On the January 14 episode of the PSA podcast, Collectors president Ryan Hoge gave fans a glimpse of what the future holds for the card-grading business following the acquisition of Beckett last year. The move brought Beckett, PSA, and SGC — three of the biggest grading companies — under a single ownership umbrella.
Last December, Collectors Universe announced that the three companies would continue to “operate with their own operations, customer experience, and standards around grading, marketplace, magazines, and price guide.” Hoge would go on to echo these statements on the company’s official podcast, and give insight into how he says sharing resources among the companies will ultimately be a positive for the hobby and industry.
Hoge highlighted new updates to the Beckett labels, a focus on reducing turnaround times, and cross-brand collaborations in the form of imaging coming to Beckett and SGC, as well as plans for anti-fraud measures and population reports across the three companies.
This plan is to share information among all companies to eliminate false population reports and achieve what Hoge called “population hygiene.” The aim is to have an accurate account of what cards have been submitted across all three grading companies.
“The easiest way to look at this is when you look up like say serial numbered cards, it might be out of 50, and you look across all the grading brands and all of a sudden you see there’s been, you know, 90 of them graded, and it’s like, well, wait a second, there’s only 50 of these that exist,” Hoge said. “It’s annoying for collectors; we would much rather have an accurate view of the world.”
This will stop situations in which cards that have already been submitted to PSA, Beckett, or SGC are cracked open and resubmitted. Cross-company cooperation should enable flagging and deactivating certificates that are no longer in circulation.
“[We] got the teams across all three grading brands sharing knowledge about counterfeits, backdoored copies, bad actors out there that are maybe trying to circumvent certain checks and policies that we have in place to slip things through. We’ve seen the benefits on the SGC side. Now we’re extending that to Beckett,” said Hoge.
When talking about the new changes to the Beckett label, Hoge explained, “The team’s got a really thoughtful approach on some visual updates to the label, to allow better information density, layouts, aligning things to a grid, and looking at some font updates.
“I really like what the team’s come up with. It looks great. Changes to how the autograph grade is displayed and represented. And so those should be rolling out early this year.
“We’re in the final stages of making some decisions about that. Subgrades aren’t going anywhere. That’s very important to note. Yeah, grading standards aren’t changing. It’s really a visual update.”
Collectors are making a major investment to increase capacity at the three grading companies. PSA opened receiving facilities in Toronto and Frankfurt last September, with Hoge confirming plans for another in London in the near future.
“This helps with the capacity, it makes it easier for customers in those markets to submit lower costs for them from a shipping standpoint, just less cross-border friction,” said Hoge on the podcast.
Integration between the three grading companies was a recurring theme in the podcast, with news that the PSA Vault and eBay partnerships will be open to Beckett and SGC.
“We’re going to work to make it easy for Beckett grading customers to have their cards go to the vault, where they have the option to sell on eBay, which reduces time, reduces shipments, and makes it super easy. We think that’s a great customer benefit,” Hoge explained. “
We’re working on doing the exact same thing at SGC, too. The PSA Vault supports all the major grading brands today. And so this feels like a no-brainer for us to put this as an option for customers that want to participate in it.”
Hoge also highlighted that investments in imaging and automation will be a part of Beckett plan to improve grading efficiency and speed.“We image at PSA every card pre and post grading. It helps us run more efficiently,” Hoge said. “It allows us to, you know, identify cards easier. It allows us, in the case where maybe something goes wrong, and there could be potential damage that happens while it’s in production at our facility, we can refer back to those images to see, OK, did this damage exist when it got to us, or, compared to what we’re seeing later. It’s all in the spirit of accuracy and efficiency which manifests for customers with faster turnaround times, and then also, you know, longer term down the road, when we have more capacity, we can lower prices, we can run promotions and things like that, there’s a lot of benefits that come with it, and so that’s the spirit behind all of these investments and so. I’m pumped for the team, too, to get these delivered, get the learning, start scaling certain things, and so hopefully customers will be seeing it show up in faster service.”
