NerdWallet, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the NerdWallet Q4 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Rob Ferris, VP of Finance. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Welcome to the NerdWallet Q4 and full year 2025 earnings call. Joining us today are co-founder and chief executive officer, Tim Chen, and chief financial officer, John Lee. 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, Rob. This quarter, we exceeded our guidance for revenue and non-GAAP operating income. In a moment, John will talk through our results in more detail, and you can also find more information in the earnings release and shareholder letter posted on our investor relations website. In 2025, we faced headwinds as consumers increasingly turned to AI overviews and LLMs over traditional search, resulting in steep organic search declines. In spite of this, We delivered year-over-year revenue growth of 22% for the full year and 23% for the fourth quarter, as growth in performance marketing, direct, and non-search referral channels more than offset the decline in organic search. Turning to our financial performance, we delivered fourth quarter revenue of $225 million, up 23% year-over-year, and non-GAAP operating income of $25 million, up 47% year-over-year. Revenue growth is driven primarily by personal loans, banking, and insurance, partially offset by credit cards and SMB products. For the full year, we reported revenue of $837 million, up 22% year-over-year, and non-GAAP operating income of $96 million, up over 100% year-over-year. Looking ahead, in the near term, we anticipate continued growth in performance marketing while we expect organic search to remain under pressure. We are keeping the long-term in focus by continuing to invest in building deeper relationships with consumers and SMBs across an increasing number of financial decisions. And now, I will pass it over to John to cover our financial results in more detail.

Thanks, Tim. As Tim mentioned, our fourth quarter results exceeded our revenue and non-GAAP operating income guidance due to continued momentum in performance marketing. We remain focused on creating long-term shareholder value by delivering sustainable growth, strong free cash flow generation, and disciplined capital allocation. With Q4 growth ahead of expectations, trailing 12 months adjusted free cash flow increasing to $118 million, and Q4 share with purchases of $51 million, we made progress on each of these objectives during the quarter. Total revenue in Q4 was $225 million of 23% year-over-year, exceeding our guidance range. This was driven by a 28% revenue growth in our consumer verticals, partially offset by a 12% revenue decline in our SMD vertical. Within consumer, insurance revenues increased 13% year-over-year, driven by robust auto carrier demand. Lending revenue increased 141% year-over-year driven by a 264% growth in personal loans and double digit growth in mortgages and other loans. Emerging verticals revenue grew 57% year-over-year driven by banking as we leveraged conversion data provided by our partners to gain share in a healthy demand environment. Looking forward, We are cautious on the outlook for our banking business as lower interest rates could reduce demand for high yield savings accounts as the year progresses. Credit card and SMB revenues declined 24% and 12% year over year respectively, driven by organic search headwinds. For the full year, total revenue was $837 million, up 22% versus 2024. Revenue from our consumer verticals grew 27% to $737 million, while revenue from our SMB vertical decreased 9% to $100 million, primarily driven by organic search headwinds. Moving on to profitability, Q4 non-GAAP operating income, or NGOI, was $25 million, which was above our guidance range. The BEAT was primarily driven by revenue outperformance partially offset by margin pressure from declining organic starch revenue. Q4 GAAP operating income was $19 million, and brand marketing expense was $11 million during the fourth quarter, consistent with prior year levels. Full year 2025 NGOI was $96 million at an 11% margin, compared to 2024 NGOI of $48 million at a 7% margin. And margin expansion for the full year was driven by expense discipline partially offset by a 40% increase in for course marketing investments from 2024 levels. Full year 2025 gap operating income was $65 million. Over the last four quarters, we generated $118 million of adjusted free cash flow at end of the year with a cash balance of $98 million. Please refer to today's earnings press release for a full reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures. In terms of capital allocation, during Q4, we completed $51 million of share repurchases, reflecting our confidence in NerdWallet's long-term prospects. Looking ahead, we will continue to focus on creating long-term shareholder value through disciplined capital allocation, including both opportunistic share repurchases and bolt-on acquisitions to accelerate our strategic initiatives. Before moving to guidance, I want to highlight a change we're making to our financial reporting beginning in Q1, 2026. Moving forward, we will simplify our revenue reporting from five categories to two, consumer and SMB. Consumer will combine what we currently report as insurance, credit cards, loans, and emerging verticals. SMB will continue to report it as it is today. Our consumers and SMBs often engage with us across multiple product categories, and we believe this presentation will better reflect that reality. We have provided historical data restated under the new revenue categories to facilitate comparisons. Turning to guidance, we expect to deliver first quarter revenue in the range of $224 to $232 million, up 9% year-over-year at the midpoint. In terms of profitability, we expect non-GAAP operating income in the range of $28 to $32 million. Our first quarter guidance assumes similar trends to those we saw in the fourth quarter, namely revenue growth driven by an increase in performance marketing revenue outweighing organic revenue headwinds. We expect the margin compression caused by this ongoing revenue mix shift will be offset by year-over-year declines in brand marketing spend. Recall that in the first quarter of 2025, our brand spend included a Super Bowl ad, an investment we did not repeat in 2026. Looking at the full year, we're expecting non-GAAP operating income to land between $95 and $110 million. We anticipate the first quarter and the third quarter will be our strongest quarters, just like we've seen in the past years. For the rest of the year, we're modeling somewhat softer results compared to our first quarter guidance. This factors in the ongoing headwinds we're facing in organic search, along with our expectation that the recent surge we've enjoyed in banking, both in the fourth quarter and so far in the first quarter, will start to cool off as short-term interest rates drop further.

