I love I would recommend called Play Bigger.
(39:14):
And ever since I worked with Craig Fuller, I was
fascinated about this by this idea of category creation, and
so Play Bigger talks about creating categories and doing big things.
And one of the things I love about that book
is that it talks about there's nobody. Nobody ever set
nobody created a category or disrupted an industry by setting
out to do so. They set out to think about
(39:36):
a problem in a fundamentally different way, and it became
disruptive and it became a category creator. And that's really
the story of Highway. We didn't set out to create
a new we just wanted to solve a problem. We
want to think about the problem different. So those are
those are my three top ones right now, i'd give people.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
All right, great And for those that don't know, Craig
Fuller is from Freight Waves fame. He started freight Waves
and which is a huge transport portal for those that
they're interested to learn more about the industry. So, Michael,
I really want to really want to thank you for
your time and insights. And I think what you guys
are doing at the Highway is really great because like
(40:12):
you mentioned, you know, you're not just solving a problem,
You're you're really making supply chains what I would say
is probably more efficient. So, uh, you know, best of
luck and continuing to do that.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I appreciate it all right, and I want to thank
you for tuning in. If you liked the episode, please
subscribe and leave review. We've lined up a number of
great guests for the podcast, so please check back to
your conversations with C suite executives, shippers, regulators, and decision
makers within the freight markets. Also, if you want to
learn more about freight transportation markets, check out our work
(40:45):
on the Bloomberg terminal at b Igo or on social media.
This is Lee Clasgow signing off and thanks for talking
transports with me.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Bye.
Hi, everyone of This is Lee Clasgow when We're Talking Transports.
Welcome to Bloomberg Intelligence Talking Transports podcast. I'm your host,
Lee Klaskow, Senior Freight transportational Logistics Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence,
Bloomberg and House Research arm of almost five hundred analysts
and strategists around the globe. Before diving in a little
public service announcement, your support is instrumental to keep bringing
(00:29):
great guests and conversations to you, our listeners, and we
need your support. So please, if you enjoy this podcast,
share it, like it and leave a comment. Also, if
you have any ideas for future episodes or just want
to talk transports, please hit me up on the Bloomberg terminal,
on LinkedIn or on Twitter at Logistics League. Now on
(00:50):
to our episode and we're delighted to have today. Michael Cainey,
chief Commercial Officer at Highway, a Rollie's held since joining
the company in twenty twenty two. Michael has twenty years
of experience in leadership and advisory roles in corporate development, sales, brokerage,
managed services, technology and fleet operations. He also was the
(01:11):
founder of Growth and Nexus, a consultancy firm Michael, Thank
you so much for joining us today on talking transports.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Thanks Ley, it's good to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
So Highway we all drive on them, but I guess
a lot of people might not know it is a company.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Let's talk about what does Highway do.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, Highway exists to reduce the friction that existed between
motor carriers and freight brokers. We do that by providing
a really robust identity and access management platform. So we
really we do two things. We eliminate fraud between the
broker and carrier connection and then we improve the speed
at which they can connect and conduct business. Right.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
And you know, one of the reasons why I wanted
to have you guys on as I met you guys
out at Manifest great conference.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
If you've ever been, you should go. You know, And
fraud is become such.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
An issue within transportation. Can you talk a little bit
about like how did fraud become such a big deal
for the trucking industry.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, so there was. What's interesting is there was always
there was always fraud in the trucking industry. I started,
I started in this business as a freight broker in
two thousand and four. And the thing that we dealt
with the most was the occasional theft and the occasional
double brokering, And for the audience is not familiar with that,
(02:31):
let's just kind of unpack that just just a little bit.
Double brokering is when a freight broker contracts a motor
carrier to move a shipment, and that motor carrier then
then brokers that freight out again, right, And that motor
carrier may have legitimate freight broker authority where they may
be giving it to a cousin or a friend or
another owner operator, and they may pay that carrier and
(02:54):
make a little money on the spread. And in that case,
you're just kind of upset about it as a freighter
because you overpaid, and there's probably some some liability issues
because you don't know who you actually contract with, right,
and that's there's risk there. The worst kind of double
brokering is when someone takes a shiment from you, acts
like they're a carrier, gives it to somebody else, doesn't
(03:16):
pay the underlying motor carrier, and just disappears. So they
collect the money from you, and then the other motor
carrier shows up saying nobody paid me, and that motor
carrier still owed that money. That's the worst kind of double.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Broker And just to back up, so double brokering in
with itself is not illegal.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
It's not it's not illegal if you have brokerge authority, okay, right.
But but every every every contract between a freight broker
and a motor carrier contractually prohibits double brokering, okay, right.
