Good morning, and welcome to MONY Group Interim Results Live Q&A. We will conduct a question and answer session following the release of this morning's results. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the Raise Hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Participants can also submit written questions through the webcast page using the Ask a Question button. I'd like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I'll now hand over to Peter Duffy, Chief Executive Officer of MONY Group. Please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for your time this morning. So hopefully you've all had the opportunity to watch the results video that we released this morning, but perhaps I can just give you a quick recap before we get into questions. So we've had a good start to the year. We've delivered our best ever H1 revenue and EBITDA. Revenue was up 5% to GBP 223 million. EBITDA up 8% to GBP 73 million. The MONY Group is all about saving households money. That is exactly what we've been up to in the half, because we've saved customers an estimated GBP 1.7 billion. Now, this growth is supported through our two-sided marketplace. On the consumer side, we've seen momentum across what we're calling our member-based propositions. That's the SuperSaveClub for MoneySuperMarket, the app for MoneySavingExpert, and Quidco. By growing members here, we're encouraging customer loyalty, retention, and repeat purchasing, and in time, this will grow our revenue per customer, but then also importantly, reduce our reliance on expensive third-party marketing, because more customers will be coming to shop with us directly. It's still early days. Initial results are suggesting that our member-based models are achieving what they set out to do. On the provider side, the work we've done on our platform means we can get our products to market faster, onboarding them across our, all our brands and our B2B partners simultaneously. And then we've also made great progress advancing our other additional provider services, Market Boost and Tenancy. And these services help our partners get more great deals in front of customers. It earns them and us more revenue at the same time. So as we always say, there is strength in the breadth of our offering. We are more than just a comparison website, and our investment in data, tech platform, and marketing infrastructure means we are in the best shape possible to drive further growth, and I am excited for what's ahead. So of course, our confidence in FY 2024 performance and continued strategic delivery meant that we were delighted to have grown the dividend by 3%. And with that, I'm going to open the floor to questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the Raise Hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Participants can also submit written questions through the webcast page using the Ask a Question button. We will pause for a moment to assemble the queue. We'll take our first question from Joe Barnet-Lamb at UBS. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Excellent. Thank you very much. So three questions from me, please. So firstly, with premium growth slowing substantially, led by motor, but with home following, could you give us a bit more color on what gives you the confidence that insurance can continue to grow in 2H? Obviously, last year was really exceptional in the second half. Secondly, as growth in insurance slows down and cash back and B2B are sort of growing nicely, do you think this is gonna negatively impact your gross margins in 2H, or do you think you can hold them steady at 1H levels? And then the third question around OpEx. The low cost growth in 1H was very impressive. This sort of low- to mid-single-digit cost growth guidance that you've given, should we be thinking more low than mid, or is there anything on the agenda to drive that up? And can you give us a bit, sort of broader color around the measures taken to get that cost growth so low? And as the group progresses post-tech and data spending, do you think that can continue at low single-digit levels? Thank you. Thanks, Joe. Perhaps I'll do one, and Niall, I'll pass two and three on to you. So, just in terms of premium growth, so obviously, premium growth in FY 2023 for car was very significant, 35%. That's tapered off to 18% in H1 2024. And as we always say, home sort of lags car by three-six months. So we saw premium growth of circa 34% last year in home. That's now tapering off to circa 30% in H1 2024. So you see the sort of same trend, but not as pronounced in terms of what's happening. Yeah, you're right, Joe. I mean, we will have tough comps in H2, but I point to a number of things, really. You know, firstly, the absolute price that a consumer are paying is still really significant. We're estimating in H1 that an average consumer is saving about GBP 550 coming onto the platform. So whilst inflation may not, may be tailing off, the absolute amount the customer is paying is really significant, and car insurance has never cost so much. We've now got 260 products for car and home on the platform. So, you know, typically, somebody is pricing in a way that is gonna attract a certain sort of customer. That means they can begin to find value. On top of that, all our martech that I used to talk about is now fully deployed and is, is helping us begin to drive volume efficiently. We've also obviously now got 10 B2B partners in car that we didn't have 12 months ago. So I think strategically, you know, we're in a strong position in the second half of the year. Niall, do you want to pick up the questions on margin and OpEx? Sure. Thanks, Joe. I mean, start with gross margin. I think you're right. You're calling out in H1. There are a couple of ups and downs going on inside that, holding it steady. Obviously, the mix into insurance is helpful. We've also been doing a lot of work on our