Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the QuinStreet Third Quarter Fiscal 2020 Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Erica Abrams. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Keith. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us today as we report QuinStreet's Third Quarter Fiscal 2020 financial results. Joining me on the call today are Doug Valenti, CEO; and Greg Wong, CFO of QuinStreet. This call is being simultaneously webcast on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.quinstreet.com. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that the following discussion contains forward-looking statements. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected by such statements and are not guarantees of future performance. Factors that may cause results to differ from our forward-looking statements are discussed under the legal notice section in our Form 8-K filed with the SEC today, including disclosure about the effects of coronavirus and related restrictions on our business and are also discussed in more detail under the Risk Factors section in our SEC filings, including our most recent 10-Q filing. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these statements. Today, we will be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are included in today's press release, which is available on the Investor Relations website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Doug, CEO of QuinStreet. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Erica, and thank you all for joining us today. QuinStreet business fundamentals and financial position remains strong and resilient despite coronavirus. We rapidly and successfully shifted to working remotely in all geographies in March, and productivity and progress have continued to be excellent. The execution of our team throughout this period has really been outstanding, first, by moving so rapidly to working effectively remotely in all locations and functions and since, by adapting quickly to the changes in our client and media markets caused by coronavirus. Due to that great work combined as usual with the scale of our opportunity, strength of our core capabilities and variabilized business model, we expect to deliver continued solid EBITDA and cash flow during this challenging period. Our balance sheet is also strong with cash approaching $100 million and no bank debt. So again, QuinStreet's business fundamentals and financial position remains strong and resilient. Beyond coronavirus, we are confident that our future has never been brighter. Fiscal Q3 results were impacted by coronavirus-related reductions in client marketing budgets and consumer traffic in some areas of our business. Those effects accelerated during the quarter with year-over-year growth in revenue, excluding divested businesses, dropping from 20% in January to 9% in March. Adjusted EBITDA margin fell from 10% in January to an average of 6% in February and March due mainly to the loss of top line leverage and related lower media efficiency. Our insurance client vertical has been performing best in the face of coronavirus. Auto insurance, our biggest business, grew 30% year-over-year. QRP also continues to progress well and promises to be one of the most exciting business opportunities in the history of the company with a strong value proposition for agency clients and big-scale and SaaS-like margins for QuinStreet. Among its…

Thank you, Doug. Hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. To start, I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy during these unprecedented times. Total revenue for the third quarter grew 11% year-over-year to $128.7 million, a record quarter for QuinStreet. Revenue, excluding divested businesses, grew 15% year-over-year to $126.3 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $9.3 million or 7% of revenue. Adjusted net income was $7 million or $0.13 per share on a fully diluted basis. We grew our cash balance by $21 million to close the quarter with $97.1 million of cash and equivalents and no bank debt. Looking at revenue by client vertical. Our financial services client vertical represented 77% of Q3 revenue and grew 15% year-over-year to $99.5 million. During the quarter, the most significant impact from the coronavirus was seen in our credit cards and personal loans businesses, where client marketing spend was down due to concerns about deteriorating economic activity and consumer credit quality. Auto insurance, our largest business, performed best in the face of the pandemic where revenue increased 30% year-over-year, reflecting strong spending from a broad range of large carrier clients. The client vertical we historically referred to as other, which included home services and B2B, represented 11% of Q3 revenue and declined 6% year-over-year to $13.8 million. As Doug discussed, we divested our B2B business in the middle of February. Moving forward, we will refer to our other client vertical as simply home services. Home services revenue for the third quarter grew 8% year-over-year to $11.5 million. Year-over-year revenue growth in home services slowed somewhat due to coronavirus as consumers limited their exposure to outsiders in their homes. Our education client vertical represented 12% of Q3 revenue and grew 4% year-over-year to $15.4 million. Moving on to adjusted…

Thank you, sir. [Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Carter Trent with Stephens. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Just wonder, what kind of feedback have you've been getting from the carriers who are already using the QRP platform? And also, what do you attribute to the recent pipeline growth?

Thanks, Carter. I got the first question. The second half, I didn't get clearly, so I may have to ask you that one again. The feedback's been very positive. In fact, unanimously positive about the performance of the platform and about how it's helping their operations. We just had a client – I got sent a text from a client just a few days ago, the most recently launched client, that said, we don't need any more testing. We're rolling this out across the floor. This thing is as good as it can be. So we're super pleased with the performance of the platform. And the feedback again has been unanimously positive and in some cases, like I just covered, growing as well, so very good progress on QRP. In terms of the – I think you said to what you attribute the growth of the platform. You mean the QRP platform?

Yes, the pipeline. Yes.

