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MNSKY · MoneySupermarket.com Group PLC/ADR
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Earnings call · FY2026 Q2

MoneySupermarket.com Group PLC/ADR (MNSKY) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Concluded Jul 21, 2026 Audio replay Verified speakers
Jul 21, 2026 30:08 3 turns
Period
FY2026 Q2
Runtime
30:08
Sources
3 artifacts
Open full screen Slides 32

Transcript & audio

Verified speakers 30:08 Audio

Welcome to The Money Group Half-Year Results for 2026. I'm Peter Duffy, CEO, and I'll be joined later by our CFO, Narmut Bride. So, with UK households continuing to feel the pressure, what we do, helping households save money, has never mattered more. And in the first half, we helped people save an estimated $1.5 billion. And as a result of that, I'm pleased to report a strong set of financials. On a like-for-like basis, we delivered record revenue that's up 6% to $227 million and adjusted EBITDA up 3% to $76 million, continuing our story of unbroken growth for the last five periods. We've grown adjusted basic EPS by 5% to 9.7p and we plan to return over $90 million to shareholders in 2026, made up of our progressive dividend and our ongoing £25 million buyback. Now, our strength comes from our breadth, our breadth of markets, of products, of brands. It's what differentiates us. It's what gives us resilience. It's what underpins our growth. And our two-sided marketplace strategy is working. On the consumer side, our brands are turning transactional users into law-engaged members. And on the provider side, we've continued to make excellent progress welcoming new household brands onto the platform, most recently Witch and Blue Light Card. Now, this is all underpinned by our leading tech and data platform that has not only helped us to increase revenue per employee by more than 60% over the last five years, but as you'll see as we go through the presentation, is now facilitating a pace of product innovation unlike anything we've been able to deliver before. We've been busy. Now, I will detail these new initiatives later on in the presentation, but there's one I'd like to mention right up front because it is genuinely exciting. And that's the recently relaunched Money Supermarket iOS and Android app, now powered by AI. There is nothing like it in the market. And just to be super clear, this is in addition to the Money Supermarket app that we launched on ChatGPT earlier in the year. The transformed Money Supermarket app is now a single destination to compare, to switch, to save, to invest, to earn cash back, to get rewards, and to generally stay on top of your financial life with the confidence you're getting a great deal from the brands you trust. But it's also more than that. It's a financial companion, now powered by our proprietary AI tooling, where your data flows seamlessly within our world, of course, but it makes life easier as we keep you updated on everything from renewal dates to better deals to smart suggestions so you never miss a trick. Let's take a quick look so you can see how it works. The app is being enhanced all the time. Last week, we launched Investments by Money Supermarket, initially with a fun supermarket where customers can invest from just £1 with zero trading fees and low management charges. And we're going to have much more to follow there. We're also launching for SuperSafe Club customers our own branded digital insurance broker, starting with Motor, where monthly payments come at no additional cost. Now it's going to unpack more of that shortly. And then on top of all of that, we've been increasing the AI-powered intelligence within the Money Supermarket app, making it easier again for customers to save. As I say, this is unique in the market. And for the group, it will bring more customers to us directly, in turn reducing third-party media costs, but also diversifying our revenues, adding both recurring and AUM-based streams to group revenue. And because it's all wrapped up in the SuperSafe Club, most importantly, it will incentivize customers to bring more of their wallet to us. Our brand's established member base, our tech platform, our proprietary data, and our capacity to leverage AI is a powerful combination. I've much more to share shortly, but in the meantime, and for a deeper review of a half, Niall, over to you.

