J.D. Moriarty: Sure, so at the end of the day, we’re trying to — we are coming at credit card where it is a small business relative to our portfolio businesses, relative to our competitors, and the competitor that you’re mentioning, is obviously, Credit Karma. That’s, I believe what you’re referring to when they talk about the guarantee where cards are assured. That’s an extension of their light box preapproval. And they’ve just changed the verbage around it to assure somebody the degree of guarantee that they would actually get the card. Now, why are we doing TreeQual? One, for consumers we think it’s a better outcome. We don’t like a LendingTree consumer coming to our experience, clicking out and having effectively 80% plus chance of being denied a card, that’s not great for us and it’s fine for our partners, because they only pay us on approvals.
But it’s not great for customer experience. So TreeQual started from that perspective. Now, ultimately, though, for our partners who want to deal with Credit Karma, NerdWallet, ourselves and others, they need to get volume, right. There’s no point in working with us if they can’t get volume premise. So we are from a marketplace perspective, embarking on a strategy to increase the volume we can get them at a reasonable price. And so we just need to diversify the marketing channels to do that. TreeQual is going to rely on our MyLendingTree base, right, largely. And then there are opportunities to use TreeQual in our existing experiences that we’re actually quite excited about. So for instance, a consumer could be coming in and looking for a given product, let’s say they’re looking for a personal loan, but the size of the loan they’re looking for it doesn’t really make sense for a personal loan, and we can show them a card that they are preapproved for.
That we think would be a good experience for the consumer and it’s another opportunity to drive volume. And we need to get better there. Now, core to your question is the competition in the card space. Interestingly, we’re coming into this where it’s a very small part of our overall business. So any incrementality is improvement. That is a business that is in the — from a margin perspective. For us it’s — it operates in the team. So if we can take market share and even just hold our current margin profile, which obviously we want to improve over time, we can see great gains in credit card that are meaningful for us. Perhaps less meaningful for some of our competitors who started from card. So that’s our strategy. Now, when we talked about the competition, we probably talk about that competition more than others, because we feel it more than others, because we’re so dependent on search.
As we diversify our marketing mix for the card business, it won’t be quite as profound, right. But that’s where we are today and we’ve been very candid about that, we need to improve that. So there are a number of aspects to it. There’s a tech aspect, that’s the Lightspeed migration, there’s a marketing aspect that’s developing the other channels. And then there’s a new product aspect, and that is TreeQual, that’s the strategy.
Douglas Lebda: And the only thing I’d add to that if you first off, we were late to the credit card business. And the reason was because we didn’t like the approval rate dynamics that J.D. just talked about. However, we did enter with an acquisition and we’re in it now, and we’re just — and now we’re just continuing to make it better. So when I think of the competitive environment, we’ve got one competitor that’s better at us in card SEO, and another one that’s better than us in approval rates because of light — because of Commons LightBox. Our response to that is TreeQual, the Win Card, the Lightspeed tech work that J.D. talked about and SEO on LendingTree. And the nice thing is with our competitors being public, we get to see the target of where we want to head and we’re very focused on it.