Yes. The – we have a – just an extraordinarily strong pipeline that has been worked by industry veterans with great connections. The feedback from the pilot clients and pilot efforts that we did a year or two ago, we're very positive and folks new about that. Some of our carrier partners are working the pipeline for us. This is something I think we've talked about in individual sessions. I'm not sure I've ever talked about on the calls, but this is not just a QuinStreet initiative. The largest carriers in the independent agent channel are very aggressively backing this platform. And in many cases, in fact, I think the majority of our launched and advanced pipeline clients, at least the ones at the signing stage, were referrals from big agency partners – I'm sorry, big carrier partners. So I think that combination that's a great product proven, great feedback from the initial pilot clients and then you have carriers pushing it alongside us with a team that's out of the industry and what – connected in the industry. I think all those things are working in our favor, and there are very, very strong winds at our back. It's – it is – again, it delivers – we have had reports of it delivering upwards of 40% improvement in productivity for the agents. So that is a – that's pretty staggering in terms of the benefits you can see. And it's not surprising, right? This is a unified platform. You enter the data once. You get multiple competing quotes. Those quotes, because we have the most integrations end to end with the big carriers, are much more active than previous quotes. You don't get a lot of requoting. You don't get a lot of misquoting. You don't have to enter the data two, three, four times. You want to get two, three, four quotes from two, three, four carriers, and it's a benefit on top of benefit on top of benefit. So this is just a very, very fundamental improvement in the channel. And then for our carrier partners, not only do they get more productivity out of the channel, which is important because this is a very big channel for them, but they get much better workflow management, workflow control, which would mean reduced cost, better quality and vastly improved reporting from every angle that they want. So it's just a great product at the right time and a good channel and everybody benefits. So it's one of the business opportunities you get excited about as a business person to have something that works so well to deliver so much value for everybody. So we're – I would say that that's the QRP report.

Got you. That's helpful. Thanks, Doug.

We'll take our next question from Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, gentlemen. Apologies if I ask a question that's already been addressed. I was waiting to get into the queue for a bit here. But just wondering if you can walk through the last several weeks' financial performance on a channel basis, I mean, I think you called out that auto insurance has remained pretty strong through this market. So just wondering what components of the business are seeing the most impact from the economic slowdown or COVID.

You bet. Let's start with auto insurance. Auto insurance remains strong throughout the quarter and actually gained steam. And March was, I think, Greg, the strongest month of the quarter. Correct me if I – that's not correct.

That's right. We accelerated throughout the quarter in our auto insurance business, which resulted in March being a record month for – in the history of the company in auto insurance.

And so auto insurance remains strong. It's a combination of a number of factors. First of all, we have – all the carriers are doing pretty well because of the reduced driving, reduced incident rates, so they have a lot of money. They want to – they'd like to put that money back into marketing and share gains. They expect this to be a period of heavy shopping, both because consumers are at home and online more and because a lot of consumers are going to be financially challenged. And one of the things, and Greg alluded to this, that consumers do when they're financially challenged, they shop the line items, monthly line items, including insurance and see if they can save money. And in almost every case, because of the complexity of the insurance market and the changing dynamics of that market, if you shop, you're probably going to save money. And it's not unusual at all. You see reports from our carrier partners. But back when we were running our own shopping service, direct-to-consumer shopping service, insurance.com, we had – we were seeing on average for consumers that shopped and switched $400 a year and so that's meaningful to the average consumer. So insurance – and by the way, let me not mention. Let me make sure I do mention. I don't want to be remiss to not mention. The team has got a great set of initiatives that are very fundamental and very long-term oriented. And we're making great progress on those initiatives, and those are continuing and adding a lot to that momentum. So for all those reasons, auto insurance, of course, is our biggest business, is now well over 50%, I think, of revenue or still around 50% of revenue at least. And we'll be…

I appreciate all the color you gave there. I wanted to focus on one of those components you talked about in personal loans. I know when you made the AmOne acquisition a year or so ago, one of the components of that was the turndown service. The – I think it was like a credit repair credit monitoring service. Has that held in there a little bit, helping to offset a little bit of the challenge in there? Or has that not really had a meaningful bounce either?

It has. It had an initial drop and shutdown, too, because once people go through these credit repair and/or debt forgiveness processes, they still have some obligations. And there was fear that locking consumers into new obligations in such a rapidly changing environment was dangerous, and so we saw an initial hit there, initial – pretty dramatic drop in activity in client demand. And we've seen that come back much more aggressively than the lending side. And 40% or more of our historic personal loans business is in that category. So we're somewhat diversified in that business because we do have and represent those services for consumers and unfortunately, we're probably going to go through a period where a lot more consumers need those services.

Okay. Great. And then two quick ones on QRP. Just one, at this current environment with having everybody work from home, is that creating any delays to rollouts of any particular carriers or agents? And then number two, just wondered if you could address the opportunity for captive agents as it relates to QRP.