Speaker 0

Thanks, Peter, and good morning, everyone. This has been a strong first half. We have delivered growth in revenue and adjusted EBITDA in a mixed market while still launching some of our most innovative products to date, broadening what we offer to members and providers. Before we get into it, a quick word on ICE Travel Group, where we moved to a minority stake last year. Today, I will talk about group revenue costs and EBITDA excluding the travel segment on a like-for-like basis for a clearer view of the underlying performance. On that basis, group revenue grew 6% to £227 million. That is a strong result given the wider economic backdrop and highlights the resilience that comes from the breadth of our brands, products and loyal member base. Adjusted EBITDA reached a record 76 million, up 3% with margins at 33%, reflecting real operational progress and operating costs 2% lower year on year. This has flowed through to shareholders with adjusted basic EPS growing 5% and operating cash flow of £36 million remaining robust. In 2026, we plan to return over £90 million to shareholders, reflecting a 1% increase in the interim dividend plus our ongoing £25 million buyback. So, it's a strong start to the year. Next, I'm going to take you through each of the segments, then Super Save Club and Super Save Club Insurance. Insurance returned to good growth with revenue of £122 million, up 4%, which is a real step up from the minus 2% we reported at the half-year in 2025. The headwinds in car insurance continue to ease, with average premiums down minus 5% year-on-year, improving from minus 9% in the previous half. Growth was supported by AI-enabled enhancements to the journey including Price Optimizer which has now helped over 200,000 customers save an additional £25 on average. Home is following Car's trajectory with roughly a nine-month lag. Premium declines moderated to minus 3% year-on-year from minus 6% in the previous half. In addition, our newer revenue streams continue to build. We launched MSE Travel Compare Plus and new B2B partnerships including Witch and Blue Light Card. Life insurance continued to perform well, building on the new journey we launched last year. Money delivered another strong half with revenue of £58 million, up 9% year-on-year, building on the 4% growth we reported at the half-year in 2025. Banking led that growth, with current accounts performing well, supported by strong provider partnerships and market-leading deals. In borrowing, loans growth was supported by increased CRM activity and AI-enabled enhancements to the borrowing journeys, including personalised pre-approval information driving higher conversion. Home services delivered another excellent half with revenue of 30% year-on-year to £28 million. Energy was the main driver. Since the year-end, wholesale prices and the price cap have risen significantly. However, we leveraged MSE's editorial reach, our provider relationships and exclusive deals to keep delivering competitive offers despite that market volatility. Broadband also continued to perform well, supported by deal availability, tenancy improvements and alt-net expansion. Cashback had a tough half, with revenue of £24 million down 13% on the first half last year. Retail was subdued as consumer confidence and spending remained under pressure. UK marketing budgets have fallen, particularly in affiliate channels. And whilst conditions are gradually improving, recovery remains slow and uneven. We continue to invest in the proposition from expanding gift cards and card linked offers to improving personalisation and onboarding, strengthening cashback for when demand picks up. Moving now to SuperSafe Club. SuperSafe Club is working. It brings customers to us directly, more often and across more products. There are three things that I want to highlight today. The momentum in our growing member base, engagement that keeps deepening and economics that are genuinely stronger. Firstly, momentum. We now have over 2.5 million members, having added a million members in the last year. And we see plenty of runway for further growth. Encouragingly, one in five members are completely new to the group, illustrating that Club is widening the acquisition funnel. SuperSafe Club now makes up 19% of total revenue, up from the 16% we reported earlier this year. Secondly, engagement is growing. App downloads have increased by more than 50% after we moved to app-only redemption for Club rewards. Monthly app users increase by a third year on year And cross-channel inquiry rates, a lead indicator for breadth Are running at 44% for members, which is double the group level Finally, we are seeing stronger economics translate from that deeper engagement With members outperforming non-members on every measure that matters Average Revenue Per User or ARPU for SuperSafe Club members runs at £35 Significantly more than the Group ARPU of £21 Incremental