ATLANTA — Jordan Graft sees a lot of corruption, bad actors and fraudsters in the trucking industry.
“People used to be able to hire a carrier based on three emails, passing a rules assessment and an insurance certification and that’s just not possible anymore. The world’s just changed,” Graft, founder and CEO of Highway, said at FreightWaves’ Future of Supply Chain event.
Graft was joined on stage Wednesday by FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller in a discussion titled “Trucking Fraud and Cybercrime Briefing.”
“We see fraud at almost every layer, whether it’s the insurance: Whether it’s the ELD layer, whether it’s email phishing, fraud is everywhere. They’re trying to get in at every point of access of a freight broker,” Graft said.
Dallas-based Highway is focused on solving the digital identity problem in the trucking industry. The firm aims to remove risk and friction between brokers and carriers by being an onboarding provider with a carrier identity engine.
Identity theft, double brokering and other types of fraud are costing the trucking industry over $100 million annually, according to experts.
Fraud and carrier identification must be addressed through layers of security, Graft said.
“You have to have a multilayered solution that’s looking at not just does this carrier pass my overall company’s rules assessment, but what type of freight am I willing to give that carrier?” Graft said. “That’s the evolution that I think is the most fundamentally changing of what Highway is. Now we’re saying, OK, they may pass, but this carrier doesn’t get access to consumer electronic loads out of Southern California, or they don’t get access to high-value loads for this shipper.”
He said security is about removing friction from the process of carrier-broker relationships.
“We allow brokers to do low-level compliance and change the requirements, and that’s so important in this industry, in this market right now, because you have to reduce friction,” Graft said. “You can’t put friction on the entire business; you have to let certain things move really quickly, like your bottled water loads or your low-risk, low-value loads. Those need to be able to move quickly and not put a lot of friction on your carrier sales team to get those loads covered.”
A sense of security with high-value loads is important to brokers, Graft said.
“You want to focus your effort and energy and any compliance or risk function, you want to put that stuff in a matrix and focus on the ones that have the highest risk so that you don’t overly burden the entirety of the business,” he said. “How that relates to the freight brokers and their ability to serve shippers is that we think we make our brokers better. That’s our job. We don’t serve shippers. We don’t sell to shippers. We never will. We serve one master, and it’s really important that we make our brokers better and make them the hero.”
Highway has worked with the U.S. Postal Service and its transportation suppliers to make shipments more secure.
“An example of how we make a difference is the United States Postal Service saying to brokers that they want them to use Highway if they want to stay in the USPS network, and this is stuff that’s really helping our customers win more business,” Graft said. “That’s important for us because they need to be the hero for us to succeed. Fraud isn’t going away. Fraudulent actors just continue to change and evolve.”
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