Welcome to the MONY Group Half-Year Results. I'm Peter Duffy, CEO. L ater in the presentation, I'm going to be joined by our Chief Financial Officer, Niall McBride. We've had a good start to the year, achieving both financial and strategic milestones, helping U.K. households save an estimated £1.4 billion in the first six months of 2025. That's as well as growing revenue by 1% to £225 million and profit by 2% to £75 million. It's a resilient financial performance, given the exceptional growth in motor insurance switching that we saw last year. Now, we continue to grow both sides of our marketplace. In SuperSave Club, we've welcomed half a million more members since February, bringing total members to over 1.5 million. We see plenty of further opportunity here, so we've been investing to drive growth by introducing first-purchase rewards. I'll talk about that more a bit later.
We've also continued to enhance our offering to providers whose products are listed on our sites, with over 100 now signed up to Market Boost, that's our data product and 34 now using our enhanced B2B services. All of this has been doable because of the investment that has already been made in building out our data and tech platform, which serves our diverse product range. I'll be talking later about how this has also facilitated our new AI-driven features for customers. That's in insurance, credit cards, and energy, and it's also supported a revised life insurance offer on MoneySuperMarket and Home Compare+ on MoneySavingExperts. The platform is also allowing us to reset the cost base of a group, but importantly, it's this cadence of product improvement that is going to help us drive further organic growth.
Now, we are very grateful to our people who make all this happen every day, but we're also grateful for their broader support for initiatives that sit outside the group. We're particularly proud of our ongoing relationship with a campaign against living miserably, CALM. As just one example, I hosted our annual MONY Talks event at the Houses of Parliament in May, where we spotlit the financial wellbeing as a mental health issue. CALM is a leading suicide prevention charity, and the MONY Group's involvement in many activities supports the important work that they do.
We have a compelling growth outlook based on three building blocks, significant headroom in our member-based propositions, which will increase customer loyalty and customer lifetime value. O ur innovative product development pipeline to improve the customer experience, boost conversion, and tap into new markets and then the growth we're expecting in our end markets. This all adds up to a highly effective and resilient business, well-positioned to continue to deliver profitable growth. I'm going to be back shortly to provide more detail on our strategic and operational progress, but in the meantime, Niall, over to you.
Thanks, Peter. G ood morning, everyone. We're pleased with our progress in the first half. We enhanced our member and provider propositions, we launched new products and generated resilient financial results. Group revenue was £225 million, up 1% year-on-year against an exceptionally strong prior period. Remember that insurance was up 14% in the first half of last year. This highlights the resilience that comes from the breadth of our brands and products. This was achieved through growth from home services and money, alongside solid contributions from home life and travel insurance, mitigating lower demand for car insurance switching. Adjusted EBITDA reached £75 million, a 2% increase, with EBITDA margin holding at 33%. This was helped by operating costs being 6% lower than last year. Adjusted basic earnings per share was up 4% to £0.093.
Cash flow of £44 million was down 16% on last year, driven by the mix into areas where revenue takes longer to convert to cash, such as energy and life insurance. In 2025, we plan to return £96 million to shareholders. This includes a 1% increase in the interim dividend, and the ongoing £30 million share buyback we began in February. I will now take you through the segment performance, the costs, cash, capital allocation, and finish with the outlook. In insurance, we generated revenue of £118 million, down 2% against a strong first half of 2024 when there was record premium price inflation. In this half, car insurance remained soft as expected, with premiums falling 9%. In contrast, home insurance premiums grew 4%, providing some offset.
To compensate, we increased focus on other insurance categories, with home, life, and travel insurance performing particularly well, supported by improvements such as our streamlined life insurance journey. With the car insurance inflation surge now behind us, we expect home insurance may face a slowdown with a lag of six to nine months. Although premiums have come down from last year's peak, they're still high, and many insurers are offering competitive deals to attract customers, with consumers still able to save up to £469 on their car insurance. MONY delivered a good performance with a revenue of £53 million, up 4%. Borrowing products led this growth, with strong switching in credit cards and an improving trend in personal loans. By securing exclusive credit offers and optimizing our journeys, we capitalized on consumers seeking better deals.