And so there's the problem that you have with double
brokering that the motoring public should understand is that you
you lose you lose the ability to vet the ultimate
(03:56):
underlying motor carrier. Right. So a freight broker is going
to sign up for all kinds of egregious indemnification with
a shipper and agree to do all of these things
when they select motor carriers. And then if if they
give it to an entity that doesn't do that, right,
there they've got they've just got some liability exposure contractionly
with whatever they've agreed to with that shipper, right and
then and then the worst kind of double brokering is
(04:18):
just when when they the broker ends up double paying, right,
because they have to pay for that shipment twice, all right,
So then there's there's fictitious pickup and and theft, and
that's always existed, okay, but what happened during the pandemic.
So fraud needs three things to exist and thrive prospective gain, anonymity,
and urgency. There's there's always been a very easy prospective
(04:42):
gain when it comes to I mean, the transaction I
just explained is pretty simple to pull off. There's a
very low barrier to entry for both a freight broker
and a trucking company, so you can kind of get
an MC number. And there's there's plenty of people that
talk negatively about the FMCSA I don't I don't need
to swim in that lane. There's other people that do it,
but there's a low barrier to entry. It's fairly easy
(05:02):
to get going. And you can hide behind a public
load board and a you know, back in the day
it was a fact summer, not it's an email address
and pretend to be anybody you want, and and and
we don't federally, we don't prosecute it. Like no, it's
not a big deal. You walk into a bank and
steal two hundre fifty thousand dollars, they're going to come
after you. You still two und fifty thousand dollars load
(05:23):
a cargo. They argue about whose problem it is, right, right,
So so the anonymity is easy. And then the urgency
has always been there, especially in a freight brokerage environment.
It's always urgent. It's a last minute, shit minutes. Something
has to happen. It's a it's a high, it's a
it's a boiler room type environment. At least it has
been historically. And the pandemic just we all know, like
(05:44):
everybody knows it just accentuated that m right, and so
fraud lives thrives an urgency, right, I mean, just think
about think about like the elder abuse schemes, right when
someone calls you and they're from Africa and they need
you to wire them ten thousand dollars, Like just think
about like this has to happen now, or the irs
(06:06):
schemes that make these phone calls, like, oh my god,
it has to happen right now. And if it doesn't,
like that's literally how freight moves. That's how about twenty
thirty percent of the freight market moves. Oh my goodness,
it has to happen right now. And bad actors have exploited.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
That, right, And when I think of theft and trucking,
you know, I think of good fellows and a guy's
strong arming a truck driver and stealing it. But in
today's world, that's not really how it happens, is it.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
No, it's it's not. And so again, if anyone wants
to go find Scott Cornell's interviews on the internet, He's
interviewed a lot. He's far better at explaining the history
behind us. He's been he's been helping put away bad
guys for twenty years. But strategic cargo theft did it
did used to exist that way, Like there were rings
(06:53):
of people in parts of Kentucky, southern California, Texas that
that would just show up and hook to a trailer
or wait for a guy to go into a truck stop.
But it's very sophisticated now. So so we're now being
told by lots of sources that there are there are
black market by orders for certain types of cargo before
it's ever stolen. So most people think like a thief
(07:13):
is like, oh, it's really easy to sell Tito's vodka. No,
there's an order for that, right, There's there's somebody going Hey,
go get go find me five loads of Tito's vodka.
Go find me. Tires are a really high theft right
now because they can move on the black market. So
there are there are rings that are they're filling by
orders for for things that are in high demand to
(07:35):
be resold on the black market.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
You know, obviously fraud theft a big deal. I guess
can you talk a little bit about you know, not
to make this so much of a commercial, but can
you talk about what does Highway do and how do
you prevent fraud because obviously if you're a broker or
a trucker, you kind of you kind of need products
like Highway to really help you combat fraud.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah, so I think it's probably and yeah, we can
absolutely without it being a commercial because really what we
do is we apply the same k y C KYB,
Know your customer, know your business, the same principles that
exist and literally every area of life that you and
every listener engages in, we just apply that and contextualize
(08:17):
it to the relationship between a freight broker and motor
carry So so for people that haven't followed Highway, our
CEO Jordan graft ran a Payments business inside of Triumph.
So members of this audience is probably very familiar with
Trent Financial and who they are in the trucking sector,
very very large factoring payments business and what happened when
Jordan was running Triumph Pay. So Triumph Pay paid freight
(08:39):
bills on behalf of freight brokers create a payments network,
and Jordan was getting payment reversal requests or stop payment requests.
Well that you can't just do. You can't just not
pay somebody, right, you have you have a contract like
somebody submits pod especially when you're a bank. You can't
just not pay somebody because your buddy at the freight
brokers told you not to, right. So that's one aspect.
