Good day, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the MoneySuperMarket interim results 2022 conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be the question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please use the Q&A box available on the webcast link anytime during the conference call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Peter Duffy. Please go ahead. Well, good morning, everybody, and thanks very much for making the time for us this morning. This morning we reported a good trading performance and momentum on our strategic delivery. Revenue for the half was GBP 193 million. That was up 19% or 2% excluding Quidco. Profit returns growth with EBITDA up 10% to GBP 57 million. Within that trading, Money has been the standout performer. Q2 was exceptional at +64%, driven by very strong banking products. Our travel channels also had a strong half, helped by the recovery in the travel market. Gross margin was down by circa 2 percentage points to 67.9%, mainly due to the Quidco consolidation that we flagged at prelims back in February. We've increased year-end guidance to around the upper end of market expectations. We've maintained the interim dividend at 3.1%. I'll focus on a couple of areas in my presentation. First, the FCA general insurance pricing regulation that was introduced in January. The important thing to stress there is it's still really very early days, despite the fact we're six months in, and we don't believe that we've reached steady state. Overall, there has been less provider switching. PCWs are taking more share of the switching that there is, and we're also pleased that within that, our performance has improved, helped by our initiatives to be slightly better in Q2, meaning we've made some progress on market share. Overall with our strategy, we've made good progress to becoming a scalable tech-led savings platform. We've completed core data transition to Google Cloud Platform, which alongside our market leading PPC, CRM, and SEO platforms, will lay the foundations for future growth. The new MoneySuperMarket marketing campaign is resonating well with customers, and our three acquisitions of 2021, Quidco, CYTI and ITG, are all on track. We continue to streamline the business, taking out legacy roles and layers, and all of this sets us up for the next phase of our strategy, where we can begin to use data to drive greater cross-sell, product innovation, and enhanced offers to providers. With that, we're going to open the call to questions. Can we take the first question, please? Thank you. The first question comes from the line of Adam Berlin from UBS. Please ask your question. Hi, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking three questions if I can, please. The first question is on energy switching. Clearly, there wasn't much revenue in Q2, and you're still guiding for no revenue in the rest of the year. What's your current view based on what's happened recently to gas wholesale prices on when you think the switching market could reopen? And very specifically, if let's say, wholesale prices remain where they are right now through the rest of the year when the price cap increases in October, does that give us any hope that the switching market could open then? Obviously, there's uncertainty how that could go. But if we just assume wholesale prices remain roughly where they are now, by then, what does that mean? That's the first question. Second question is just a question on travel. I was interested that the travel insurance revenue was up quite strongly on Q2 2019, but TravelSupermarket revenues were still down. Could you just explain why that is? Is there still upside in the TravelSupermarket revenue, as travel recovers? Just explain that. That'd be helpful. The third thing is, can you give us an underlying growth rate for Quidco in the first half? Thanks. Great. Maybe I'll take the first two, and I'll hand the third on to Scilla. Is that all right? On energy switching, thanks, Adam. Yeah, I mean, you know, the basic point is it's really very hard to predict. I think there are four factors, four buckets that we need to sort of take into account in terms of the market returning to more steady-state. First, consumer demand for switching. We have seen actually that it continues to be robust essentially across the first half. You know, customers are coming to the site, but they are looking for opportunities to save. Unfortunately, we just don't have any product out there to sell. Number one is consumer demand for switching, and I think that is still solid. The next point is then wholesale prices. We need those to return to a level that enable providers to offer attractive, tariffs again. Clearly, we're looking into a significant increase in terms of the price cap coming in at the start of October. That market continues to be much more volatile than perhaps we would have even expected when we spoke to you in February. There is no sense that that is gonna come back in 2022, and there's really limited visibility in terms of what that looks like into 2023. I think the third area then is providers. Obviously, we've seen some level of shakeouts of the market. That has stabilized to some degree. We've got 20+ providers still in the market at the moment, broadly the same number that we have in broadband, which makes it have the potential to be a competitive market. They have to have absorbed the customers that they've taken on as a result of the market shakeout and be ready to come back to acquisition. I think that's another issue. We've got increasing levels of regulation coming through. We've seen the market stabilisation charge as an example. We've also seen the regulator announcing that they will be moving the price cap onto a quarterly rather than a half yearly basis. We know that every time the price cap shifts, essentially it creates in consumers' minds the opportunity to go and check they're on a good deal. We'd say that is a sort of net positive thing. I mean, they're the four factors that we have to sort of take a view on really. What I would say is this is still an exciting market, albeit it's closed at the moment. 