PPC bidding to make sure that that remains efficient. And those are all tailwinds in the first half, and then offsetting that, the growth in cashback and in B2B, obviously, they're structurally lower margins. I think as we look into the second half, you're going to see the similar dynamics play out with cashback and B2B hopefully continuing to grow. But we'll also be working to make sure that we manage our margin carefully. We're always making decisions week to week, month to month on where we find margin to be acceptable and either bidding or not bidding on that basis. And then picking up on the OpEx piece, clearly, we've guided low to mid the year. We're coming in at 2%, for the half, which is partly distribution costs, where again, we've sort of taken the advertising down where we could. But also I think inside admin costs as well, if you look at people costs being up 2%, that those require a piece of work. So lots of that good work will sort of also be benefit in the second half. Wonderful. Thank you. Our next question is from Andrew Ross at Barclays. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Hi, guys. Morning. I've got two, if that's okay. The first one is on SuperSaveClub. And I wanted to ask: Can you give a sense as to what percentage of switches or revenues the SuperSaveClub represents in the early verticals that were put into the club, so I guess insurance? Or maybe to ask the question a different way, how many of your total transacting users does the 500,000 people now signed up to the club represent? Because the 14 million active users you've disclosed, I think, is inquiring and not transactions. If you could give a sense as to what that number is in transactions, that would help us to try and gauge how meaningful the club is in context. So that, that's the first question. And the second one is on energy. I guess a big picture one, but what is your latest thinking in terms of when revenues might start to be material, in that business? Thank you. Great. Thanks, Andrew. Perhaps I'll do club. Niall, do you want to pick up energy? So I mean, I think the short answer is it's not massively material at the moment, Andrew. So we've done really well. We got to 500,000 members, which we're very excited about, and we've shared with you some data from the very early cohorts in terms of what they were looking like six months later. But obviously, about, you know, 500,000 has sort of grown across the half, really, and so it isn't significant versus our overall sales yet. But I think what you should read in 500,000 is that customers think this is a relevant proposition. So as that grows, I would expect that to be different. So I don't think there's any more color I can shine on yet than to say it's not material at the moment. Niall, energy? Yeah, energy. So I think, we're continuing to call out that we're not expecting anything material, this year in energy. Clearly, as the year has gone on, there are things out there that are improving, so wholesale prices are coming down. They're not necessarily stable every day of the week yet, but they're definitely coming down. We know that the ban on acquisition tariffs is being looked at by Ofgem, and hopefully in October this year, we'll know more on that. And we have got these on the platform. S o at the end of the period, we had 4 deals on the platform as well. So that's all positive momentum. I think then what we need to see is kind of clarity, I guess, around the regulatory environment and providers feeling that confidence to come into the market and offer these. Great. If I, if I could just follow up on that first answer. So I guess, Peter, would you expect that it will be a material part of the revenues or a more material part of the revenues getting to 25% of the SuperSaveClub sales? And I guess what I'm trying to ask, it's obviously good for those positive lifetime value dynamics going on amongst early adopters, but when does this actually get big enough that it makes a difference to the P&L? Are you saying that's more a 2026 thing than a 2025 thing, and it's still a kind of immaterial part of the overall group revenue right now? Thanks. Yeah. No, I do think you'll start to see the impact in 2025, Andrew, beginning to wash through. So if we kind of look at our rate of acquisition, and if that stays at, you know, the levels that we're seeing at the moment and the attachment rates we see from customers who are coming to the platform now, we would expect that to be a significant volume in 2025 and start to begin to have an impact. Okay, thanks. Our next question is from Luke Holbrook at Morgan Stanley. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. My first is just on market share dynamics in the quarter. So I think in prior releases, you might have commented on whether you've kind of gained share in insurance or not. Just wondered if you can comment in that regard. And also just secondly, on the reduction in distribution costs. Was it more of a conscious effort to reduce brand advertising in terms of growth and profitability trade-off, and whether that also impacted any of your market share in the quarter? Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Luke. Look, I think in terms of, market share, we don't obviously, get into individual dynamics. I think if you look at this on a sort of, what's been happening over the last couple of years. W e've been clearly taking share. In this half, we've won the, Auto Trader deal, we also are pointing out that. You know, we have taken decisions to keep margin where we want it to be at certain points in time as well. So there's always ups and downs in it, but, you know, we're happy with where we are. I think then, sorry, on the second question, reduction in distribution costs. You remember that sort of back end of last year, we did say that we put more money behind, Quidco and TravelSupermarket specifically, and we also were looking to, you know, make the spend more efficient as we got into this half. So all of it was a very conscious decision about where we were putting our money, but it comes on the back of the work that we'd already been doing for the last couple of years, really, to get the spend that we are putting out there more effective. Okay, understood. So the fact that you're effectively reiterating adjusted EBITDA guidance in line with the market for the full year just basically reflects some of the potential in the second half to see maybe some lower growth than profitability. If you're basically protecting that in Q2, I'm just wondering why or if you think the market is maybe a bit conservative on the profitability for the full year? So we're getting to the consensus number, so we have it at GBP 140.5. And, you know, I think it probably will reflect some of the trends of what we've seen in H1, where, you know, we're getting to low to single in terms of OpEx, and we're saying there's not going to be any energy, and the insurance become a sort of a tougher comp in the second half. So I think that's kind of in line with what the market think. Understood. Thank you. Our next question is from Ciarán Donnelly at Berenberg. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Yeah, thanks a million, guys. Just a couple from me, I guess, on marketing margin. If we could just dive a little deeper on that. Could you help us, I guess, understand a little bit more, how much of it came from kind of benefits you've seen on the efficiency of your marketing spend? I guess, is there anything in terms of pricing in online spend that it's slightly softened? I guess, just in terms of the member base propositions, have you seen any benefit from that flowing through? And then just secondly, just on M&A, obviously, Quidco is now kind of in the rearview mirror, could you give us your updated thoughts on that? Thanks. Do you want to pick up on the margin? I'll pick up on M&A. Yeah, I think the, the margin is pretty much the point we were just talking about, Ciarán, and you can see the benefit of the reduction around the, you know, TV and radio spend, that's gone through in the half. So that, that is the bulk of what's going on. So that, I say that all comes from getting the spend quite efficient over the last few years. You can choose which channels you want to go and spend your money, and, and we're, we're choosing and, and trying to keep the margin in the right place as we go through each period. Ciarán, to your point on M&A, we will delever Quidco by the end of the year. Look, our situation is kind of the same. We look at a lot, we consider a few, we do very, very little. We have a very high benchmark when it comes to M&A. We look at things that make absolute strategic sense to us and the shareholder. So obviously, we have an active program understanding what's happening in the market, but you know, at any point in time, we will only consider the absolute best opportunities for the group. So nothing changes in that regard. All right. Perfect, guys. Thanks. Our next question is from Roddy Davidson at Shore Capital. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Yeah, morning, chaps. Hope you can hear me okay. Thanks for the initial remarks, et cetera. Not too much left on the question I've had actually, after the other guys. But just a couple of things, maybe sort of slightly higher level in terms of perspective, if I may. Firstly, any thoughts, initial thoughts on the sort of relevance of any of the initial pronouncements from the new government on your trading environment, any of your underlying verticals? And also, just interested in your view on how quickly you think that products within the money vertical could pivot in the event of an interest rate cut. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Roddy. I mean, obviously, obviously, it's still very early days in terms of a new administration. So I think it's very difficult to kind of call out anything in particular, really. I think there are very few initiatives which are particularly in the space of kind of what we do. So I think it is just too early doors, really, to say one thing or another. Sorry, the second question was? Money and interest rates. Money and interest rates. So, so clearly, as interest rates begin to drop, we would expect that to be a tailwind. So you remember when we had the Liz Truss budget, we saw an almost overnight reduction in conversion rates on mortgages, loans, and credit cards. Now, Niall's pointed out that we've had quite a strong trading in credit cards, but you're still seeing suppressed conversion really on loans and mortgages. I think small changes aren't going to make a massive difference, but I think when, you know, rates potentially come down by 1% or 2% or more like 2%, we will probably see that to be an environment that was more supportive of the consumer in terms of using borrowing to begin to, you know, bring forward some of their discretionary purchases. Thanks for that. Yeah, I guess, I guess it's difficult to make an assessment of how quickly things pivot. I just. I suppose I was interested in whether you get a sense from your partners that they have products that are basically on the shelf and ready to go. Can I ask, if I may, a supplementary just on B2B? I mean, great progress being made in that area in terms of the number of partners that you have. How should we sort of think of the ultimate potential and breadth of the opportunity in that space? Yeah, maybe I'll do the first one, and pass the second one on to Niall again on B2B. So, in terms of sort of products on the shelf to pivot, I think really these lending products, these mortgages, they're relatively simple and, you know, essentially the sticker price is the thing that really begins to make a difference to the consumer, what their monthly repayment is. So I think when interest