(09:00):
And the second thing is, you know, payment reversals and
a payments business are really expensive. You know, it's it's
a it's it doesn't cost much to process payments, but
it's really expensive to reverse a payment. And so Jordan
looked at it and said, hey man, why are you
Why am I getting these reversal requests? And what brokers
were repeatedly saying, and then the growth was exponentials. We're
not really sure if they hauled the load right or
(09:21):
we can't find the load. And so he's saying, wait
a minute, you vetted on, you signed a contract, how
do you what do you mean they you didn't know,
you don't know who hauled the load. And when he
dug into the process, what he realized is that there
was no KYC. Like the very basic cybersecurity know your
customer principles that exist in every aspect of our life
(09:43):
did not exist in trucking. Right. It was very it
was very bottoms up approach. Hey, I found someone and
they're going to move this load for me. Now let
me go figure out if they're good or or hey,
I'm going to go put my freight on a on
a public load board, which is in these days tantamount
to Craigslist. Let somebody call me. I don't know who's calling.
(10:05):
I have no idea who they are, but I'm gonna
take their word for it when they give me an
MC number and just hope for the best. Right let
them let them go to a website and fill out
a form right in sensely, So it's like we're gonna
go from the bottom and work our way up and hope
for the best. And what we just said was like, wait,
a minute, hang on, time out. Nobody does this, like
no healthcare doesn't do this, banking doesn't do this. Let's
(10:25):
start at the top and create an identity management platform
that just allows carriers to operate in the light, helps
good actors go really fast and introduces friction to bad actors,
or introduces friction when we don't see things, and allow
allow an entity to self heal the gray areas that
(10:46):
we can't prove.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
So how does how does that happen?
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So what is your Obviously it's a technology driven solutions.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
So think about think about anything that you might engage
with that that it's a single stile experience, like like
when you use Google or you use something like stripe. Right,
you're gonna you're gonna be provided with a challenge that
forces you to prove who you are, and they're going
to put you through some hoops and give you some
codes and make you do a couple of different things
(11:15):
to not only make you prove who you are, but
you know, make sure somebody's on in personing you're not
using a different device. So so we did the same thing.
So when a motor carrier comes to highway, they have
to claim their profile claim their identity. To think about
like a like Like Google has profiles on every restaurant
North America, and the restaurant can go, hey, that's my restaurant.
I'm going to sign in and it's my restaurant. I
(11:36):
want to now manage that profile. It's the same thing.
We have a profile and every motor caure in North America.
And so when the motor carrier shows up, they sign in.
How we have to prove three things? One, who are they?
Who's the human? You can only authenticate one user to
one motor carrier. And we're going to look at all
kinds of things. Where are they logging in from? Are
they time traveling? Are they are they logging in from
(11:56):
Russia in the morning and Indianapolis in the afternoon? Are
they to use VPNs or verse residential proxies? Like? Are
they trying to hide? Who's the hum The second thing
is are they actually the motor carrier? So oftenimes people
will log in and they look kind of clean, but
are they authorized to represent that motor carrier? Right, they
may even be at the motor carrier, but they may
(12:17):
not be authorized to represent the motor carrier. Also, are
they a dispatch service. So one of the things that
a lot of people just in the in the in
your audience probably don't understand is there a companies out
there called dispatch services. They're not regulated, they're not freight brokers.
And I'll just call you and say, hey, Lee's trucking company.
You want me to dispatch for you. I'll go out
(12:38):
and find some loads for you. Right, And they may
be doing that for twenty different trucking companies and not
telling the people they're contracting with which company is actually
doing it. They're not. They don't carry any insurance. They're
just these wild West people with a phone and a computer,
all right, So we suck that. And then the third
piece is the motor carrier's capability. So this is what
didn't exist before Highway. One was the identity piece, and
(12:59):
three was the capability piece, which is a basic pillar
of identity access management. Right, who are you? Are you capable?
Trucking companies that have for example, five drive aands just
the NILA eighteen wheelers going up and down the road, right,
should not be booking twenty loads at a time. They
(13:21):
shouldn't be taking refrigerated freight, they shouldn't be taking flatbed freight.
So one of the problems that existed in fraud before
Highway is if you had a motor carrier number and
an insurance certificate and some trucks, and somebody could go
see that you had trucks have been inspected, they assumed
things about you. Right in the way that small asset
based carriers and even large ones have made money over
(13:42):
the years is by overbooking their markets. So anybody that
covers transports knows that you know, large public fleets operate
between a ninety five and a ninety nine operating ratio,
So the way they make money is by overbooking their
markets and then picking which freight they want to hauld.
