Doug Lebda
Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please proceed
Thank you, Andrew, and thank you to everyone for joining us this evening. Our company generated exceptional revenue growth this quarter, led by the insurance business more than doubling from the second quarter last year. Our overall revenue outlook continues to improve into the third quarter. As you all know, we operate the business on a day-to-day basis with a laser focus on generating positive incremental variable margin dollars. We seek to attract as many high-intent consumers to our marketplace as we can at positive unit economics while at the same time driving wallet share gains with our insurance and lending clients to both deepen our relationships and expand demand on the network. During the past two years in insurance, we successfully executed our plan to drive high intent traffic despite limited budgets to grow our share with carriers. Now is the time to execute the same strategy in lending. Ultimately, we expect this gain in share as -- at partners will be rewarded when interest rates decrease or lending conditions begin to loosen. We are also encouraged by the increased consensus forming that the Federal Reserve may be ready to lower its target rate at one of its next two meetings, although we do not assume any rate change in our financial outlook. Looking at segment performance, insurance grew revenue 109% and VMD grew 47% from the same time last year. Demand from carrier partners continued to build throughout the period. On one level, competition for market share has strengthened within the auto insurance category as very good underwriting results have allowed carriers to invest more into customer acquisition, and we expect that trend will continue throughout the rest of the year. But to put our insurance growth into context, two years ago, we were the third largest insurance aggregator in the US market. Today, based on comparable results, we are the second largest and believe our continued market share gains will propel us into first. Our partnerships of carriers are stronger than they have ever been, we could not be more excited for the future or more appreciative of those relationships. Our consumer segment grew revenue by 9% sequentially. We are still lapping a period of looser underwriting standards in the first half of last year, which resulted in a decline from a year ago. During the quarter, we leaned into stable lending demand at many of our partners with a particular focus on the personal loan business. Our strategy drove a 44% sequential increase in high intent consumer traffic, which helped to improve the number of loans we closed for our partners by 34%. The home segment performed as expected with higher mortgage rates and lower supply of homes for sale, limiting the number of consumers shopping for refi and purchase loans. Home equity continues to be the bright spot of the segment as revenue grew 6% sequentially. Finally, I'd like to extend my sincere gratitude to our CFO, Trent Ziegler. He started 12 years ago as an analyst in our finance department. In his time at the company, he's helped build our financial planning and analysis team, build an award-winning investor relations function by himself, and took on the role of treasurer as well. His work the last three years as our CFO helped us to improve our operating efficiency and recapitalize our balance sheet with a loan from Apollo we closed in March. Jason Bengel will be taking over the job from here. Jason is truly one of the most respected people at LendingTree and last year he partnered with Trent to remove over $60 million of fixed costs from the business. Jason has built out and led a team of professionals tasked with driving ongoing improvements in operating efficiency. He also co-led our internal strategy process which has resulted and are becoming a much more responsive and agile company. I am excited and thrilled for him to take over this expanded role. And with that introduction, Jason would like to say a few words as well.