Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the NerdWallet, Inc. Q1 2022 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your host, Caitlin MacNamee, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator and welcome to the NerdWallet Q1 2022 earnings call. Joining us today are Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Tim Chen; and Chief Financial Officer, Lauren St.Clair. Our press release and shareholder letter are available on our Investor Relations website and a replay of this update will also be available following the conclusion of today's call. We intend to use our Investor Relations website as a means of disclosing certain material information and complying with disclosure obligations under SEC Regulation FD from time to time. As a reminder, today's call is being webcast live and recorded. Before we begin today's remarks and question-and-answer session, I would like to remind you that certain statements made during this call may relate to future events and expectations and as such, constitute forward-looking statements. Actual results and performance may differ from those forward-looking statements as a result of the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K dated March 24, 2022 and in other reports filed or to be filed with the SEC. We urge you to consider these risk factors and remind you that we undertake no obligation to update the information provided on this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. You should be aware that these statements should not be considered a guarantee of future performance. Furthermore, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. With that, I will now turn it over to Tim Chen, our Co-Founder and CEO of NerdWallet. Tim?

Thanks, Caitlin. Before we get into our Q1 results, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about where we're headed as a company and why we're confident the business we've built will get us there. Today, consumers and SMBs are faced with a seemingly endless amount of financial challenges, decisions and questions as well as an expanding number of financial products to choose from. Money is only getting more complicated and consumers and SMBs need someone they can turn to and trust for well-informed financial guidance. That's what we're focused on delivering at NerdWallet, trustworthy and knowledgeable financial guidance across all of life's financial decisions. Building trust with consumers has always been core to our strategy and has informed a lot of decisions we've made. We've never lost sight of this long-term focus because we believe that the trust we've built and will continue to build with consumers and SMBs is key to achieving our vision and it's also our single biggest differentiator in the market. Over the past several years, we've been steadily climbing towards becoming a financial ecosystem, a place consumers and SMBs can connect their data, receive data-driven nudges, learn about various financial topics and shop for financial products, all with the peace of mind that the guidance they are receiving is trustworthy and knowledgeable. We started by helping consumers with their credit card decisions powered by our industry-leading editorial team and we've since expanded to other financial areas. Today, we're moving further up the mountain by finding opportunities to leverage our trusted brand to vertically integrate in areas that capture reoccurring revenue. And it's working. Our SMB business grew well in excess of 100% year-over-year in Q1 and is our fastest-growing vertical. Simultaneously, we have been focused on delivering more values to consumers and…

Thanks, Tim. We are proud to have started 2022 with a strong first quarter. Despite rising interest rates and headwinds in several verticals, we delivered Q1 revenue of $129 million, up 43% year-over-year and above the high end of our guidance. Even in these uncertain times, our successful diversification efforts laid the groundwork for our Nerds to execute and deliver great results. We recognize that the year-over-year growth rate is partially driven by lapping the first quarter of 2021 which was recovering from COVID-19 lows. As we said last quarter, we will continue to look at our pre-COVID revenue CAGR from 2019 which, at roughly 30%, is consistent with our historical growth. Let's take a deeper look at the revenue performance within each category. Credit cards delivered Q1 revenue of $45 million, growing 97% year-over-year. As a reminder, we experienced multiple quarters of credit cards recovery in 2021 from the lows of 2020, primarily through pricing gains. Credit card continues its strong growth due to the overall macroeconomic recovery, the high-intent nature of our audience and our deep alignment with partners to deliver quality matches. Loans generated Q1 revenue of $34 million, growing 6% year-over-year. In particular, personal loans grew significantly as we saw strong consumer demand and optimized our user experience to drive increased conversion. Despite the extension of student loan forbearance, student loans also grew as we continue to provide valuable content during the changing environment. We are encouraged by our execution and year-over-year growth in the loans category, although we are seeing increased headwinds in mortgages as interest rates rise. Finally, other verticals delivered Q1 revenue of $50 million, growing 43% year-over-year. As Tim mentioned, SMB continues its impressive growth trajectory as we run our integration playbook and direct our strong organic traffic through Fundera's efficient and…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Youssef Squali from Truist Securities.