75% plus now households are on a standard variable tariff. We have a leading short and very simple journey with Pick Me a Tariff Every Year on MSE and, the equivalent product Super Switch now on MoneySuperMarket ready to go as and when that market does begin to open. Consumers are being moved to providers that they didn't choose. They're on variable rates, and they will be wanting to get better deals as and when that market begins to open. There's just very limited visibility about when that will happen at the moment. That's number one. Number two is travel insurance revenue versus TSM revenue. I'll get Scilla to pick up on this, but fundamentally, revenue is running ahead of volume. Volume is about 30% of where it was in 2019 on insurance, but revenue is running, you know, ahead of that. TSM has come back strongly, and I don't think we've published the percentage. About 60%. About 60% we've said, okay, versus 29%, the 29% performance. To your point, we still see that there's kind of upside to kind of come through. I think the thing we just need to be very conscious of, with TSM is what's happening with the travel industry at the moment, with the sense of disruption and, certainly the cost of living crisis, where does that kind of end up? We've seen, you know, a strong performance certainly in quarter two. Let's just see where that kind of gets to in quarter three and quarter four. Scilla, do you want to add anything to that and also then pick up on question three? I think the key thing exactly as Peter touched on, Adam, is that what we're seeing in travel insurance is some significant growth in value, if you like, but volumes are still tracking behind 2019 levels. We've seen that, you know, consumers effectively trading up a bit in terms of what policies they're taking out. Remember that travel is one of the very few channels where what we're paid is linked to the premium that somebody, you know, pays for the policy. It's quite different than the model within both, you know, TravelSupermarket and Icelolly.com. Actually, if you looked at them for Q2 on a volume basis, they're not as different as you're suggesting. You know, kind of take that into account. The other bit we're, you know, in danger of adding too much color here, but within the TravelSupermarket business, there is a you know quite strong car hire business. You were seeing our car hire is experiencing sort of similar issues to what everyone else is seeing in terms of availability of cars and therefore pricing is particularly high. You know, that's causing some impact in terms of traffic. That's travel. You then asked a question in relation to Quidco. I think if you remember at the time we did the acquisition, people asked about the shape to sales at that point in time. Really we said that revenue was broadly evenly split between the halves with the exception of November, which, you know, Black Friday and so on, which I guided to being about, you know, twice as much value to the other months. You can see on that basis we're sort of reasonable, you know, sort of low growth on revenue. Importantly, look into the back of the RNS, and look at the segmental for profits where you'll see that for adjusted EBITDA, we printed GBP 5.4 million of EBITDA for the half for Quidco, that compares to GBP 7.9 million for the full year to July 2021, you know, at that acquisition. You can see that, you know, as we've highlighted in the RNS, we're making some considerable progress in relation to, you know, synergies within that business. Sorry, I didn't understand that last point. You said the EBITDA was down from 7.9% to 5.4%. No, no, sorry. I was quoting. No. In the half we've done GBP 5.4 million. Yeah. compared to a full year of EBITDA A full year. Okay. Okay. of 7.9 for July 2021. Thanks. Okay, thank you very much for your help. Thank you. Now we're taking our next question. Please stand by. The next question comes through the line of Andrew Ross from Barclays. Please ask your question. Great. Good morning, everyone. I've got three questions as well, if that's okay. First one, you made some interesting comments there around your market share improving in home and motor insurance during the half. Can you just talk a bit about the competitive intensity you're seeing there and the gross margin specifically in both verticals for you as you start to gain share? So are you able to hold on to gross margin gains and gain share is the question. Second one is on Money, where you had a very strong banking performance in Q2. Can you just talk a bit about what you're budgeting for that market in the second half and whether in the 110 EBITDA guidance we should assume there's a continuation of that very strong market or if it were to come, could that be on top? The third one is a bigger picture question. It kind of feels like there's some really good tech progress being made in the business and we may start to see some real evidence of that in the consumer experience. The markets have not been normal in the last couple of years and maybe more normal next year. Do you now think this is a business that can grow EBITDA double digits? Is the tech in that place if you get normal end markets? Thank you. Okay. Maybe I start with tech progress and then Scilla and I will sort of dance on the other two. Yeah, I think we have made good progress. As I described, we've moved everything now onto Google Cloud Platform. That means all our data is in one place. It's available real time, but