LendingTree, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to LendingTree, Inc., second quarter 2024 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 participate, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, simply press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I will hand the call over to the Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development, Andrew Wessel.

Thank you, Carmen, and good afternoon to everyone joining us on the call to discuss LendingTree's second quarter 2024 financial results. With us today are Doug Ledda, LendingTree's Chairman and CEO, Scott Hari, COO and President of Marketplace Businesses, Trent Ziegler, our CFO, and Jason Bangle, our incoming CFO. As a reminder to everyone, we posted a detailed letter to shareholders on our investor relations website earlier this afternoon. And for purposes of today's call, we will assume that listeners have read that letter and we'll focus on Q&A. Before I hand the call over to Doug for his remarks, I remind everyone that during today's call, we may discuss LendingTree's expectations for future performance. Any forward-looking statements that we make are subject to risks and uncertainties and and LendingTree's actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Many but not all of the risks we face are described in our periodic reports filed with the SEC. We will also discuss a variety of non-GAAP measures on the call today, and I refer you to today's press release and the shareholder letter both available on our website for the comparable GAAP definitions and full reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP. With that, Doug, please go ahead.

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, and 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 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 percent, and VMD grew 47 percent 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 U.S. 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 with 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, built 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 in our 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. Thank you, Doug.