This is Robert Zeller on for Youssef. On the all-time brand awareness, are you guys taking share -- are you guys taking market share right now? And if you can answer that, if it's a yes, if so, from who? And then secondly, just on the back half of the year, if you could remind us what the growth rates look like for the quarters in 2019. I'm not sure we have it or it's out there but just curious on the puts and takes for each vertical in the back half of the year, as you mentioned that we may return to pre historical norms similar to pre-COVID.

Rob, I'll take the first part of that question. We really think about our brand awareness on an absolute basis. We had ambitions to continue to march up over time. In terms of share, I really think we're taking share from constituents like agents, brokers and advisers, asking your family members or friends for help or just not doing the research and making uninformed decisions. In terms of digital competition, that's actually a much smaller piece of the competitive landscape for us. And so yes, we feel really good that we are continuing on a great trajectory there and filling this void of being a trustworthy and knowledgeable source for financial information.

And Robert, I'll take the second part and then Tim and I can talk about some of the vertical dynamics that we're seeing today and sort of expectations as we move forward. But we did say that we expect 2022 to be more in line with our pre-COVID seasonality in which we usually see flat to sort of a slight decrease in revenue from Q1 to Q2, followed by an increase into Q3 and then again a decrease in absolute revenue into Q4. And then in terms of some of the vertical dynamics, I can kick it off, Tim and then you can add some. Obviously, we're seeing really, really strong growth and recovery in credit cards and, as we've talked about, personal loans. Our SMB products is also doing incredibly well. And a rising interest rate environment tends to help things like high-yield savings accounts, so we see banking. And so we would expect similar type things. And then, Tim, some of the headwinds we've talked about, obviously, rising interest rates, impacts refi. Any other call-outs that you would make?

Also just a challenging market out there for insurance, as you may have heard from others, is -- carriers are struggling with profitability and resetting pricing right now.

For our next question, we have Nat Schindler from Bank of America.

Kind of related to that last point, it goes into kind of understanding some of these metrics on how to understand them versus the swings that happened during COVID and mean stocks and the like. If you look at the monthly unique user numbers, I know it was very elevated last Q1 and that's why it's down on a year-over-year basis. What is -- could you give us some more metrics so that we could kind of characterize the difference or what the swing is and so we can look at that number in a more meaningful sense? For example, what was Q4 '20? And how off was that versus Q4 '21? And where do you think is a normalized growth level for unique users?

Yes. So maybe I'll comment on a couple of things. I mean first, we feel really good about our diversification efforts like we talked about. And so we expect there to be puts and takes from macro factors. And again, we believe that diversification will continue to help insulate us. As it refers to MUU growth, as we talked about, Q1 MUUs were down 3%. This was expected. We called this out in the previous earnings call and this is mostly related to sort of comping a much tougher period from Q1 of '21 with the mean stock phenomenon. We do expect, though, to see our typical seasonal cadence return. As we talked about with revenue, we would expect the same thing with our monthly unique users as well. And so if you look at our Q4 to Q1 performance, we see our typical seasonal step-up. This year, the quarter-over-quarter growth which was 22%. And moving forward, we expect to see that typical seasonality and a return to growth overall. We have not broken out monthly unique users by individual verticals or revenue categories because there is cross-shopping and it's not very easy to do. We still would have expected users to grow in the quarter if we've excluded some of the impacts from last year's investing phenomenon.

For our next question, we have Justin Patterson from KeyBanc.

I just want to ask a question about registered users versus nonregistered users. How should we think about the returns between those two groups? And then it sounds like there's brand investment staying elevated over the course of the year. That sounds like it's having some good conversion. So how should we think about just that potential to grow registered users over the course of the year and drive more nudges?