Small carries do the same thing. So I'm gonna go
out and I'm gonna I'm gonna take my five trucks,
I'm gonna boo ten loads, pick the ones I want
to move, and either double broker or just not pick
(14:04):
up the other five. And so one of the things
we do is we say, hey, we're going to look
at your equipment and represent to the broker your actual capability,
and we're going to allow the broker to hold you
accountable to what you're capable of doing and not over
extending yourself. And so we do that by looking at
both the equipment account and the veins that are scheduled
on the insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
And so at highways. So who are the customers? Are
they the broker, are they the carriers or are they both?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Yeah, so we only so I would say that that
carriers are absolutely a customer and that we have to
give them a great experience and we also have to
protect them. But we don't monetize that relationship, right, So
we do have a dual side of network. We do
have motor carriers using highway every day, hundreds of thousands
of times a day, hundreds of thousands of users. But
the paying customer is the freight broker. Okay, so the
(14:52):
customer that shows up and engages in the service to
protect their network is the freight broker. And we do
business with most of the top one hundre freightbrokers in
the country.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
And then can you just like just talk about you
know what a what a typical fraud that you guys
are able to prevent looks like.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
It's all aspects of it. Double broker and fictitious pick up,
the impersonation of a carrier. So all of those, all
the impersonation of the carrier leads to thefter double broker,
and so there's multiple layers at which we engage. And
one of the things we do lead it's very interesting
that know the provider does, is we we put all
(15:31):
of our technology, we actually get to the load level.
So so sometimes bad actors are very very very very good,
and they it's a it's a game. They love to
try to figure out how to thwart any any new
fraud prevention efforts. So sometimes a bad actor will get
all the way to the point of getting a load,
but all of the things I just explained to you,
(15:52):
we boil them down to the load level. So when
we look at their equipment, if they're out of range,
if they're doing something that's uncharacteristic, if they suddenly begin overbooking,
we can alert a customer that something's going on in
that load. And so we catch people both at the
at the signing level, we catch them at the load
booking level, and then we'll look for anomalies and transit
(16:13):
and actually catch a load that's potentially being stolen and
allow the customer to intervene. When we see a.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Flag, right, and then when you guys see something that's fishy,
did you let the authorities know? Or I guess a
crime hasn't been committed yet, So.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, that would be a little bit like minority report,
like I think there's going to be a crime and
you should go arrest this guy, which I mean most
of the time we're right. So we do a couple
of things. One we're a little bit different than most
SaaS or software businesses is that we will we will
absolutely provide labor to a problem to service our customers.
So we do two things. One of the other reasons
that fraud was able to thrive is because freight brokers
(16:53):
didn't have the ability to manage exceptions when it came
to motor carrier compliance. They had to constantly dig through
all of the data in multiple screens. So we do
is we just say, look, here's what you need to
look at on a carrier. We just need to look
at these three things, and so we provide them really
robust exception management, and the biggest brokers in the country
they just consume that into their system and they are
(17:14):
building AI and automation around that, and it's really beautiful
for a mid market broker. We provide them a really
beautiful screen where we just tell them here are the
things you need to go look at. That's what we do.
From a product side, From a service side, we actually
call them. We'll call the motor carrier if we think
there's an anomaly and say, hey, this is what it
looks like like. We've called carriers before and they've said,
(17:35):
I don't that's not my load. I don't have that.
Nobody gave me that load, right, And so oftentimes what
happens is if a bad actor can get one load,
they can get ten. So if we can stop them
at the first one, we prevent them from getting the
other ten. So a lot of what we do is
very dynamic. So to plainly we give them exceptions to manage,
but we also support them by calling the carrier and
(17:58):
calling the broker and saying you need to look at this.
We will our customer success team will actually alert the
freight broker to help them understand the exceptions were given.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
Over right, you mentioned earlier that you know it's gotten
pretty sophisticated, and from what I understand, like a lot
of this fraud, it's not just you know, some guy
in his basement. A lot of it as is out
of the country. It's like Eastern European like, it's.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Teams of people overseas. I mean downloading, downloading the FMCSA
database and running complex sequel queries to look for anomalies
and email addresses that they can. Then I mean we
saw what was the We got the L and I
file one day and I think we saw.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
What's the L and I file for those.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Licensing and insurance from the FMCSA. They produced a licening
and insurance file and in that are changes to motor
carrier records, right, and we saw mass changes in like
like ten or twelve thousand phone numbers one day, like
just mass changes, all changed to different phone numbers with
the same area code prefix. Like is people don't you
(19:00):
don't do that over now right? Right? So now, okay,
so when I talk about how they're adapted, well they
figured out that we're hip to that. So now what
they do is they they are trying to buy MC numbers.
