LendingTree, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the LendingTree, Inc. fourth quarter 2025 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 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that the hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 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, Andrew Wessel, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Tanya, and hello to everyone joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter 2025 financial results. On with us are Scott Puri, President and CEO, and Jason Bangle, CFO. This afternoon, we posted a detailed letter to shareholders on our Investor Relations website. And for the purposes of today's discussion, we'll assume that listeners have read that letter, and we will focus on Q&A. Before I hand the call over to Scott for his remarks, I remind everyone that during this call, we may discuss LendingTree's expectations for future performance. Any forward-looking statements that we make are subject to risks and uncertainties, and LendingTree's actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Many but not all 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, and I refer you to today's press release and shareholder letter, both available on our website, for the comparable GAAP definitions and full reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to GAAP. And with that, Scott, please go ahead.

Thanks, Andrew. And thanks to everyone joining us today as we discuss our very strong fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. I will first touch on some of the highlights from our earnings release, and then I'd like to take everyone through our 26th strategy before opening it up for questions. First off, we had a fantastic 2025. VMD was up 14%, adjusted EBITDA grew at double that pace, 28%. Each of our three reportable segments grew VMD at double-digit rates. insurance again led the way as very strong demand from carriers combined with our ability to take market share from competitors generated $174 million of BMD, a 10% increase over the previous year. We have heard some of our peers call out slowing demand from the largest insurers in Q1. I just want to tell everyone we are not seeing that at all ourselves as top carriers Budgets with us remain robust as they're targeting our high-quality consumers. In fact, we expect Q1 to be yet another record revenue quarter. The number 4 through 10 insurers on our network grew revenue by 65% with us in 25 from the previous year, a testament to the strength and breadth of partners in our marketplace. Insurance gathered strength as the year progressed, finishing with record performance in the fourth quarter that was just ahead of our previous record the year-ago period. The momentum is carried through the start of 26, and we expect another record year from the insurance division this year. Consumer segment profit by 17% last year, anchored by a 60% revenue growth from our small business team. Similar to the insurance segment, our consumer group of businesses strengthened throughout the course of the year, with segment profit increasing 24% in Q4 from the prior year, and small business revenue growing a remarkable 78% year over year. Importantly, we have not sacrificed margin to generate this growth. The segment margin for both the quarter and full year was stable at 51%. As a reminder, we have continually invested in additions to our small business concierge sales force, allowing us, you know, as well as lenders on the network, allowing us to help a greater number of business owners find the best loan options for them while guiding them through the often complex process of completing their application through to funding. Continuing the build-out of this team is in our plans for 26. The home segment recorded 6% year-over-year growth in revenue for the fourth quarter, although increasing media costs and lower conversion rates for our lender partners pressured segment margins. The national 30-year mortgage rate just dipped below 6% for the first time since 2022. We are hopeful lower rates will finally start to unlock what has historically been a historically slow mortgage market. The guidance we published today does not assume any continued improvement in rates, so we hope this means our home segment forecast will end up being conservative. The pace of AI and AI-enabled search innovation has continued to accelerate. As I have said on previous calls, we view these new tools as fantastic opportunities for our business and are a key component of the strategy we have developed to increase the number of high-intent visitors to our sites to compare and shop for financial products. We understand investor fears around the threat of disintermediation to our business model. There are many legal and regulatory structures in place that would make it difficult for a genetic AI to overcome, not to mention our own partners' incentive structures that would negate the outcome. Instead of focusing on playing defense, though, against these low probability outcomes, we are embracing this innovative technology. I cannot be more excited about the AI-powered improvements that we are making to our consumer experience. We have already driven results with our use of AI voice in our call center. As mentioned in the letter, we've seen significant revenue growth to the tune of 10 plus million dollars in revenue growth per quarter over the last six quarters compared to OpEx growth of a few hundred thousand dollars per quarter of the last six quarters in our call center operations. We've also seen efficient improvements in our marketing team has generated using AI enabled technology to speed up design, ad testing, and funnel testing. This is shown with a 17% increase in overall conversions coming through our network year over year in the fourth quarter. And that is with the headwind of legacy SEO coming down. Our North Star as a company continues to be, I'm sorry, the North Star of our company is to be the number one destination to shop for financial products. Everything that goes into forming our long-term initiatives is based on this aspiration. We have the right to win as LendingTree as the broadest network of financial partners of any consumer finance shopping site, sourcing millions of visitors who are in the market for these products and want the best deal is our core competency. We will use these strengths as the bedrock to scale customer volumes and improve outcomes with enhanced experiences, new tools, and better matchings. Our North Star strategy has four strategic pillars. Number one, accelerate the core business. Number two, improve the consumer experience. Number three, expand product offerings. And finally, number four, rebuild and reposition our brand. I'd like to briefly hit on each of these pillars for the investors today. Number one, accelerate the core business. Initiatives in this growth area focus on our existing businesses to support ongoing double-digit growth. These strategic initiatives support driving more consumers to our network, providing more purchase options to consumers, and increasing monetization of our traffic via our distribution networks. Examples of areas we're focusing on now include the continued expansion of our SMB concierge sales force and network of lenders in SMB, the development of a concierge sales force and auto lending, investments into tech product and sales teams for rapid expansion of our media business development capabilities, and tech investment into major upgrades of our marketing technology platforms. Number two, improve the consumer experience. In this pillar, the CX team is systematically resolving consumer pain points, often with the use of AI technology. Initiatives in this pillar focus on making shopping easier for what are often complicated financial products. We are seeking to serve both consumers looking to transact as well as consumers who are just window shopping. The goal of this pillar is to become a trusted partner for the consumer when seeking financial products to drive an increase in return visits and referrals. Examples of this area that we're focusing on now include improving our login experience, taking learnings from our Spring app to our website, such as making it easier to log in and customizing the homepage for login users based on products they are shopping for. Also, simplifying the process to find and review offers they had previously received. Second, develop a personal loan rate table. Using our proprietary rate data, we gather from millions of consumers shopping for loans on our network, which will allow consumers to know what rates they should expect before applying. This tool can be provided on our website, in our app. It can be embedded with our business development partners and, importantly, embedded within LLMs. Third pillar, expand our product offerings. This pillar focuses on the addition of categories of financial products offered to consumers. Our long-term strategic goal is to provide representation of all financial products that consumers can want. We do not have to manufacture a shopping experience for some products when we can instead identify and partner with industry-leading service providers. The focus over the next 18 months is to sign partnerships in areas such as commercial insurance, pet insurance, boat and RV insurance, wealth management, robo-advisors, student lending, and others. Finally, our fourth pillar, rebuild and reposition our brand. We have strong brand resilience with aided awareness, but need to rebuild the brand from an unaided awareness perspective. We also are focused on repositioning our brand to be a destination to shop for a wide variety of insurance, lending, and other financial products, where historically we've been associated more specifically with mortgage products. In Q1, we made key brand hires and have begun the redesign of our homepage. Our goal is to target brand spin in several large geographic markets in the second half of this year, introducing new customers to our redesigned experience. So thank you, everyone. I know that was a lot, but I thought it was important with our North Star and our new strategic focus to really lay it out for all of our investors. It was a little bit of a long window there, so thank you for bearing with me. And so with that, I'll pause there. and open the line to your questions about our results, outlook, and strategy.