Yes. I'll take that one. Our registered users have 5x the lifetime revenue of a nonregistered user. So they're far more engaged. We do end up registering a lot of users organically as they learn or shop or manage their financial products on NerdWallet. And so we kind of don't break that out into more of an organic versus inorganic acquisition. It's largely organic. And so the flywheel for us is really turning on more on-ramps into registration. So that can happen throughout our site for various reasons. It can happen through more personalized shopping experiences in our marketplaces. It could happen through app convenience features such as budgeting, cash flow, net worth, credit score, etcetera. And then the other part of the flywheel is really reengagement. So as we get smarter and smarter about using first-party data to really be helpful in letting people know when they can make a smart money move, that drives the reengagement. So expect more to come on that in the coming quarters.

Yes. And I can comment a little bit more on the brand spend, Justin. So as we said in our prepared remarks, in -- Q1 of '20 was the first quarter that we spent on a national TV brand campaign. And then in 2021, we also leaned in both in Q1 and Q2. And so in 2022, this year, we want to also test and learn our way into brand into Q3. And so the expectation is that we will be spending brand off three of those quarters. And as a result, we would expect that the margin profile from an adjusted EBITDA perspective to look fairly similar between those three quarters. And while I have a minute, I'll just remind everyone, though, what we've also said about -- we focus on the full year adjusted EBITDA margin. There can be variability between quarters but that we do expect modest accretion from 2021 to 2022 from adjusted EBITDA perspective.

For our next question, we have Ross Sandler from Barclays.

Tim, just a follow-up on the last question. You guys have talked historically about how Credit Karma did a nice job of like getting folks back into their app and getting them to engage with some of these smart notifications. So it sounds like you're doing a little bit of that today but not fully kind of embraced or rolled out. So can you guys talk about how large the app audiences or the logged-in audience relative to that 22 million total MUU number? And then like for users that are in the app, getting some of these nudges, what does engagement look like for them versus kind of the garden-variety NerdWallet user? That's my first question. And then just a couple of housekeeping questions. Performance marketing as a percent of revenue was up a little bit. I know that was part of the plan but how do you see that trending relative to revenue and the rest of '22? And then can you remind us how big mortgage is as a percent of that loan segment?

Okay. Yes. I'll take the first part of that. So yes, the -- our long-term product vision is definitely focused around that, right? The more we learn about our users, the better we can help them with smart money moves. And so today, out of the 22 million MUUs, a subset are registered. We haven't broken that out. It is outgrowing the overall -- and in terms of nudges, I mean, some of them can be quite simple. Like for example, since rates are rising, we're nudging users who save more money last month and this month to move extra cash into a high-yield savings account. And given our credibility with being really great about that kind of advice, it's meaningful to people. Also with gas prices skyrocketing, we're nudging users with tips on how to save money at the pump. There happen to be a lot of fantastic gas credit cards but there's also other ways to save money that don't involve getting new financial products, right? So we're really taking a consumer-oriented lens to just being helpful.

Great. And I'll take the last two parts of your question there, Ross. So first on performance marketing. Before I jump in, I'll just remind everyone that our shareholder letter includes a breakdown of all of our sales and marketing spend and how we think about those areas of investment for us. And specifically, for performance marketing, we really see this as a variable cost that we can quickly dial up or dial back as needed. As we talked about, we've seen really nice recovery in pricing. We've also seen some really nice improvements in conversion. And those two things allow us to invest more in things like performance marketing. And so you can see a little bit of increase there, benefiting from the pricing and, like I said, conversion improvements. And then the third question in terms of mortgages. We don't provide the vertical level breakdown but what we did say is that mortgages remains the largest vertical in loan category despite the rising rates. And the majority of that revenue is coming currently from purchase versus refi.

And for our next question, we have Ralph Schackart from William Blair.

On credit card, it sounds like you still have some opportunities on pricing growth perhaps coming out of pricing concessions in the market during COVID. Can you maybe sort of talk about your opportunity to still drive price within credit cards? And I know you don't guide to specific product level revenue drivers but just sort of how we should think about credit card growth in general for this year. And then I'll have a follow-up.

