Now, that said, like home equity, there’s a lot of growth opportunity, I believe, in home equity in the current and near-term. On the consumer side, I do think — honestly, I think we’re probably currently leaving some VMD dollars on the table by running very strong margins, which were running very strong margins right now. But that is something we are going to actively look into to see if we can reinvest in certain areas and gain market share and increase our total VMD dollars by running a bit slimmer margins.
Melissa Wedel: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Jamie Friedman of Susquehanna International Group.
Jamie Friedman: Hi. I wanted to ask about student loan repayments. So, I was just wondering how, if at all, did the resumption of student loans around October affect say, the lending partner sentiment towards loan originations or the consumer behavior? Any color on student loan would be helpful.
Doug Lebda: Scott, do want to take?
Scott Peyree: Yes, hello Jamie. That was a lot of discussion about six months ago is what was going to happen there. And I think the short answer is a lot of nothing at this point. That came through the loan repayments started or semi-started however you want to define that from a broad-based perspective from our clients, there was no significant change in defaults or delinquency rates based off of that, that they’re seeing. It’s more of a broad — I think — that’s where there’s just generally a lot of semi-caution in a lot of the consumer lending businesses right now as defaults were starting to creep back up last year is where are they going to level off that? I’d say outside of credit cards, where we sit right now, most of these businesses, small business, personal loans, they’ve kind of leveled off at the pre-COVID levels.
So, it’s not really — people are — the clients are cautious there, but they’re feeling optimistic that the followers are starting to level off. And I don’t think they really saw the impact that they thought might happen from student loan repayments restarting.
Jamie Friedman: Okay. Thanks Scott. And then for the follow-up, I was just wondering, are you largely done with the restructuring now? And if so, or if not, either way, how would those improvements flow through to potential operating efficiency in 2024?
Doug Lebda: Yes, we are done with restructuring — and we have contingency plans if God forbid, there was another cataclysm in our economy, and so we are largely done. The good — there’s something else that came from costs side is, we now know where every dollar is going and what the return on that dollar is, maybe not quite every dollar yet, but pretty turn close. And so now we can — if we add back staff, it will be like hey, if we hire 10 new salespeople, we can go get X more clients and get that much more demand and the 10 salespeople will have an ROI that will pay off. If we push our AI investments faster, that would — output or else we wouldn’t be investing in it. And do we — can we do some of those things as they come back?
And as your unit economics improve, all of a sudden, like the projects that you had before that didn’t make sense at those economics, well, now they start making sense and so there’s definitely more work to do as we go to what I would call managed growth, and we can manage our growth from here any increase in expenses or I would say, 90-plus-plus percent of them would be [Technical Difficulty]
Jamie Friedman: Perfect. Thank you both.
Operator: Thank you. I’m not showing any further questions at this time. I would like to turn it back to Doug Lebda for closing remarks.
Doug Lebda: I would like to thank everyone on this call. Like everyone in this call to know, we are passionate about continuing to improve our business. Our team is focused on driving better outcomes for both our partners and our customers, through enhanced routing of inquiries and smarter matching of existing offers. We are encouraged by the growth we are experiencing in our insurance segment and look forward to eventually pairing that with an inflection in our home and consumer businesses to drive significantly improved financial performance. And thank you all for being here and we look forward to talking to you in next quarter.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating and you may now disconnect.
