Tim Chen
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets
Thanks, Caitlin. As we approach NerdWallet's first anniversary as a public company on Friday, I've been reflecting on the past year. I think we can all agree it's been an interesting one. In many ways, this year has played out differently from everyone's expectations, with the current macroeconomic environment creating uncertainty and challenges for consumers and businesses alike. But in looking back at the past year, I'm incredibly proud of the work we have done. In a testament to NerdWallet's trusted brand and our strong diversification, we have met or exceeded all the goals we outlined for our financial performance despite headwinds in mortgages, insurance and student loans, all while making progress towards our vision of becoming a trusted financial ecosystem for consumers and small- and mid-sized businesses. In Q3, we continued executing against our 3 pillars of growth: Land and Expand, Vertical Integration and Registrations, and Data-Driven Engagement, which ladder up to our financial ecosystem vision; a vision where we will provide a single platform that consumers and SMBs can rely on to learn about various financial topics, shop for products, connect their data and receive data-driven nudges. This will not only provide our users with more clarity and confidence around their finances but also help grow and diversify our business through reoccurring engagement and revenue. As a result of our work, in Q3, we exceeded our revenue and adjusted EBITDA outlook driven by growth across credit cards, banking, personal loans and SMB verticals. Our Q3 performance was predicated on building and extending NerdWallet's unique strengths. With our reach and brand as key advantages, our Nerds spent Q3 driving critical initiatives in our 3 pillars of growth to provide consumers and SMBs with clarity and confidence. In particular, this quarter, we saw further evidence of our distinct ability to Land and Expand, leveraging our trusted brand to cover new topics and play in new geographies. We are seeing early signals that our exploratory vertical expansion efforts in topics like Medicare and cryptocurrency are gaining traction, paving the way for new lines of business to match consumer demand. We also continue to grow our international presence. In Q3, we accelerated our Canada expansion with monthly unique users up 59% quarter-over-quarter as we executed our playbook. Elsewhere in the business, SMB delivered another quarter of outsized performance with triple-digit year-over-year growth for the third quarter in a row. The SMB team has invested in significant improvements to their personal loans prequalification flow, improving the loan application experience and enabling us to more efficiently monetize our growing traffic. SMB is a successful example of Vertical Integration or our strategy of pairing NerdWallet's massive top-of-funnel reach and trusted brand with best-in-class user experiences. In July, we began our latest vertical integration effort: our acquisition of On the Barrelhead or OTB. As we initiated integration efforts throughout the quarter, we saw OTB's primary contribution in our personal loans vertical in Q3. We are in the process of integrating OTB into our user flows and onboarding new partners. We're seeing signs that our vertical integration strategy is working, with conversion and pricing benefits when we attach their consumer flows to our organic traffic. We also see the potential to pair the technology with our traffic across additional verticals to help more people in more ways. I look forward to sharing more updates in the quarters to come. Registering and engaging users will allow us to drive repeat visits, collect data and provide users with unique insights and nudges. This work is critical to our aspiration of creating a trusted financial ecosystem. In Q3, we made more progress in our Registrations and Data-Driven Engagement efforts, with registrations up more than 60% year-over-year, in part due to product experimentation on registration modules. Additionally, we continue to iterate on our nudges to drive engagement, providing our users with better matching and more relevant smart money moves. And these efforts have resulted in improvements to our engagement metrics. In Q3, registered user revenue grew more than 70% year-over-year. These results and the opportunity our OTB integration will provide on our ability to reengage and register more users are promising and indicate that our strategy has traction. Now more than ever, I am grateful for the principles that have shaped NerdWallet's growth. We are long-term thinkers, but we're also nimble, able to adjust course because we have invested accordingly. While the rate environment prior to this year meant mortgages was up and banking was not, our commitment to diversification and investments and thinking mean that today, with the situation flipped, we are ready and able to meet consumer demand and our financial commitments. And though we cannot predict the future, we intend to focus on our long-term goals and execute against our strategy. For example, we are actively investing in improvements to our insurance marketplace, ready to capture market share when the industry rebounds. And I feel confident in NerdWallet's strong position as the macroeconomic environment evolves. In a minute, I'll pass it over to Lauren St. Clair, our CFO, to share more about how these results translate into our financial performance this past quarter. But I want to reiterate that I am very proud of the work we've done and the way in which NerdWallet has risen to the occasion. These attributes have helped us weather a number of storms in the past, and they will continue to serve us well. In all of this, we strive and will continue to strive to operate responsibly, aligned with our mission-driven consumer-first ethos. Yesterday, we published our first-ever environmental, social and governance report to highlight how we achieve our goals with integrity. While today, we're focused on our business and financial performance in Q3, I encourage you to seek out the report for insight on our commitments, approach and progress. With that, I'm going to hand it over. Lauren?