We call them seasoned. They're seasoned dem C numbers. They've
been existing for a few years. They've actually had trucks
on them, and they'll call some owner and offer them
(19:21):
twenty five thousand dollars anywhere from five to twenty five
thousand dollars to buy their company. They're not buying the company,
they're buying the log in information to their to their
to all their accounts, and they'll go out and they'll
they'll they'll purchase as many of those season dem c's.
So what happened before is you just went got mc
numbers and it was really easy to get to a
broker's network, and you just you burned them and you
(19:43):
just kept going. And we've made it really hard. You
can't do that anymore. We just can't. So now you
have to go buy season mc numbers and there's a
very short window of how long you can do that
before you burn them. And so the reason one of
the things is it's gotten more expensive. Right, So the
the operating costs of the bad actors actually gone up
(20:05):
because they're having to get more sophisticated and they're having
to invest more capital in their own in their own
theft business because they have to go purchase seasoned m
C numbers. So now you actually have collusion and like
these owners, they're not innocent. Man, you meet a guy
in a McDonald's parking lot and sign a shady bill
of sale with no asset transfer. They don't want your trucks,
(20:27):
they just want your logins, like they know. Yeah, these owners,
these these sellers that claim to be legitimate, they know.
I mean, come on right, Like then that's literally how
these things happen. Meet me in a parking lot. I
don't want anybody to see me. Here's your bill of sale,
here's your twenty.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Five thousand dollars cash.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Write down all your log in information, not your customer list,
anything else.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
Just to log in.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah, I'm just curious, you know. It seems like double broking.
It kind of like creates a lot of fraud in
the industry. Is like the TIA, which is like for
those that don't know, it's the industry trade group for
for freight brokers. Are they actively trying to pass laws
or get laws passed where double broking is illegal or
do they like double broking because sometimes there's a need
(21:16):
for it.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
So there's let's talk about double brokering. So double brokering
is the word we use when we want to talk
about co brokering in a negative sense. Okay, but code
brokering is very different. So like here's what people understand.
All contract logistics is double brokering, like like federally like
they you don't. You can be a motor carrier, commoner
(21:40):
contract you can be a freight forwarder, or you can
be a freight broker. There is no designation for three
pl contract logistics. So when you when you look at
a Penske, a Writer, Robinson, TMC, these are all people
that have contract logistics businesses that contract other freight brokers.
(22:02):
That technically is double broker. But that's a legitimate contracted
co brokering agreement, right, it is papered. There are agreements
in place, so that exists. Right, contract logistics where two
three pls are sharing business, that is technically double broker.
So that's not bad. It's the unknown, shady double brokering
(22:25):
that's problem. Now back to t TA lobbies has been
lobbying Congress for years about double brokering and dispatch services
and Congress doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Man. Yeah, but it's a big issue, right, you know,
you're huge. We were talking about offline. You know, it
impacts the cost of to consumers because you know, it
is not a victimless crime.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
No it's not. And so and the thing that that
would be important to understand is when I got into
this business, not a ton of freight moved through through brokers.
You know, the company I started with was about an
eighty million dollar top line revenue business when I started,
when I when I left that business about one hundred
and fifty million, and it was a it was a
top one hundred freight broker. There are many, many, many
(23:15):
one hundred and fifty million dollars freight brokers out there, right,
and so and there are many billion dollar brokers. So
fragmentation is increasing within small motor carriers. So a lot
of people don't know that ninety six percent of fleets
going up and down the road are comprised of ten
trucks or less. Right, So the the transports that your
(23:35):
audience may cover, they they're they're four percent market right right.
Most of the market is the small owner operator. And
so there's a lot of fragmentation in that business. And
then and brokers, brokers scooped that up. Brokers make help
try to help balance those networks and large large fleets,
and that's only going to get that's only going to
(23:56):
continue because large fleets are moving more and more away
from what we would call it irregular route or one
way moves and concreasingly moving to either exclusively dropping hook
or dedicated mm hmm right. So like like, I don't
want to out of because are my customers. But there's
a lot of there's a lot of large public trucking companies.