importantly it's available operationally as well as for analytics. I described this morning the first sort of significant shift in the customer proposition, where we'll be able to use that data to truncate the experience for returning customers. You may remember when I first presented, going back almost a couple of years now. One of the things I spoke about is how we broke the expensive marketing loop and tried to re-contact customers and bring them back directly to the site and do that in a very, very efficient way. These are the building blocks to enable that to begin to happen. I really think that is quite a significant shift for us in terms of how that practically works. The second point is then about the savings platform, sort of tech-led savings platform. We're building out our technology once, so we can then begin to feed that into multiple brands, whether that's MoneySuperMarket, MoneySavingExpert, Kwik Fit, or actually other people's brands through our B2B business as well. We've made good progress there in the half in that we have launched MSE Car for the first time, which uses obviously the group aggregation stack, but very much has the MSE tone of voice. You can imagine that we'll be looking to begin to move that into Kwik Fit at an appropriate point in time and also offer that out as a B2B service as well. More progress to be announced there in terms of where we are. In terms of then competitive intensity against the existing model, yeah, I think it has been competitively intense. We see media budgets very strong. We see aggressive bidding on PPC. We see everybody chasing the same SEO customers. There's been no letup in terms of that. Would I say it's any more intense than it has been historically? I don't think so, particularly. I think it is just a very, very competitive market in terms of where that is. In terms of money, I'll hand over to Scilla in a second to pick up your points on gross margin and EBITDA. The key points on money that we've tried to make this morning is that whilst we've had strong growth right across the category, we've had particularly strong growth in terms of our banking product. That is very promotional by which we mean, you know, we. It's fundamentally checking and savings accounts. It really is about great rates being available to customers. Great rates, particularly on experiences where the customer can convert easily. While we, you know, see the potential for that, obviously, kind of going forward, we just have very limited visibility in terms of when those deals are gonna come. Typically, we can understand that a deal will become available, say, a month before it kind of goes live. Scilla, do you wanna pick up then the points about the gross margin? What's in the 110 and where we are in terms of what we guided on the EBITDA? Sure. I mean, within insurance in terms of the market share and, you know, taking that while holding margin, Andrew, you'd have seen within the commentary on gross margin for the first half. I have given a nod to the conversion points in car and home being, you know, a slight headwind on margin in the first half. It's, you know, as ever, a little bit difficult to disaggregate the pure conversion versus the competitive intensity in the auction, but it has been, you know, a slight drag in margin in the first half. You'll remember, you know, Peter describing at prelims what we were looking to do, and you touched on it in terms of growing share. Obviously the platformization into MSE, you know, margin positive, CRM, and above the line, gross margin positive, PPC as I've sort of guided to. You know, you've got a bit of mix going on there. On Money, exactly, again, as Peter touched on, very strong and we've used the word exceptional Q2 performance. Actually, it was double-digit growth for all channels, borrowing and banking, but it was really banking that drove the sort of truly exceptional nature of it in Q2. You've heard me say it before. I'm smiling 'cause I sort of say it's very lumpy and very difficult to predict. It was the highest quarter in over five years, from banking. You know, knowing me as you do, you wouldn't expect me to be expecting and forecasting that to continue in that shape into H2. Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you. We are going to take our next question. Please stand by. The next question comes to line of Bridie Barrett from Stifel. Your line is open. Please ask your question. Bridie, your line is open. Please ask your question. Can we go to another questioner and see if Bridie comes back a bit later? Yes, of course. Thank you. We're going to take our next question. The question comes from the line of Ciarán Donnelly from Liberum. Please ask your question. Thank you. Most of mine have been asked, but two. I guess one, just on the improvement you've seen on the data side and the replatforming. I wonder, could you give us some insight into how that might translate into an improvement in marketing margin, whether there's any kind of leverage from that side of things? Two, I wonder if you could give any update in what I'm sure is a very hard task in replacing Scilla. Thanks. Yeah. Okay. On the first, I mean, essentially everything we're trying to do, Ciarán, is to begin to use our own data, use our own resources to begin to drive volume rather than always rely on expensive third party media. You know, in saying that, we're not guiding specifically on the marketing margin in terms of where we are at the moment, but, you know, we're making good progress in terms of all of that with SEO, with CRM, with everything we're doing on NQA, which is a program we call No Questions Asked. I don't think there's any additional guidance to kind of give there, but you can see what our direction of travel is. In terms of replacing the irreplaceable Scilla, we have a top four headhunter looking at that at the moment. I'm seeing candidates as we speak. I have no doubt we will find someone brilliant, but of course, it was a very sad day when Scilla told us her news, and she's been absolutely brilliant for this organization. Brilliant for me as well, not just as a colleague, but also as a friend. We're very sad to see her go. All good in terms of looking for a replacement. Okay. Thanks both. Thank you, Ciarán. Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question over the phone, please press star and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Alternatively, you are welcome to submit any questions on the webcast. Please stand by. We're going to take our next question. The question comes to line of Ross Jobber from Citi. Please ask your question. Thanks very much. Two questions, if I may. First of all, I think I'm right in saying that at the prelims, you gave a very interesting statistic about 19% of active users inquiring in more than one channel, which was lower than the pre-pandemic peak of 23%. Just interested if you've got any sort of update on that for us in terms of the first half and whether you saw that move at all. A similar question, but slightly longer term. In terms of the reorganization of the tech stack, when would you expect that to start to have an impact financially? Are we really talking about next financial year rather than this? Thank you. The second one first, Ross. Yeah. The way the No Questions Asked will be rolling out, the way some of the smarts are still rolling out in terms of the MarTech, it's sort of done on a, you know, category by category basis really. NQA will go on to cards, loans, car insurance to start off with. In getting that stuff live, we need to make sure it works. Inevitably, some bits of it work well, some bits of it don't work well. You know, it takes a while to begin to bed in. You know, I wouldn't be expecting anything coming in this half specifically, very much with a view to kind of 2023. In terms of the cross buying rates that we shared, I think I may have said in February, we're not planning on giving a running commentary on that every half year. There have been some pluses and some minuses in terms of how that's worked as you would begin to expect. It will be something that I'm very happy to kinda come back to you next February and kinda give, you know, an overall view of where we've got to over the 12 months. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to take our next question. Please stand by. The next question comes from the line of Bridie Barrett from Stifel. Please ask your question. Your line is open. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can, Bridie. Hello. Hi. Sorry about before. I'm not sure what happened. I wasn't on mute. Happy to have a go now. Yeah. I just I was curious on the motor and home insurance point that you made earlier, that the PCWs have been increasing their market share. I wondered if you had any thoughts as to, you know, why that might be, particularly at the moment, given everything that's going on and, you know, if that's something that you think as an industry you'll be able to carry on building on. Because I think until sort of more recently, the view was that it was a fairly mature market already. I've got a couple of little questions I just wanted to follow up on after that as well. Yeah, sure. No, you know, my answer to that, Bridie, is that you've got very strongly embedded consumer behavior about going to check a price comparison website at the point of renewal. Even though the market is smaller, you've got consumers who are going to go and look kind of regardless, really. I think that to me would be why PCWs are taking a bigger share of the market overall. The market may be smaller, but you know, people are still looking in the way that they were. Okay. You don't really see it as being sort of tied to, you know, cost of living crisis, inflation, kind of people just more generally being more- Well, I think all of that will. -active. Yeah, I think all of that will factor in, but I don't think we could draw that out specifically as the reason why. Yeah. All our research says about 60% of all car and home inquirers will go and look at a price comparison website just to make sure that the deal they're on is sensible. I think that for me, would be the reason why. Okay. Thank you. Just coming back to travel again. I think you said you're back to 60% of 2019 levels. I just wanted to check, is that pro forma for Icelolly? Yes. It is pro forma. Okay, fine. Thank you. It is. Then the other thing I just wanted to ask was about the kind of new product opportunities that you've been talking about. You mentioned introducing some tenancy advertising to the platform. Are you able to give us a sense of materiality of that? You know, presumably it'd be a 100% margin product, so you know, kind of when should we start factoring that in as a new revenue line, if you like? Not at this point, Bridie. I think we're still very much in the process of kind of rolling that out, as I say, category by category. It's very early days. We've got to see how that works. It's been very successful for us in Decision Tech. Let's see how that begins to work more broadly across the enterprise. I don't think we can give you any specific guidance on that at the moment. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Bridie. There are no further questions on audio at this time. Please continue. Okay. I think we're saying there's no more questions. Look, thank you everybody for your time. We really appreciate it. If you have any follow-ups, then please get in contact with us directly. Otherwise, look forward to catching up with you one-on-one shortly. Cheers. Take care. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.