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

Michael Infante: Hi Tim and Lauren, it’s Michael Infante I’m for James. Congrats on the quarter. Lauren, I know you mentioned Q1 being the toughest mortgage comp, but what are your general perspectives on the extent of the recovery we may potentially see in 2023 in mortgage specifically, particularly given some of the bank executives has started to note that a lot of the excess capacity has already been drained from the system?

Lauren StClair: Yes, I’ll maybe reiterate some of my commentary from my prepared remarks, and then I’ll also hand it over to Tim to give his perspective. So, yes, as we said, in Q1 of this year, we expect this to still have really tough comps relative to a year ago when the environment was not quite as bad. We’re not expecting any massive change in sort of the macro environment around mortgages for the rest of this year.

Tim Chen: Yes. And I guess I’d just add, it’s a challenging macro environment for both refi and purchase, volumes are low, interest rates are high. So, we’re really using this slowdown as an opportunity to invest in our home equity marketplace. It’s a really small part of our business today, but in the spirit of landing and expanding, we’ve launched new comparison tools here and continue to onboard partners. And so our longer term outlook really incorporates the view that it’s going to be challenging, as Lauren mentioned. So, yes.

Michael Infante: Understood. Thanks for that. And secondly, I know Ross asked earlier about the relative outperformance vis-à-vis is one of your competitors, but I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper you’ve seen an acceleration in partners that perhaps previously, we’re allocating marketing dollars across a variety of financial marketplaces but now maybe sort of consolidating that spend on your platform just given the quality of the user base that we’ve talked about previously.

Tim Chen: Yes. So, I’d characterize the primary driver is just the deterioration in really near-prime has been — and sub-prime has been just much more accelerated than prime. I think that’s probably something you would typically see in a normal credit cycle and that’s probably driving a higher beta. Yes, of course, like, we ‘reinvesting in our experiences and the OTB integration, I think, has really leveled up our product experience in our personal loans search, for example. But the first one is probably the major driver.

Michael Infante: Great. Thanks guys.

Operator: Thank you. And I show next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Jed Kelly: Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Just going back to insurance. You mentioned the new consumer experience. I mean I think insurance has always typically been a product that’s hard to sell and probably some of your competitors, it’s a lot of phone calls. So, can you just touch on like where you’re sort of disrupting you think the consumer experience in insurance. And do you see that becoming a big enough segment where you could break that out separately one day?

Tim Chen: Yes. So, great question. I mean, of course, that’s something we think about all the time in terms of user experience. And so internally, the conversation is often, can we do better than that user experience while leveraging our brand and our brand trust to drive parity in terms of things like conversion rates, right? And so — without getting into specifics, those were a lot of the iterations we’re trying to drive with an in-house experience. And yes, I mean, the results have been pretty promising.