They're not gonna pick up your one way freight anymore. Yeah,
(24:18):
you're gonna pay them for all their miles, or they're
gonna they're gonna build a really robust network with dropping
hook freight. So it only increases fragmentation, which only increases
the need for freight brokers. And so so what happens
is the freight broker ends up picking a lot of
the expense and the liability because the shipper pool pushes
all the liability to the broker. The small motor carrey
doesn't have any money. It's a penny's business, and so
(24:40):
the cost fraud drives insurance cost up, it drives operating
expense up. Okay, so the broker then has to raise
the rate just to be even able to cover themselves. Well,
the shipper doesn't absorb that. It goes to you, it
goes to me, right right, And so all of the
the expense of fraud and the liability that the shipper
(25:03):
pushes and forces onto the broker all gets pushed to
the consumer.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Right, and insurances for those listening, the insurance has become
a major issue for a lot of trucking companies.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Their premiums have gone up considerably.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
And not only their premiums, but you know, when there's
a lawsuit, those verdicts tend to be extremely high relative
to you know, where a typical verdict might have been
five years ago. So Planet off Attorneys, if you're driving anywhere,
you see some of those billboards on the side of
the roads for the Planet Attorneys going after trucking companies
(25:39):
because they're viewed just having deep pockets and it really
does impact their margins and the trucking company's ability to
reinvest in their fleet. And to your point, that's kind
of why, like the large companies like the JB Hunts
of the world, would rather do dedicated or push stuff
into their brokerage business versus buying trucks.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
For the regular route business.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Yeah, because for a large string company, consistency reduces risk,
right right, I know what I'm doing, I'm doing it
more and more and then the the insurance cost is
also high for a broker. What's interesting about insurance cost
because what you're really talking about is is auto liability,
like the liability insurance of the and that was always
the big one, and brokers were always straddling this line
(26:23):
between vicarious liability and negligent hiring. Right, you're gonna assume
me because I didn't do enough, or're gonna assume me
because I did too much. Okay, that's that was always
the one. But now we've also seen really really the
cost of cargo insurance has gone up. Right, So if
you're a freight broker, a lot of times your contingent cargo,
(26:46):
they're not great policies. It's very hard to trigger coverage.
There's a lot of exclusions, and so now you're kind
of getting if you're a freight broker and a carre
you're kind of getting double hit. Your liability premiums are
going way up because of the religious nature of just
our society, and your your cargo premiums are going way
up because of the amount of theft and losses associating
(27:07):
with fraud.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Is is there like one thing or maybe two things
that the industry can do, whether it's the broker industry
or the trucking industry. Besides using services like Highway to
reduce fraud or are there like like easy wins out
there that the industry should pick up as best practices.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Yeah, I mean what we're really advocating for is even
even outside of Highway, just adopts standards. Right. So there's
a there's a freight fraud symposium that Freightwaves is hosting
in May, and one of the things that we're going
to try to advocate for is just not to understand
that like this is this is a product to go buy,
but but it's a kyc kyb. It's a standard the
(27:47):
industry should adopt, and so shippers should do the same thing,
like I think I think carriers are doing are doing
everything they can. That's a again, it's a penny's business,
so they're already they're already strapped.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Right right, Actually in this environment.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Yeah, I mean, the best brokers in the country they're
doing this. They're doing everything they can to fight for
their shipper, to fight for their business because it erodes
their margins and it then when the more you have,
the more fraud you have in your business. If you're
if you're a large three pl it impacts your the
service to the shipper because you're you're wasting time on fraud, right,
(28:23):
I think I think shippers could get more engaged and
own their part of the problem, right and and and
that has to do with some of the the unrealistic
expectations they put on the freight broker and what they
do at the top. Like there there are things that
a shipper could do to collaborate with the broker at
the point of pickup that would greatly reduce the instance
(28:46):
of theft.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Can you give it like a simple example.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, I mean one of the easiest things is just
just verify the driver. I mean, we've seen theft events
where the shipper makes a photocopy of an expired driver's
license and lets the ship then go right right. So,
one thing that's really common in theft is a bad
actor will take all of the bolts on the trailer
(29:11):
locksley and on the outside of their smooth rivets on the
inside the bolts, they'll reverse them. So for six bolts,
you can unmove the whole lock mechanism, the bolt seal
stays intact. You can pill for the load, put the
lock back and the bolt seal shows up in tact,
shippers should just like look at the trailer and not
load that trailer. That trailer is configured for one reason
and one reason only. Hey, I'm gonna strip it and
put it on the rail, or I'm gonna pill for
(29:32):
the freight, or I'm gonna steal the freight. That's it
is the only reason you have that configuration. Hey, just
how about just don't load that trailer. Yeah, I just
don't do that, right. I mean, let's think about an
electronic bill of lading. Right, so there's a there's a
big problem with pil fridge. Right, Whereas something like like
what I just explained happens. Somebody goes and picks up
a load of one hundred TVs, an eighty show up,
(29:54):
but in transit, they've doctored the bill of lading. Right,
So Johnny on the dock at the receiver signs of
bill A says eighty TVs and he counts eighty TVs
and he's like, man, work it to go. So why
why are we still doing like why do we still
have a paper bill of lading?
