NerdWallet, Inc.

good day and thank you for standing by welcome to the nerd wallet inc q4 2023 earnings conference 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 please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced to withdraw your question please press star 1 1 again please be advised that today's conference is being recorded i would not like to hand the conference over to your speaker today Caitlin McNamee.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome to the NerdWallet Q4 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. Tim?

Thanks, Caitlin. In 2023, headwinds outweighed tailwinds in our business. In the spring, we faced increasing macroeconomic headwinds following the regional banking crisis, as well as ongoing rate hikes. This affected several verticals, including loans, credit cards, and SMB, and they have not all fully recovered yet. In addition, the strong insurance rebound we saw in Q1 of 23 was premature. The industry pulled back through the remainder of the year While the rising rate environment did create tailwinds in areas like banking, which continued to outperform our expectations through the end of the year, this did not offset the headwinds in our other verticals. We did not meet our revenue or adjusted EBITDA outlook in Q4, and this is the first time as a public company when we have fallen short of our outlook. We attribute our Q4 miss to underperformance in credit cards and personal loans. While consumer demand remains strong for balance transfer products, Incremental underwriting tightening and balance sheet constraints limited issuer appetite. We also encountered unexpected growing pains with matching sub and near prime users with the best products, which required us to take a step back. But we believe we're making progress and routing these consumers to the right offers. Our business is cyclical. While I believe there are positive signals to suggest that conditions will improve in 2024, we know that headwinds and tailwinds offset each other over time. so our priority is growing from cycle to cycle. We continue to take share across the cycle in a large and growing market, independent of macroeconomic factors. Our primary addressable market, U.S. Financial Services Digital Advertising, is expanding, with a 2023 four-year CAGR of approximately 15%. And NerdWatt's share in this market has also increased, with a four-year revenue CAGR of 27%. And in Q4, We achieved record monthly unique users, up 24% year-over-year, suggesting a significant opportunity for revenue growth as monetization improves. Also critical to my mind are the structural improvements we made to our business in 2023. We are dedicated to relentlessly improving our operations and increasing our efficiency. This past year, we made our brand spend work harder, and we also efficiently managed R&D expense growth, while still launching several new product initiatives, including NerdAI and NerdUp by NerdWallet. As a result, full-year non-GAAP operating income increased $27 million versus the prior year. And in Q4, we maintained relatively similar margins despite our declining year-over-year revenue. This work should set us up for improved margin leverage as growth returns. We build NerdWallet with a long-term orientation, and this means relentlessly improving while executing our strategy, to create a trusted financial ecosystem or a single platform where consumers and SMBs can learn, shop, connect their data, and make decisions about their money. I continue to believe that this is the right path forward for our consumers, partners, and business, driven by the meaningful progress we made against our growth pillars in 2023. I'd like to provide you with more insight into these pillars, the progress we've made toward them this year, and how I think they can accelerate our business. As a reminder, land and expand initiatives extend NerdWallet's guidance to new markets, categories, and audiences. While we cover a range of topics today, we know the financial landscape is vast, and there's still plenty of territory to explore. In 2023, we strengthened our presence in Canada and Australia, and in topics including Medicare, Social Security, estate planning, and auto loans. Looking specifically at Q4, our land and expand efforts have shown particularly strong results in Canada, as MUUs were up 56% year-over-year last quarter. Similarly, Q4 saw continued acceleration in our Medicare category. Our traffic was up over 150% year-over-year as we built out our library and enhanced our marketplace to serve more consumers during the open enrollment period. Vertical integration pairs our competitive advantages in top of funnel and brand with best-in-class user experiences, and throughout 2023, this was a significant focus for NerdWallet. We pursued vertical integration via continued integration of On the Barrelhead, including introducing their pre-qualification technology to our credit cards vertical, as well as through several key organic initiatives. Our hypothesis is that investing in best-in-class user experiences will not only provide consumers with new, more personalized ways to shop for products, but will also increase our monetization and re-engagement capabilities, ultimately setting us up to capitalize more effectively on our growing audience from cycle to cycle. In Q4, we focused on two organic initiatives. Early in Q4, we launched NerdWallet's first branded product, NerdUp by NerdWallet, which is a secured card designed to provide no-file, thin-file, and subrime consumers with an option to bill their credit, while also benefiting our partners. Meanwhile, our team has recently launched NerdWallet Taxes, a tax preparation software, in partnership with Column Tax. This product seeks to capitalize on the significant organic traffic to our taxes category, which previously went largely unmonetized by leveraging our unit economics to offer consumers a fixed fee option for preparing their tax returns. We also continued to integrate on-the-barrel heads technology, extending their personalized experiences to mortgages in anticipation of increased demand when interest rates decrease. Land and expand and vertical integration support our registrations and data-driven engagement strategy. They drive more MUUs to convert to registered users and give consumers reasons to register and connect their data. At the same time, we invest in specific registration and data-driven engagement efforts to help foster loyalty-based relationships with consumers. As a result, our registered user base ended the year ranked 37%. In 2023, this work included introducing and optimizing new product features, as well as up-leveling our CRM capabilities to more effectively nudge our registered users with targeted insights. Our registered users have five times the lifetime value of visitors, so expanding our registrations and data-driven engagement work to furnish more cross-sell opportunities and build loyalty-based relationships with consumers presents significant growth potential for the business. Our registrations and data-driven engagement work in Q4 included a significant focus on developing our cross-sell capabilities, We launched several campaigns to surface personalized product recommendations to registered users based on their data and we plan to continue developing this program in the quarters to come. By now, 2024 is well underway and I'm looking forward to sharing our results with you over the next four quarters as we continue to execute our strategy. As in 2023, we will embrace relentless self-improvement, a long-term orientation, and our commitment to consumers to drive results. In the meantime, I'll pass it over to Lauren to provide a financial update.