rates get to the point that that becomes something that seems to make sense to a consumer versus the, you know, what they're wanting to do with that discretionary expenditure, then we'll start to begin to see that move. And I think in terms of the mortgage market, well, you know, there's quite a lot of commentary there in terms of what we would expect it to begin to happen, as interest rates begin to kind of move back to more historic norms, obviously, you know, pre the financial crisis. So, I'm thinking of a couple of percent, really, again, I sort of reiterate that before you would begin to see those tailwinds starting to come through. Niall, on the second part of the question? Yes, so I think B2B, you know, just think there's historically, we've done a lot of B2B in home services. Last year, we really sort of got insurance live, and we've kind of gone quite rapidly at winning, customers through, well, through the course of last year, including sort of as Auto Trader, toward the end of the half. So there is, as we bring more products on, that gives us more potential to win in more markets. But even within the markets that we have, you know, we've got a, a fairly full pipeline review that we do regularly. It does take time to bring these, bring them on, so, we'll, we'll just keep chipping away at it, Roddy. Yeah, that's great. Thank you very much. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the Raise Hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Our next question is from Rahul Chopra at HSBC. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Good morning. I have three questions. In terms of with slowdown in insurance, could you give us any. Are you seeing any signs of increased competitive activity in the insurance vertical that should impact conversion rates? How should we think about that? Second, in terms of coming back to insurance, Direct Line recently had given indication that they'll be moving towards price comparison websites towards the Direct Line insurance brand. So any early comments on in terms of how you're thinking in terms of what it means to the volumes for the price comparison sector? Finally, in terms of SuperSaveClub loyalty cost, I think the GBP 15 voucher and GBP 300 basically reward loyalty, I mean, I know probably that's an aggregate number, but then how does it compare with traditional marketing online spend on a per user basis? Just wanted to understand the feel of it. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Rahul. Niall, can I ask you to pick up the third one there? So just in terms of competition, I would observe that, you know, the home and motor markets are intensely competitive. I think I said earlier in the call, we have 260 products, you know, many of which are repriced very regularly for customers, if not, you know, same-day, real-time, increasingly. So I think you've got a very, very competitive market there, which is why the consumer does need an environment like MoneySuperMarket to begin to get the best deal for them to meet their individual demands and needs. It's just too complicated to kind of understand without some level of tech support. I don't see any reduction in that competition starting to happen. What you see are new products, you see new initiatives coming through from providers all the time. It's quite an entrepreneurial space, so I don't see that environment changing. But that 260 products I talk about, that's up 20%, essentially in two years. In terms of Direct Line, yeah, obviously, Direct Line have said that they're coming on to comparison. Obviously, Direct Line Group are already on comparison with their other brands, but they have said that they're bringing Direct Line onto price comparison websites as well. So, we'll be looking forward to having conversations with them about how quickly we can begin to support them with that aspiration. Niall? Yeah. So in terms of the SuperSaveClub, I think, Rahul, the way to think about this is if you look at our current cross-inquiry rate that we give as a KPI, you know, kind of customers are looking at 1.2 things. So that's kind of telling you something about the number of times we need to acquire a customer for any given product. And the point of what we're trying to achieve in the club is we're trying to get them to buy more and to do that consistently with us sort of over multiple years. And that's a sort of proper change of behavior that we're wanting to drive. But clearly, as Peter's kind of called out, we're in the quite early stages of it to know whether or not that's going to compare very differently in the future to what we've got right now. But we are managing club and/ or marketing mix at the moment to hold our margin where it is. So we're managing that through this period as we try to get more control over our spend in the future through the member-based initiatives. Thank you very much. Yes, thanks. We have another question from Joe Barnet-Lamb at UBS. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Excellent. Thank you very much. Yeah, a couple more from me, please. So on tenancy, how meaningful are the revenues coming from tenancy now? And how do you view that with regards where it can get to? When you consider the growth of those tenancy revenues, what's, does the growth come from you putting more real estate aside for ads or selling out the space you already have, or, you know, driving up the cost you're charging for it? And just to confirm, presumably, that's close to sort of 100% margin. And then secondly, you mentioned, I think in the recorded remarks, about the new AI-powered campaigns to reach more users through more channels, and specifically, I think you called out broadband. Can you give a little bit more color on what you've done here, what the benefits were on CAC? Is it something you can push more widely as well? Thank you. Right. Let me start, and then I'll-- on both of