NerdWallet, Inc. (NASDAQ:NRDS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So, all-in-all, I’d say it’s very early days, and we see this as an opportunity to serve our audience in new ways.

Justin Patterson: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali from Truist. Please go ahead.

Youssef Squali: Great. Thank you very much. A couple of questions here. First, can you maybe just elaborate a little more on what you’re seeing on the insurance business. I think you’ve actually turned the corner there. I think it was up 43% year-on-year in Q4. You talked about launching a new house marketplace. Can you expand on kind of your experience there so far? And kind of within insurance, what are kind of the bright spots that you’ve seen, is it kind of across the board or just one or two products. And then on the credit card revenues were down sequentially. Can you maybe speak to the level of credit tightening out there? And maybe just how much of that may be seasonal versus just softening demand? Thank you.

Tim Chen: Yes. Okay. I’ll take the first one. Yes. So, we spent the past year or so facing all the same headwinds in insurance that you’ve heard about from others, inflation and supply chain issues, making it more expensive to fix a car or replace or fix a house, right? But during that time, we launched this enhanced marketplace experience. And we’re going to soon follow-up with marketplaces in home and life insurance. That was all about improving the user experience, giving more personalized responses and increasing conversion rates. So, that was successful, and that drove the success here. So, really excited about the investments we made during the downturn and how that will help us as things recover — things are looking strong going into 2023.

Lauren StClair: Yes. Maybe I’ll comment on sort of the credit card performance quarter-over-quarter. And then Tim, if you want to maybe add more color on just the environment right now and what you’re seeing for credit cards overall. We’ve talked about credit cards performing incredibly well over the course of 2022. And we talked about two things. One was the pricing recovery from the lows of COVID. And the second piece that we’ve talked about has been conversion improvements that we’ve made within our product. And so the expectation around credit cards is that, that pricing improvement and the growth that we are getting from the pricing improvement is going to level off as we move into this year and a little bit as we talked about in of 2022. But again, we still expect lots of headroom there, lots of opportunity, and we will continue with those product improvements.

Tim Chen: In terms of seasonality, yes, Q4 traditionally is seasonally weak in credit cards, so no surprises there. And yes, I’d say more broadly, it’s a healthy environment out there for prime and up, and there’s a pretty broad expectation from loan officers about unemployment increasing 100 basis points throughout the course of 2023 as kind of a low case scenario. And so assuming we don’t go too far beyond those levels, we’re expecting to be kind of in line with our expectations.

Youssef Squali: Okay, great. Thanks and contrast.

Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.