Sure. So pricing in cards is already above pre-pandemic levels. So we are in uncharted territory. But that being said, we've spent most of our history in uncharted credit card pricing territory because our pricing tends to go up over time. I still remember our first transaction in credit cards had a $60 CPA and that same SKU still exists today and there's many, many multiples of that. So we believe that pricing has similar dynamics to basically all Internet marketing pricing, right which is that it tends to go up over time. And the factors driving that include things like improving lifetime values at our partners and inflation, right? But we also believe that NerdWallet is increasingly also being seen as more than just a direct response channel for our partners. Given our trust with consumers, you really care about being on NerdWallet beyond just the value of that transaction. And so it's not just pricing. I think in terms of unit growth, we still have headroom as well to grow across the credit card funnel from -- everything from top-of-funnel market share to reengaging with our growing base of registered users and on to increasing conversion rates in the marketplace, as Lauren alluded to.

Great, that's helpful. Maybe just one for Lauren. Lauren, just wanted to clarify what I thought I heard. It sounds like EBITDA margins, Q1 to Q3, at sort of similar level and the '22 margins perhaps sort of expand or there's some leverage on a year-over-year basis. Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct. You heard that.

For our next question, we have Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer.

You're continuing to see nice growth in credit cards and you talked about how your pricing is improving. Can you just talk about how some of your prequalification tools that you provide your partners are benefiting you relative to some of your competitors?

Yes. Jed, I'll take that one. I mean -- so I think the prequalification tools applies not just to cards but to any loan-based vertical where there's risk-based pricing. So yes, every year, we increasingly are making matches through APIs and they're getting increasingly personalized. So that really helps our partners to know exactly what they're getting and that tends to do things like help our partners really refine an understanding of the quality of people we're passing through. And that does tend to drive pricing up over time.

And then just on one of your prior comments, you mentioned how in your loans category that mortgage is still the highest amount -- the highest percentage of revenue. Just as we see more people or more consumers start to spend on credit cards, one would assume they're eventually going to need to refinance their credit cards, right, with a personal loan. Can you talk about some of the -- like how you're positioning where we'd likely see in the back half that we'll probably see consumers start to take out more personal loans for credit card refinancing and other tools?

Yes. We're -- so we're not anticipating anything, yes, any really out-of-ordinary trends there. There continues to be a pretty healthy consumer on the -- both the cards and the loan side. On the mortgage side, you're probably seeing a bigger mix on the refi side towards cash-out refinancing. A lot of people may be using that as a product to actually pay off their credit cards or finance in other ways. So it's not just about interest rates going down and refinancing a mortgage. So there's a lot of interplay between all of these different areas.

For our next question, we have James Faucette from Morgan Stanley.

Just following up on that point around credit cards and kind of the evolution within the mortgage space, etcetera. How does that -- or how is that impacting generally pricing? And have you seen any changes in your partners' kind of credit profiles that they're looking for, etcetera? I'm just wondering how kind of the changing environment may be impacting what your partners are looking for right now.

Yes. So we're definitely seeing a little bit more conservatism on the mortgage side. Our partners are just being a little more conscious of quality as they kind of wait and see what happens. We're seeing relative strength in areas like cards and personal loans and small business lending. And so it's a bit of a mixed bag.

And when you think about like that -- and I think it's understandable on the mortgage side particularly that people will be a little bit more conservative but it doesn't sound like that, that's spilling over to other parts of what you can offer to your -- to the registered users. Are there things that where you're looking to accelerate or lean into? And how does that change how you evaluate the efficacy of brand development, engagement, etcetera, especially if you've got a little bit of a different mix of product?

Yes. That's a really interesting question. I mean I'd point out that a lot of the tailwinds we're seeing now were headwinds during the pandemic. So there's quite a bit of offsetting headwinds and tailwinds that happen at different points of the cycle. So internally, we're taking a long-term view, frankly. I mean for example, we're investing now in mortgages. We think we can take share over the next cycle in both purchase and refi with some product improvements and more personalization in our marketplace. So even though there's headwinds there now, we want to be ready. And yes, we're also landing -- we continue to land and expand. We're having a ton of success with that within different sub-verticals of small business and as well as in the U.K. and Canada. So the short-term macro environment creates headwinds and tailwinds but doesn't really affect our longer-term strategy.