With that, we'll open up for Q&A.

Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, To ask a question, you need to 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 stand by while I compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Michael Infante from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hey, guys.

Thanks for taking my question. I'd be curious on the LLM-based referral traffic in terms of what you guys can see, whether or not it's actually incremental to the business or if you're seeing some level of cannibalization relative to existing organic searches.

Yeah, I'll take that one. We're definitely seeing what we believe is incremental. People, I think, are searching more both on traditional search engines as well as LLMs. We see that in the industry data. And then in terms of what we're seeing on our side, the conversion rates on that LLM referral traffic are much higher and growing rapidly. So we do believe it's incremental.

Okay. That's helpful. Is there a way to sort of help quantify how much of a drag the sort of persistence of these organic traffic headwinds are as it relates to the 26 profitability outlook? I'm just trying to understand, you know, how we should think about any potential, you know, continuation of this performance marketing intensity. And if you view that as a form of medium term headwind to margins.

Thanks, guys. Yeah, I'll take that.

So, I believe your question is, how should we think about SEO headwinds? Is that right?

Yeah, that's fair.

Yeah. So, just first of all, we're not solving for a margin percentage. We're focused on adding NGO dollars, as we discussed. So, given the mixed-step changes in performance marketing and organic revenue tends to be not as correlated to NGOI and free cash flow and focusing on margin percentage targets would be limiting for our flexibility as we need to make the right economic decisions for our shareholders. And so what it is true that what you have seen is correct, where we are experiencing a decline in organic revenue, but we have been, at least from a revenue perspective, more than offsetting that with our performance marketing revenue and and in order to and what I would guide to is I think you could really take a look at our performance marketing spend trend over the last couple of years. I think they'll give you a pretty good sense of how to think about our our revenue growth from a performance marketing standpoint in the outer years. But at the moment, we're not guiding specifically to revenue channels.

That's helpful. Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. Just given the current landscape, you've got a strong brand and broad distribution with a You know, how can you give us an update just on how you're thinking about vertical integration and how that strategy is going to create a more stickier relationship with the consumer? Thank you.

Yeah, it's a good question. You know, typically we're pairing, like you said, our brand and reach with better consumer experiences, stickier consumer experiences. And, yeah, we're pretty happy with the way that's playing out. You know, typically you go from a transactional relationship into a relationship with better unit economics and a lot more, a lot closer relationship in terms of understanding what the customer needs. So we continue to see opportunities there. We are quite often the preferred acquirer when we get into corp dev conversations. So we continue to look forward to just being prudent but opportunistic on vertical integration.