Gross Margin for Members stands at 77% Considerably higher than the Group Margin of 63% Cross-Sell is stronger too With Members purchasing a second product at more than double the rate of non-members and members return to us directly rather than via paid channels at almost double the rate of non-members. Put this all together and a member is worth double a non-member by year three. That's based on early cohorts and it will evolve, but we're confident in the direction. So let's talk about what's coming next. We're introducing SuperSafe Club Insurance, our own digital broker proposition that further evolves what club offers for customers. Let me take you through that in a little bit more detail. SuperSafe Club Insurance is our own AI-enabled digital broker. It lets members compare, buy, manage and renew their insurance entirely in the app. We're starting with Motor and for our members this provides them with an even better experience with everything done in one place including AI guidance throughout the journey and the trust of a brand they already know. We're also offering our members a first. They will be able to pay monthly at no extra cost compared with annual products. We'll be the first mainstream brand to offer this widely so this is a real step change from the market norm and underscores that we want club insurance to be a great deal for consumers. For our providers we can deliver richer data helping them better provide the most appropriate products and rates for customers. The revenue profile of this product takes us beyond the traditional comparison model to an end-to-end relationship where we earn at the point of sale through cross sell and critically on renewal. In the near term the financial contribution will be modest as we take a deliberately measured approach to test, learn and then scale. So I'm moving on now to talk about costs, cash, capital allocation and outlook. Gross profit at £142 million is 1% up on the prior year on a like-for-like basis. Gross margin decreased three percentage points to 63%, predominantly driven by sustained PPC cost inflation with elevated 2025 increases annualising in this period. PPC inflation is currently running at around 8% exiting the half in comparison to running at over 20% last year. However, with the major search landscape changes including the introduction of AI overviews seemingly largely in place, the backdrop in PPC has felt more stable this year. Adjusted EBITDA of £76 million is 3% up year-on-year, with margins at 33%, supported by the replatforming work, which includes embedding AI throughout our operating model. Our operating costs are down 2% year-on-year. Distribution expenses on a like-for-like basis were 7% lower year-on-year, reflecting strong cost discipline and phasing of marketing investment, including media spend behind the launch of the new money supermarket advertising campaign, which aired in Q2. As a result, we expect distribution costs for the full year to be in line with last year. Admin expenses on a like-for-like basis were flat, largely driven by lower people costs, offsetting wider cost inflation, in particular from higher VAT, due to revenue and marketing mix. Closing headcount was down 9% and people costs were 6% lower than the prior year, reflecting resource efficiencies supported by our increasing use of automation and AI. Operating cash flow was £36 million, 17% lower year-on-year, with a higher working capital outflow reflecting strong revenue growth, particularly towards the end of the half and a mix into energy where cash takes longer to convert. As in prior years, we expect cash conversion to improve in the second half. Investing and CapEx outflows included £5 million of tech spend, one of the lowest levels in recent years, despite significant development of new products, including the Money Supermarket Chat GPT app, savings, investments, SuperSafe Club insurance and business banking, which Peter will share more on shortly. This is clear evidence of the leverage we're generating from our platform investment, delivering more, faster, for less. Our disciplined capital allocation policy is well established. First, we invest for organic growth, then we pay the ordinary dividend, then we look for value accretive M&A, and finally, we return any surplus capital to shareholders. This is underpinned by a strong balance sheet and robust cash generation. The £25m buyback launched in February continues to progress well, with over £19m repurchased to date. Combined with a 1% increase in the interim dividend, that delivers a 2026 returns package of over £90m, alongside 5% adjusted basic EPS growth. Looking ahead, our recent trading performance and the breadth of our portfolio, combined with disciplined cost management, gives the board confidence that we will deliver adjusted EBITDA for 2026 within our current published consensus. And with that, I'll hand you back to Peter.