Got it. Got it. And does it -- but does it impact the relative performance of your spend at all? Or is that not really -- like it's -- that's too hard to discern at least right now?

For the most part, no. I mean I'd say, of course, on the performance marketing side, there's a bit of -- you kind of follow where the heat is on any given period throughout the cycle but it doesn't really affect our R&D or our brand budgets. Those tend to be much longer-term-oriented.

For our next question, we have Pete Christiansen from Citi.

Tim, Lauren, great stats on the brand awareness and the registration side. I was curious, though, on -- it seems like the match rate seems to be improving quite a bit here. Does that help drive improved pricing at some point, being able to show your partners that you can convert higher or that conversions are improving on a regular basis? And then as a quick follow-up, how should we think about the registered user in terms of how many times they access the platform on a per year basis? Have you seen any trends among registered users there as well?

Yes. Thanks for the question. So on the match rate question, I think certainly, it's a win-win for everyone in the ecosystem when match rate goes up, both for the consumer small business and for the lender. I mean you can imagine the lender has to run credit approvals which cost money and take time. And in some cases, like in mortgages, it requires humans to get on the phone, right? So certainly, they want improved personalization and matching. And that's a win for them. And then, yes, for the consumer, it's not great getting rejected or wasting your time on the phone with a broker of some sort. And so our continued improvements in match rate do result in higher pricing as a result of making those dynamics better for everyone. In terms of our registered user engagement, yes, we continue to invest heavily in that. For us, driving that up over time really comes from more nudges and smarter nudges. And so we haven't given any specific metrics but that's a pretty broad-based focus for a lot of our product organization and content organization right now.

Operator, I think we'll take one more question.

For our final question, we have Youssef Squali from Truist.

And apologies if my questions were already asked, I was on a different call. But Tim, maybe can you just double-click on the loans growth? Maybe you can just speak to how much of any of the headwinds that you've seen in the quarter maybe kind of related to pure macro raising rates versus maybe a -- some incremental change in the competitive landscape that you've seen in the last, say three to six months. And then can you maybe just talk about the marketing efficiency? You guys continue to do really well, driving more traffic. Maybe kind of break out the organic traffic versus not. And just overall, how you guys are doing on your marketing efficiency metrics.

Sure. I'll take the first part and maybe Lauren can take the marketing efficiency part. So yes, in loans, we actually think we're taking share across the board despite a pretty rough macro environment in certain areas. So the student loans, student loan forbearance was extended which is great for consumers and providing much needed relief but it's definitely dampening refi demand. And despite that, we're seeing student loan growth year-over-year. And we -- yes, we think we have share gains there. On the mortgage side, similar story. We think we're gaining share. There's the purchase component which is the bulk of what we do. That's actually hanging in there. Refi is suffering as a result of the macro environment. But we think we're actually weathering pretty well relative to the broader market. So we think that's more macro than competition-driven.

Great. And I'll take the marketing efficiency. So I'll highlight both brand and performance marketing since I think you missed those, Youssef. But for brand, we feel really good. We are continuing to lean in. This is an investment for the longer term. So we really expect the full payoff to be over the next 18 to 24 months. But what we saw in Q1, we're really proud of the record awareness that we saw. We also see increasing user registration which we think is a combination of our product efforts as well as increased brand awareness. In terms of performance marketing, we really do see this as a variable cost. What we saw in Q1 with really strong pricing and also some improvements in conversion, we've been able to lean in a little bit more on performance marketing. And so we're feeling good about that as well.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll hand it over to Caitlin MacNamee for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you for all of the great questions today. As always, a big thank you to the Nerds for another great quarter. There's a lot to be proud of. We exceeded our revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations. We achieved a record number of quarterly registrations. Our brand awareness and brand preference metrics both hit all-time highs and we saw even bigger gains among our target audience which are the consumers who are most likely to be in market and eligible for financial products. And all this progress moves us closer to becoming a financial ecosystem and helps us achieve our vision, a world where everyone makes financial decisions with confidence. So, thanks for joining us and enjoy the rest of your day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.