them, and I'll throw those over to Niall to pick up on, on both of them. So Joe, tenancy is all about smarter targeting. It's not about putting more inventory all over the site. So we're quite happy with the way tenancy works on the site now. It's just about refining the targeting and enabling providers to talk to those cohorts they really want to talk to. So that's very much what our focus looks like going forward. And actually, the tenancy that the SuperSaveClub is a good example of that, where you have a provider who essentially can begin to augment the club benefits, essentially, for someone who is a member. So if the club gives you X, then, you know, they can get Y, if they choose that product from somebody who's buying into that opportunity. I think the point I was trying to make on AI is that actually the breadth of our exploration across the whole group is what is kind of really exciting. So we've got lots of stuff going on. So clearly, we've switched on the copilots in terms of software development, in terms of data science. We're obviously using it in terms of content creation and then customer services, like many organizations have. I use the example of how our bot now is answering two-thirds of customer contacts on MoneySuperMarket, and we're getting really, really strong feedback in terms of how that happens. It's actually the stuff that we're planning on doing in terms of, the customer experience, the overall customer proposition that most excites us, and we can begin to use this technology to offer services that, you know, we haven't been able or enhance services that we haven't been able to do previously, or would have been very complicated for us to begin to do previously. Just to say there's kind of lots going on across the group. Niall, do you want to pick up on anything else in that? Only just to sort of extend into the point on AI. I think the thing about having a platform now, Joe, is that, you know, we push that type of campaign everywhere, so all the brands get access to those tools straight away. I think the "Can we do more?" becomes about the data that we have, and the more that we push into our member-based propositions, the more we'll know and the better we can target the cohorts that our providers want to target as well, as that we want to target. Just to follow up on tenancy, if that's all right. I mean, is it fair to assume that tenancy at the moment is sort of fairly immaterial to group revenues? Is it sort of low single-digit percentage? Because I sort of imagine that the incremental margin there is close to 100%, and otherwise, if it were more material, it would be impacting group margin. So yeah, I think you're in the zip code of where to think about it. It is very high-margin products, not totally free, as we do—we do have people who look after that service for us, but it's very helpful from a margin perspective. Excellent. Thanks very much. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the Raise Hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. We have another question from Andrew Ross at Barclays. Please unmute your line and ask your question. Hi, guys. I just have one more on travel insurance. There's some language in the statement that talks about normalization in premiums, and I think this is one of the areas where your monetization is actually being a function of premium value as opposed to being a flat fee. Can you just tell us, you know, where the average premium in travel is compared to pre-COVID? How fast that's normalizing, where you think it normalizes to, and how we should kind of think about this in terms of your revenues into 2025? And I guess I'm worried that this is a, you know, an extra point of uncertainty when we think about the whole insurance provision into back half of this year and into 2025, if we, it probably is normalizing. So some color there would be helpful. Thank you. Thanks, Andrew. You're gonna have to forgive us. You were a bit discombobulated there, but I think we've got the message of it. It's around travel, travel insurance premiums. Niall, do you wanna? Yeah, I didn't, I didn't quite catch all of the question, Andrew. I think so, I think what we're calling out here is that we're seeing consumers move to a lower tier of cover from what they have been since the since COVID, basically. So we're what we've been seeing over the last few years is that we've had a tailwind from people buying the highest tier of cover, and what we've seen through the first half is that people are grading down into more silver and bronze. Clearly, that is a bit of a headwind in terms of we would we get a percentage of the price on travel insurance, but it's not something... We're not calling out here that this is materially below pre-COVID levels. Cause how, how much higher is the premium today that you're getting on average than it was, pre-COVID, when we kind of think about over time, how far through that normalization has to run, or maybe you think it won't fully normalize, but to better understand that? Andrew, why don't I come back to you with some of the detail on it? I think that this is one of these things where you're, we're comparing quite different things now to what we were comparing then in terms of mix, in terms of providers that were there, in terms of all that. So I don't wanna lead you astray with a number. Okay, cool. Thanks. There are no further questions. I'll now hand back to Peter for closing remarks. Well, great. Thank you very much for your time, everybody. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk more. I think we'll be speaking with a number of you over the next few days, but of course, if there's anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to have information on, then please get in contact with the team, and they'd be only too happy to help. But thank you for your time this morning. Appreciate it. Take care. Bye-bye.