NerdWallet, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the NerdWallet, Inc. Q2 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Caitlin McNamee. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Welcome to the NerdWallet Q2 2023 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 expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements as a result of various risks and uncertainties, including the risk factors discussed in 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, except where we are unable, without reasonable efforts, to calculate certain reconciling items with confidence. With that, I will now turn it over to Tim Chen, our co-founder and CEO of NerdWallet. Tim?

Thanks, Kaitlin. NerdWallet's mission is to provide clarity for all of life's financial decisions. We operate within the larger financial services market, and our strategy is to supply consumers and SMBs with the most trusted guidance to grow our share of this market, cycle to cycle. Achieving this requires a long-term vision for success, doing right by our users to build our brand affinity in the long run, rather than operating solely to maximize profits in the short run. Today, we'll be sharing quarterly results in the context of short-term cyclical headwinds and tailwinds. We expect headwinds to outweigh tailwinds through at least the second half of this year. But if I could ask you to remember one thing today and in the years to come, it's that those headwinds and tailwinds offset each other over time, and independent of these external macro factors, we are taking share in a large and growing market in a durable, sustainable way. Our primary addressable market, U.S. Financial Services Digital Advertising, is expanding with a 2022 three-year CAGR of approximately 23%. And NerdBlood's share in this growing market has also increased with a three-year CAGR of 33% driven by robust top of funnel gains and all-time highs in aided brand awareness. In Q2, Our brand's resonance with consumers and SMBs across verticals help mitigate severe cyclical headwinds in consumer loans and carrier profitability challenges in insurance driven by inflation. As a result, we achieved year-over-year revenue and adjusted EBITDA growth in spite of those factors. We attribute our growing market share to our track record of providing the most trusted financial guidance. Across verticals, including those experiencing headwinds we continue to provide trusted financial guidance for all of consumers' questions, and we've seen significant consumer engagement in credit cards, travel, home, investing, and SMB. At the same time, our team has recognized the new ways many consumers find financial information. We are growing the audience of our Smart Money podcast, which has been downloaded over one and a half million times so far this year. We're also developing content for platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and embracing emerging technologies. In late Q2, we launched a beta of Nerd AI, a chatbot trained on nerd-like content, to give our consumers a new way to engage with our guidance. Increasing our consumer mindshare will fuel our long-term vision, a trusted financial ecosystem, or a single platform where consumers and SMBs can learn, shop, and make decisions about their money. In Q2, we made meaningful progress across our three growth pillars. land and expand, vertical integration, and registration and data-driven engagement. In addition to the strong traffic we've seen across verticals this quarter, we leveraged our reach and brand to further our expansion in emerging verticals and serve more consumers. In Canada, we launched a number of new consumer experiences and grew MUUs over 150% year-over-year. For U.S. consumers, we've made progress in building out our auto loans, Medicare, and Social Security verticals, and we launched an estate planning marketplace. These land and expand wins cross-pollinate our other strategic objectives. They not only grow our overall traffic, they also contribute to our registration goals, with recent emerging vertical content a top driver of registrations. Vertical integration refers to the alchemy we achieve by pairing NerdWallet's brand and reach with best-in-class consumer experiences. In Q2, our on-the-barrel head integration continued with a focus on cross-sell. The loans team, where OTB is primarily integrated, is able to leverage OTB's technology to identify when a personal loans customer would be better served by a balance transfer credit card, funneling these consumers to our credit cards experience instead. Meanwhile, our SMB team has begun testing experiences that direct business owners who may not qualify for traditional business loans to our personal loans product. In doing this, we believe we can provide consumers with improved outcomes. They can explore alternative products that may be better for them or that they wouldn't have considered while laying the groundwork for more effective monetization. We look forward to relentlessly improving these cross-sell experiences and bringing our learnings to other NerdWallet shopping funnels. As we grow our percentage of consumer mindshare, we are also motivated to register and engage NerdWallet users. This will allow us to build relationships with our consumers that ensure they turn and return to NerdWallet for all their money questions. In Q2, we drove a 37% year over year increase in our cumulative number of registered users. At the same time, We have invested in enhanced consumer experiences that give our users a reason to return to us again and again. We launched additional search and categorization functionality in our app, allowing users to better track their financial health over time. As a result of this work, we have driven improvements to our user engagement. In a moment, our CFO, Laurence Sinclair, will provide more insight into our financial performance this past quarter. While I am proud of our results, especially given the current climate, I am particularly energized by the focus and velocity our nerds have brought to executing on our strategy this quarter. We are leveraging our competitive advantage and consumer trust to find new ways to serve and delight our customers, to reach new consumers, and to relentlessly improve our business. With that, I'll pass it over to Lauren.