Thanks, Niall. The group is in great shape and our brands have never been in better health. Money Saving Expert is now the most recommended financial brand in the UK and it's also the third most popular news app in the country with 3.5 million app downloads and over 9 million people signed up to receive the weekly MSC tip. Money Supermarket is the most recommended price comparison website in the UK now fronted by David Tennant in our new brand advertising campaign. And Quidco, a leading UK cashback site continues to offer more ways for customers to engage and to save with us. The Money Supermarket SuperSafe Club now has over 2.5 million members. It covers 95% of our product base and includes industry firsts like 3-Click Renewal, Price Optimizer and the Policy Hub. We're pleased with the performance on the provider side. We welcome new B2B partners including Witch and Blue Light Card to our platform. And we're seeing more providers take up our market boost and tenancy products as we help them to grow their businesses. Our re-platform data and tech is a key differentiator. It gives us an agility and speed few can match. Five years ago, around 70% of our tech team were focused on maintenance. Today, it's less than 30%. And that frees up capacity for innovation at pace. And it's the pace of innovation, especially in the last six months, that's been significant. We launched our ChatGPT app. That now covers broadly the same product set as SuperSafe Club. I've just shown you the transformed AI-powered money supermarket app. Niall has spoken about SuperSave Club Insurance, that's our digital brokerage starting with car insurance. And in a moment I'll share more about investments and our new business banking proposition. These were all developed in this half with more lined up for H2 and next year. And because of the tech and data work of the last few years, we're now a leaner, more focused organization and we put AI reinvention at the forefront. AI is embedded right across the business with tangible proof points, faster product development, cost efficiencies and stronger frictionless propositions. So moving on to AI which is a significant opportunity for the group and we are very much on the front foot here leveraging in three ways. Number one enhancing the customer experience, number two unlocking complexity for greater innovation, and number three re-engineering the organisation to ensure we're operating as efficiently as possible. And perhaps the most important point to remember is that we're starting from a position of strength. Our competitive moat is deep. We operate in highly regulated markets where accuracy, transparency and trust are critical. And we deliver deterministic, auditable and repeatable outcomes that are underpinned by our proprietary data, strong provider relationships, and decades of category expertise. That is fundamentally different from the probabilistic outputs inherent in the business models of LLMs. Replicating what we do would require regulatory change for governance frameworks, deep provider integrations, and the level of brand trust that we've earned over many years. But it's how we're reshaping the business for tomorrow that is really exciting. So let me start with enhancing the customer experience and we've got two great examples here. First our brand new digital broker proposition that Nile described a moment ago that's super safe club insurance. AI is embedded throughout guiding members through the quote journey but this is going to evolve further into an assistant that more actively interacts to make it even simpler for customers to compare, to buy, to manage and renew entirely within the app. The second example was in the film, the transformed money supermarket app with an intelligent core that is always on and knows exactly who you are, thanks to a defined persona, session memory and full chat history. This makes asking questions, handling re-quotes and providing estimates across our product universe simple. We're in the process of linking it to open banking and we're going to build out a whole range of new features that will create a habit loop leading to more frequent engagement. Now the next way we're on the front foot with AI is using it to unlock the complexity of launching new propositions and I have a further two examples here that's investments and business banking. Just as AI helped us unlock savings by money supermarket earlier this year we've applied the same approach to investments, an area we traditionally considered too complex. Investments by Money Supermarket is our own investment platform where customers can invest from as little as one pound. We've initially launched with a fund supermarket where customers can choose from around 40 funds and ETFs with zero trading fees and a single low annual platform fee. That makes it a great deal for consumers. And AI has simplified onboarding, fund selection and fee transparency, making investing accessible and not intimidating. But importantly, it's in the same app as where you save on insurance, you get a better credit card deal, and you save on some of the best rates available. The addressable market for investments is significant. UK households hold over 5 trillion in investable assets, much of it in cash earning below inflation returns. We don't need to beat the established platforms here. We're helping millions of customers who haven't yet taken their first step into investing to do so with our simple, trusted environment. Like Savings by Money Supermarket, this is an AUN-based revenue stream that compounds as the customer base and assets grow. But we believe the real value is in engagement. Every customer investing will spend more time with us, more time in the app, and will become more receptive to the broader ecosystem, driving increased lifetime value. And this is just the first step into something much larger, which will ultimately bring all of our customers multiple and sometimes forgotten investments into one place, from individual stocks to junior ISAs to SIPs, much more to come here. The second example is money supermarket business banking, which we've just opened the waitlist for ahead of a go live in August. This will be our first dedicated SME banking proposition for the UK's five and a half million small businesses. And it's a market we already know well, so it's an opportunity for us to gain further depth. But this is new for us because we've built a dedicated app, Apppace, that combines a full business carried account with AI-powered tax and accounting tools and FSCS-protected banking. And we've deliberately timed this ahead of HMRCs making tax digital changes. Banking is an everyday engagement, and the rich data that it creates is really where AI comes into its own. It's going to enable timely, personalised cross-sell into business insurance, loans, energy and beyond. Like both savings and investments, we own the brand and the customer traffic and our partners handle the build, maintenance and regulatory obligations. Again, the revenue model here is different from our core comparison business, delivering a recurring revenue stream that earns for as long as the customer remains active. And then finally, the third area where we are leveraging AI is through re-engineering the organization to ensure we're operating as efficiently as possible. Over recent years, we've rebuilt our architecture as a cloud-based, single-stack, agentic mesh, deleting around half of our legacy code base in the process. Being agent agnostic means that we can plug AI into our journeys safely, quickly and at scale. And our enterprise agreement with OpenAI, alongside adoption of Codex, is accelerating this further. Today, around two-thirds of our code changes are AI-assisted, and they're completed around 30% faster. Outcomes consistent with leading edge of enterprise AI adoption. That means faster building, more frequent deployment, and tangible cost discipline. And let's not forget, CapEx has stayed within our guidance envelope throughout our extensive replatforming with last year, our lowest CapEx year in a decade, despite delivering some of our most transformative products. The first half of 2026 has been a period of significant strategic delivery. We've transformed the Money Supermarket app into a genuine everyday financial companion that goes way beyond comparison. We're adding investments by money supermarkets. We're also adding a new digital broker proposition, SuperSafe Club Insurance, that gives customers even more ways to save and engage, and it starts with Motu. We've created a dedicated banking proposition for the UK's 5.5 million small businesses that will go live shortly. SuperSafe Club has grown to over 2.5 million members, adding more than a million in the last 12 months with no signs of slowing. Five years of re-engineering the group from our data and tech upwards has lifted revenue per employee by 60% and is helping to unlock further cost efficiency opportunities. We've continued to invest in our brands with our latest David Tennant-led advertising campaign, reinforcing Money Supermarket's market position. And this has all contributed to delivering record revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the fifth consecutive interim period despite market and geopolitical volatility. Adjusted basic EPS has grown by 5% and we plan to return over 90 million to shareholders in 2026. Our competitive mode is deep and we are very much on the front foot with AI with tangible proof points to demonstrate exactly how we're leveraging it successfully right across the group. Our balance sheet remains a strategic asset. It gives us flexibility, resilience and the capacity to invest for growth. With our leading brands, our platform, our ability to harness AI and a leaner, more focused organisation, we're uniquely positioned to keep executing on this strategy, going even further to give households even more ways to save money. Our strategy is working. Our fundamentals are strong. The opportunity is significant. And we remain confident in delivering sustainable, profitable growth. Thank you.

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