You bet. I'd say, if you ask the team working the pipeline for QRP, they would say not – no meaningful effects, and they're not – and they would say – and I'm proud of them for this. They're saying we're not going to use that as an excuse to them But realistically, some of the agencies' launch time lines moved a little bit largely because they're working from home and their engineering staff is working from home, and it's just a little bit harder to get stuff done. But I would say that those delays, while measurable, don't change our outlook for that business growth. We still are very bullish on that business and expect that to be very big over the – and to be coming at us really hard over the next year or two. So some is the answer but still a, as you heard, very healthy progress and a very healthy pipeline, and we're super excited about the clients that we have launched and watching their ramp so that we can – each quarter, we'll report to you what we know. And we now have revenue. There's not a lot of revenue yet because the agency clients are newly launched and doing their own testing and making sure everybody's trained because it does require training to use the new platform. But as you heard, one of the clients said, hey, we don't need any more training. We don't need any more testing. We're going into the whole floor. This thing is working fine for us. We're hoping to see a lot more of them. And if we do, then as we report to you next quarter, we would like to begin to report once it becomes a meaningful item, just – not just the opportunity…

On the...

Okay. Captive agents. I'd say that little – less but not zero opportunity on the captive agent side for QRP. So they don't – they are captive agents, so they're representing one carrier's product. The biggest – best examples being, of course, the great networks at State Farm, Allstate and Farmers and have – which are kind of some of the best known, biggest brands with captive agent networks. So they have their own systems for their own product. That being said, I don't think it's crazy to expect that there may be some adoption of this product to allow those agents to broaden their product line. I'm not saying that there's 100% that we – chance we'll go and do that. But I would also say there's definitely not 100% chance it won't happen, and we are having productive discussions with a lot of carriers about using QRP. And those carriers run the full range of captive independent direct.

All right. Thanks for the color. Appreciate it.

We'll take our next question from Jim Goss with Barrington Research.

Thanks. Got a couple also. One, you've talked about having SaaS-type margin levels for QRP. Could you flesh out a little what type of margin profile you expect either earlier or at maturity?

Sure. And the difference between this product, although it's highly complementary, of course, to our historic core business and it's spun out of our historic core business and serves the same channels of clients, is that there's no media cost. And as you know, Jim, historically, media runs approximately – or over the past several years, media costs run about 70% of revenue. And so we believe that the – we expect the gross margins on QRP to be 90% plus. We have an engineering team, and we have some folks who work in sales pipeline and account management. Most of those folks – some of those folks – not many of them will be applied to gross margin, which means that we expect a contribution margin. So after all direct expenses, to be somewhere in the 70% to 80% range and we expect to be at the – at that level as soon as we get to kind of somewhere in the – I don't know, Greg. Is it mid-single-digit millions of dollars of revenue that we hit the 70% and start ramping from there?

Yes, that's right.

So this is a – and as it scales, it's just very little incremental cost to us for new clients. So it's a classic SaaS-like business. It's a software package that you log into, into our cloud, and then you apply it and use it in your operations. And we charge you on a usage basis commensurate with historic products, systems that these agencies are used to using. We're not changing the pricing model on them. We're just giving a better product and pricing competitively with legacy products, so you get great adoption and hopefully continued great performance.

Okay. And there was a comment you made about a $400 million plus of revenue base. Is that the current revenue base adjusted for just a couple of areas you've divested, Brazil and B2B? Or is it after you've adjusted out perhaps some other areas, whether it's credit card and personal loan, if you thought that was more than temporary or some other areas you might choose to divest to get to the businesses you want to run on a continuing basis?

Yes. The revenue, excluding divested businesses numbers that we talk about in the press release and that I and Greg talked about, only exclude B2B, Brazil and, Greg, mortgage?

No, just B2B and Brazil.

Just B2B and Brazil. And so that's the comparator. I would say that you should not assume that we are necessarily done with our review of divestiture opportunities or programs. I would also say you can't – you should not necessarily assume that we aren't done. We are continuing to evaluate aggressively options in some other areas to decide what we think is the right thing to do and whether or not some of those businesses can compete for the position in our core where we – with the requirements really being the ability to – big scale opportunities with the ability to more predictably and aggressively grow revenue and expand margin and defend and take out some of the unpredictability and volatility that we've seen. So certainly, we did not meet those requirements for us. We just never found a way to make that into our model. Brazil did not – is coming way too slow – too difficult to break into the market with our model given what was going on down there, and the incumbents were very different market model, which was not as good for the clients but still dominated and too difficult to get through the noise. And I'd say that we have a couple of other areas that we're looking at and that we're assessing either as divestitures or places where if they – if we keep them until they prove they can compete for the new footprint, at a minimum, they will be – their investments will be cut pretty dramatically. So we're going to get down to this footprint one way or the other and – but in terms of the numbers, as Greg said, the numbers exclude – just what we used in the press release, including the growth numbers, I guess, and in my script just exclude B2B and Brazil. So to the extent we come there.