Speaker 3 (30:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:11):
And just we just take there, Like what does somebody
not have a computer that can like send in a communication.
Is like they're supposed to be a hundred of these.
If the piece of paper says something different, that's a problem. Like, like,
how in twenty twenty five, is that the way we're
still doing things. It just blows my mind.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yeah, especially everybody.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
You know a lot of old trucks have to have
pretty much little computers in their in their trucks already.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
H oh, we're putting cameras on them, right, I mean
what we've done to the driver and the cab. But
yet a shipper can just kind of willy nilly ship
something on a on a piece of paper, right, So
it's that that piece of paper is electronically produced from
an ERP and it goes out, but there's nothing to
verify that that document hasn't been altered between the time
(30:59):
that it leaves the shipper and gets to the continue. Now,
nowhere else in commerce do we treat critical documents that
way right Nowhere everything's docu signed er behind a wall,
Like so, why are we still handing a physical piece
of paper that can be doctored to a driver and
(31:20):
then like just letting that be signed for it the
other end? Like that blows my mind that that still exists.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
So how does that change? That means that change from
from a.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Federal supper has to take some responsibility.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
But does there have to be a federal regulation that says, well.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
God, I would hope not. I mean, I'm I'm the
rigging guy. Like when the government shows up says they're
here to help, that's a really bad thing. And so
I just I think.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Some regulations are good, not all.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Some regulations are good. Some regulations are good. I think
it's I think it's standards, right, Like, this is one
of the things I've been thinking a lot about lately.
You know, the two thousand and eight financial crisis produced
these standards. You look at Robinhood, do you look at Stripe,
you look, you'll get the fintech boom that came out
of that and it it it created a lot of
really positive downstream effects for the consumer and the way
(32:09):
that we just interact with financial institutions. And I think
the industry just has to get together and adopt standards.
And look, one of the things we say at highway,
like we have a lane we exist between the freight
broker and the motor carrier. I can't go fix problems
that aren't that aren't mine to solve. You know, if
we kind of go extending ourselves into things we're not
good at, we're just gonna make a mess. Right. But
I think we have to look at the other cracks
(32:30):
in the system, and the industry as a whole has
to start adopting some standards around the way that we're
going to communicate and transference information.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Well, let's talk a little bit more about about highways.
So it's a relatively new company. When was it When was.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
It founded twenty two? Sometime in twenty two, okay, twenty two,
I think, very new.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
And are you guys pee owned or is it the
founders still have all the ownership?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
We are not. The founder owns the majority of business.
We raised a very moderate amount of capital and are profitable,
so we we control our own destiny, so to speak.
We're not We're not a fundraising company. We're a for
profit company.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
And growth is coming from getting more into the that
fragmented brokerage industry, or is it offering more products that
are related to fraud.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
It's a little bit of both. The majority of the
growth we kind of there was no category of carry
identity before us Lee, so we were able to create
in trademark category and really talk about carry identity. And
so what we like to say is as a startup,
we're blessed to be born with product market fit. We
(33:43):
didn't have to kind of go figure that out, and
so our growth was really rapid. I've been in the
industry for a long time, Jordan had a tremendous amount
of credibility coming from the payments business, and so what
we were able to do early was just leverage our
personal relationships and promise our friends we would help them.
Personal friends of ours that were losing hundreds of thousands
(34:03):
of dollars and millions of dollars because they had incumbent
providers that fell asleep at the wheel, and so we
just said, hey, what will help you? We promise will
help you. And so we really focused on early was
just getting five customers and then getting ten and solving
a problem. And those customers told our story for us.
And so you know, our first our first one hundred
(34:25):
customers were all referral and that's really grown organically in
that way. Now today there is growth expansion because you know,
we're building more products. We needed to get into the
inbox and fight the fraud that exists at the inbox level.
We needed to get into the phone system. Bad actors
will flood phone, so we have a phone product. We
(34:45):
needed to get into the visibility space to be able
to tell if locations were being spoofed. But everything we
do is around fraud, right, Everything we do is around
protecting the broker. Then and then we focus on the
downstream efficiencies that come from now.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Right And are you just right now, your your service
available just in the US or do you are you
guys in Canada and Mexico or other other parts of
the world.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Yeah, so only in the US. Obviously we service Canada
and Mexico because our customers cross freight in and out
of those countries. But we don't I wouldn't say we
have a presence there, you know, you know, buy some
transports customer, they're Canadian company and there they cross freight
and now logistics. So so in that way we service
(35:30):
Canada and Mexico, and that we serve freight brokers that
are moving freight in and out.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Of those markets. Gotcha, And so you know, you mentioned
that you've been in the industry for a while. How
did you stumble into transportation or.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Like everybody so nobody goes to college, at least not
in my demographic and is like, I'm going to be
a freight broker, right, you know, we're all told to
I get into commerce or computer science or something like.
