LendingTree, Inc. (NASDAQ:TREE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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We’re getting more visibility as to how partners want to work with us. Right now, there’s a path for TreeQual that is working with a third party, trusted third party that many of the card issuers work with today. They work with them on direct mail. And so that is kind of the easiest path and that was why we went down that path. Not all of our partners, however, want to work with us that way, some of us want to do embedded integrations with us without a third party involved. And so that takes more time to work on from a technology perspective on both sides with us and the partner. But it’s obviously a good outcome when we get there. So I’d say that the dialogue has increased, we’re happy about upgrade, and we’re happy with the existing partners and the results that they’re experiencing.

But as we look at our — let’s put it this way, the financial impact of TreeQual will manifest itself in credit card potentially down the road in personal loans. It is not in our 2023 guide in any material way. We look at this as a year of onboarding partners. And we know that we will have a healthier credit card business on the back of it. But our guide is not dependent on incremental revenue from TreeQual.

Melissa Wedel: Got it? Thank you.

Operator: Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from Mike Grondahl with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Michael Grondahl: Hey, thanks guys. I wanted to dig into the strategy a little bit. I think the Tree branded Win Card is the first time you’ve put your name on a product. And you mentioned more products to come. Are you trying to put one of these Tree branded products in each vertical or how should we think about kind of the rollout in some of the new products that you said will be coming over the course of the year?

Douglas Lebda: So I’ll start and then I think J.D. will follow-up as well. So think of MyLendingTree, I’ve talked about this before as bringing the best customer experience to the consumer. And that’s why we launched a branded card there as opposed to having our MyLendingTree members be clicking out to search for cards and not getting approved. We think it’s a great product with a best in class, it is innovative. I’ve always wanted to do this but we hadn’t found a set of offerings that we thought would be different in the industry. And now we think we have it and so this is — so the Win Card can be another gateway to bring in MyLendingTree members. And it’s also a way for MyLendingTree members to put a card in their wallet that we think is fantastic and that you could get approved that are very high rate for it.

And in MyLendingTree you could expect us not necessarily to always do a single product offering but I would say that whatever we do on MyLendingTree, we want it to be the best in class product so that consumers come back to us again and again, without us having to be as dependent on paid marketing to continually drive people back into the marketplace. J.D., anything to add.

J.D. Moriarty: The only thing I would add Mike is we spent a lot of time last year doing consumer research on what specific financial jobs consumers would trust us with. And so, we’ve got, as Doug mentioned, it’s kind of a multiyear approach. We’ve got eight or so products that we would expect to launch over a multiyear period. So don’t expect eight this year. But effectively, the winning part is the first one and the theme is really the adjacency, to why somebody came to LendingTree in the first place, and what somebody’s — what problem they’re trying to address. So I don’t think it’s specifically going to be a product for every vertical area that we have. We will roll these out really relative to what we think is the most adjacent thing.

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