Just one last one. Have you – and I know you said the Goldman Sachs-led process is put on hold a little bit for – because of the coronavirus issue. Do you have a time frame over which you'd like to get down to what the core businesses are so that you then have a time frame and revenue base to grow from? Is that another year or 2? Or is it sort of a rolling type process?

Much sooner than a year or two. Honestly, we would like to make decisions and execute options as soon as possible, and we're behaving accordingly. I can tell you that, internally, ideally we'd like to have it done by the beginning of the next fiscal year. Whether or not we can get that done remains to be seen. At a minimum, I'd like to know exactly what we're going to do with each of those businesses by beginning of the next fiscal year. So – and as you know, that's two months away.

Okay. Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our next question from Adam Klauber with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good afternoon. How has the debt repair business done since COVID set in? And is that something – I would think in a tougher economy could potentially pick up also.

It initially did not do well because, again, they, too, were trying to make sure they adjusted their models for rapidly changing consumer credit environment. And then we saw it begin to pick up and has recovered much more quickly than the lending side. And we agree that that's a business that, unfortunately, is probably going to get bigger in the next months, quarters and years for too many years as the – as we continue to wrestle with this – with unemployment, the bad economic environment. And I think, as you know, historically, that's been somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% to 50% of our business on the personal loan side.

Great. And then as far as your fourth quarter forecast, insurance, again, was very strong. I think you said you had a record March. Did you conservatively say that, that business does – considerably may not grow as much in your forecast for fourth quarter as you saw in the third quarter?

Our current forecast has that business growing pretty close to the same rate that it grew in the third quarter.

Okay. Okay. And then as far as the education business, sorry if you said this already, how is the more traditional non-for-profit schools? Are they still out there spending money?

They are except on the campus basis. What we saw in education from a coronavirus dynamic standpoint was a dramatic drop very quickly in campus-based marketing budgets as you can well imagine because they don't know if they're even going to have people on campus in the fall. So why market for them? And that's pretty meaningful for us. I don't think it was quite 50% of our business in education. It used to be. But it was – it's quite meaningful. And again, I don't have the number in front of me, but if I were to guess, my estimate would be it was going into coronavirus, so it was probably in the 30% plus range, and it went away almost completely. And so we had to pivot very hard in education over to online. And so what we are seeing is a lot of growth in online programs and online demand including for the not-for-profit schools and a pretty aggressive shift over from those folks in terms of their interest and budgets. And so that team, growing 4%, 5% year-over-year in last quarter, which was pretty a herculean task on their part because they had to move hard and fast to get that done, so still growing, still a big opportunity. Still – jury is still out in terms of whether or not that's going to be able to compete for a place in the core. We are evaluating that. We're excited about the team that's working on it now. But we're also evaluating whether or not that's the business that's going to compete with the core and so what could the outcomes be? We're going to keep it, keep investing in it as we continue to demonstrate that we can grow in the not-for-profit world and that we can growing other non-degree programs like coding camps and certificate programs and those kinds of areas. That would be the case for keeping it and growing it and investing in it. There's a case for keeping it but not investing until they demonstrate those things. If we think that, that could still happen in some highly probabilistic way and then there's a case for divesting that business that we'll be evaluating as well. So we're going through that full assessment, and we'll make a decision. And again, as I told Jim, in coming months, not coming quarters or years.

Thanks. And then a last question on QRP. Are you expecting much revenue to start hitting next quarter? Or is the actual revenue expected still to be maybe two, three quarters out?

We have revenue now. It's just not very much yet. So it's – we have more – we had revenue last quarter. But again, if you can imagine, it's – we had a few launched agency clients with a few of their agents testing and training. So it was pretty de minimis. And so we will have revenue this quarter. How much? We just can't tell yet. Again – and I know you guys are sick and tired hearing me say this, but we've just never done it before. So I would say that I don't expect us to have seven-figure plus revenue in QRP in all likelihood until next fiscal year, which, of course, is just two months away. And just hard for me to see us getting the five or so agencies that are not live do testing and training and rolled out across their floor fast enough to get any – to do any better than that. But I would say that it's hard to – it's just as hard to imagine, but we won't have at least seven figures, and it looks more like eight figures revenue in QRP next fiscal year given the strength of the pipeline, the launch of clients and all those things. So that's kind of how we're looking at.

Okay, great. Thank you very much, guys.

[Operator Instructions] At this time, this will conclude today's question-and-answer session. A replay of today's call will be available starting today, May 6, 2020, at 7:00 PM Central Time Zone and ending on May 13, 2020, 7:00 PM Central Time Zone by dialing the following phone numbers, (719) 457-0820 and toll-free (888) 203-1112 with a passcode of 7941495. Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. We appreciate everyone's participation. You may now disconnect.