I literally stumbled into it. I was in college and
engaged and needed a job, and I just started looking
for sales jobs and I got recruited when I was
(36:07):
in two thousand and four, and I fell in love
with the I fell in love with the business. I
fell in love with the idea of being able to
just solve a problem between between two really different parties,
you know, shippers that are just trying to find things
moved and motor carriers that are just trying to make
a living and be efficient. And I just I fell
in love with it. And I tried to get out
of it a couple of times, and I just ended
up backing it. So yeah, I've done that in a
(36:28):
variety of context for almost twenty years now.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
And I guess what do you miss most about your
days of being a freight broker?
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Don't miss it at all? What I because what I
love is I'm so the business is so ingrained in me.
But I actually love is being able to serve freight
brokers from a position of having been one. Is what
I suffered from as an operator were tech vendors that
didn't understand my business and didn't want to take the
time to understand it. So I think one of the
(36:58):
reasons how he's been successful. I know one of the
reasons how he's been successful is we weren't founded out
of Silicon Valley with a thesis and a fundraise that
told brokers we were smarter than them, and brokers suffered
from that for about ten years. And if you look
at a lot of those companies, they haven't they haven't
had an exit, they haven't gone public, they haven't done anything.
They've sold at a discount or been absorbed by an
(37:19):
operating company or something like that. And so so as
a broker, like I lived that, I lived paying freight
bills for people that didn't listen and wanted to or
these digital brokers that wanted to come on the scene
with you know, millions and millions of dollars in capital
and say they were smarter than the freight broker, and
that hasn't gone well for them. And so what I
love about having been a freight broker now serving freight
(37:40):
brokers is we served them from the context of their seat.
We served them from the context of their business, their
p and L and what they need, rather than than
treating them like they have some existential problem that we're
going to be the hope for. That was never the answer,
and we just we just won't treat our customers.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
That way, right, And so I like to ask my
guests this questions. Usually do it towards the end. You know,
is there a book on leadership or business or transportation
that you know stuck with you through the years?
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh? Man, other's several. I've never read a book on transportation.
I've never been asked that question. Maybe I should go
find one. If someone's written a great book on transportation,
send it to me. I think. I think the first
book that everyone should read and reread a couple of
times a year is How to Win Friends and Influence
People by Deale Carnegie. I had to read that in
(38:31):
my first job and the first sales training I was
ever in, and I reread that every couple of years.
My favorite chapter in that book is how to talk
in terms of the other person's interest and really understand people.
I think my favorite business book on execution is Great
by Choice. Most people love good to Great. I prefer
Great by Choice. It's a follow up to that book,
(38:53):
and in that book, Jim Collins really talks about concepts
like the twenty mile March and how to really get
specific about creating a flywheel in a business, and things
like capitalizing on luck events. I just I've learned so
much from his research. Yeah, those are those are probably
two of my favorite books. And I'm reading a book
right now that I love I would recommend called Play Bigger.
(39:14):
And ever since I worked with Craig Fuller, I was
fascinated about this by this idea of category creation, and
so Play Bigger talks about creating categories and doing big things.
And one of the things I love about that book
is that it talks about there's nobody. Nobody ever set
nobody created a category or disrupted an industry by setting
out to do so. They set out to think about
(39:36):
a problem in a fundamentally different way, and it became
disruptive and it became a category creator. And that's really
the story of Highway. We didn't set out to create
a new we just wanted to solve a problem. We
want to think about the problem different. So those are
those are my three top ones right now, i'd give people.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
All right, great And for those that don't know, Craig
Fuller is from Freight Waves fame. He started freight Waves
and which is a huge transport portal for those that
they're interested to learn more about the industry. So, Michael,
I really want to really want to thank you for
your time and insights. And I think what you guys
are doing at the Highway is really great because like
(40:12):
you mentioned, you know, you're not just solving a problem,
You're you're really making supply chains what I would say
is probably more efficient. So, uh, you know, best of
luck and continuing to do that.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I appreciate it all right, and I want to thank
you for tuning in. If you liked the episode, please
subscribe and leave review. We've lined up a number of
great guests for the podcast, so please check back to
your conversations with C suite executives, shippers, regulators, and decision
makers within the freight markets. Also, if you want to
learn more about freight transportation markets, check out our work
(40:45):
on the Bloomberg terminal at b Igo or on social media.
This is Lee Clasgow signing off and thanks for talking
transports with me.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Bye.
Host
Lee Klaskow
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