And my guess would be, you know, a lot of these large LLMs, similar to, like, Google and Search, are going to go out and create a ton of relationships, right, direct relationships with banks and financial services partners. So shouldn't you, as an aggregator or marketplace, sorry, be – Isn't there a way to be positioned well? And have you thought about data sharing and other stuff with some of these emerging LLMs? Thanks.

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think if you think about the scenario where you're trying to do some form of agentic shopping or LLMs or trying to get more integrated, there's kind of two obstacles you really need to think about. So the first is regulatory. For example, you can't get an insurance quote from someone without an insurance license. And so if you look across, for example, credit, insurance, mortgages, and investing, they require licensing. Institutions need deterministic and compliant outputs, not probabilistic answers. So that isn't optional for any intermediary whether it's us or some kind of agentic solution and second the financial institutions need to buy in and participate so for example an insurance company can easily refuse to quote an ai agent that is shopping around by inserting a multi-factor authentication step right the two-sided marketplaces really only work if lenders and insurers want to participate They bear real costs to quote and service demand. And if agent-driven traffic hurts their margins or compliance posture, they can simply block it. So I do think there will be changes in terms of how consumers engage. But in financial services, usefulness at scale requires both the licensing piece, that compliance infrastructure, and the institutional buy-in, not just, you know, in an agentic flow. So we think we're pretty well positioned to make do with all that.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Justin Patterson from KeyBank. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks and good afternoon. Could you talk a little bit more about how AI is being leveraged internally to improve just both products as well as just the underlying content? Then I'll have to follow up after that.

Yeah, sure. I mean, we're leveraging AI pretty broadly. So I think, like you mentioned, there's two dimensions. There's the first, the internal operations. We're thinking hard about how we can use it to augment our existing workforce. And the more efficiency we can drive there, the more value we can deliver for consumers. So whether that's across, you know, coding or back office or empowering our, you know, sales people to be more useful for customers, that's a big initiative. And then in terms of the consumer-facing side, yeah, it definitely opens up more non-deterministic product flows. Like I mentioned earlier, though, we really have to be careful about compliance there and auditability. And, you know, but we do think we can provide a lot more service per agent or advisor, as well as some fully digital solutions in the future. And we're working hard on that.

Got it. Thanks. And then for the last question, you've had a really successful vertical integration strategy the past few years. As you look at just your vertical coverage today, are there any other areas where you see opportunities to be go out in the market and just augment some of the services you offer today? Thank you.

Yeah, we do. There's a lot of different corners and a lot of different verticals. So, you know, we have a pretty nascent effort in terms of new wallet insurance experts. So that's an area of focus for us that I think can improve the user experience and improve the economics of the insurance marketplace as well. But there's others as well. Thanks, Ken.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 and wait for your name to be announced. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Justin Whitney from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hi, it's Ralph Shackert, actually. Just a quick question on traffic sources. So you've been in the performance channel now for a while. Just kind of curious if you could take a step back and sort of frame what's working for you here, what strategies and channels are really starting to contribute to the overall platform. And then as you have worked with these channels for a while, can you help us think through the efficiencies you might be finding? Obviously, there's a different profitability profile between performance and organic, but just maybe speak to any efficiencies that you're finding and or working on. Thank you.

Yeah, I'll take that. I mean, performance marketing has been working pretty well for us. We think our brand is a halo across all of our performance marketing efforts. We think what we know about the consumer and our data infrastructure is a big part of enabling that as well. And then we also think our vertical by vertical expertise is also a factor that helps, especially across channels like Meta or CRM in terms of driving improvements. In terms of efficiencies, over time, we find that being a one-stop shop across many different products has advantages. So we're thinking hard about how to use the various parts of our business to strengthen every other part of our business with internal cross merchandising. And so, yeah, those things all start to work together well over time, and I think it's a big factor behind our success.

Okay, great. Thank you.

I am showing no more questions at this time. I would now like to turn it back over to management for close remarks.

All right. Thank you all for your questions today. As always, I'd like to give a huge thank you to the nerds for their continued hard work over 2025. I'm looking forward to sharing our results in Q1 with you in a few months. Thank you.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.