We boosted conversion in loans and credit cards, by enhancing these journeys through personalized pre-approval information and AI-driven prompts. These improvements, plus the depth of our lender partnerships and exclusive deals, reinforce our competitive advantage in borrowing. In banking, performance was mixed. Savings activity was robust, as we added providers to grow our panel by 33%, and consumers responded to attractive deposit rates. This helped to offset weaker current account switching, which saw fewer promotional bank offers. Home services revenue was £22 million, up 29% year-over-year, albeit from a low base. In energy, switching started to recover and further tariffs returned to the market, including several exclusive deals for us. The various price cap adjustments acted as a catalyst for consumers to seek better deals.
Whilst this is encouraging, regulatory constraints, such as the ban on acquisition-only tariffs, are still in place, and energy suppliers are being cautious about their customer acquisition plans. Providers are re-entering the market selectively, so we don't have the continuous deal flow we experienced before 2021. We remain optimistic, but realistic about the progress of the energy market. Broadband generated strong results. Switching demand remained high, and the pipeline of providers joining our platform keeps growing. We made improvements to the broadband switching journey, which led to better conversion rates in the first half. Customers can now switch to a broadband provider without leaving the site. Cashback was tougher. At £27 million, revenue was £3 million lower than last year because of the difficult retail environment and weaker car insurance switching in our Quidco Compare product. This was partially offset by a better performance from travel and cashback.
Given this, we protected our margin by limiting certain incentives and by careful cost control. We improved the user experience with more personalization and introduced faster cashback for key retail merchants, which is showing encouraging results. Travel, which includes our Icelolly and Travel Supermarket brands and represents 5% of group revenue, delivered £11 million revenue, down 2%. Package holiday traffic was solid, but car hire was again affected by competition in that sector. The market remains competitive with sustained higher PPC costs, which we look to offset by diversifying our marketing mix into alternative sources such as social. SuperSave Club is a core part of our strategy, and is about encouraging customers to come to us directly and more often. Since launch, club membership has grown rapidly and we now have over 1.5 million members.
More importantly, these members transact more often and spend more with us, giving us the confidence that the club is increasing customer lifetime value. This is crucial because online customer acquisition costs, especially PPC, remain high. A large, loyal member base through the club gives us more control over customer engagement, and will reduce reliance on paid marketing sources over time. We continue to invest in the club's growth, and now incentivize new customers to make their first transaction through first-purchase reward. This has an immediate drag on gross margin, but we believe it is worth it to create a stronger customer base over the longer term. The club's traction is already significant, about 14% of total sales now come through members. There's plenty of room to grow, and as we expand membership and refine the club, we expect an even greater contribution from SuperSave Club.
Gross profit was down 3% to £148 million, and gross margin decreased from 68%- 66%. Margin was impacted by increased PPC costs and some product mix effects, including growth in B2B and the introduction of first-purchase rewards in SuperSave Club. Despite that, we grew adjusted EBITDA by 2% to £75 million, and our adjusted EBITDA margin remained unchanged at 33%. This was assisted by cost control and automation, resulting in a 6% reduction in operating costs. Distribution expenses were 1% lower than last year, as we focused on improving acquisition efficiency, targeting higher return on investment areas. We also phased more of our brand marketing investment into the second half. Administrative expenses decreased by 7%. At the end of June, headcount was down 10% on the prior year, resulting in a 15% reduction in people costs.
Moving now to cash flow, operating cash flows of £44 million are down 16% on last year, which is mainly due to timing and mix. In the first half of this year, we generated more revenue in areas like energy and life insurance, which have longer cash collection cycles. By contrast, last year's first half had a big contribution from car insurance, which converts to cash more quickly. Our £30 million share buyback will be funded from free cash, and is expected to complete in Q4 2025. Looking ahead, our recent trading performance, coupled with momentum in our strategic execution, gives the board confidence that we will deliver adjusted EBITDA for 2025 within our current published consensus. MONY Group has an established and disciplined capital allocation policy, focused on creating long-term, sustainable shareholder value through organic and acquisitive growth.
In line with this, we launched our £30 million share buyback in February, which continues to progress well, with over 15 million repurchased to date. Our robust balance sheet provides us with the capacity to pursue value or creative opportunities alongside our ongoing share buyback. In 2025, we'll deliver a package of shareholder returns equating to £96 million through the share buyback, combined with a 1% increase in the interim dividend, which builds on the 4% adjusted EPS growth we have already delivered, reinforcing our commitment to maximizing shareholder value. With that, I'll now hand you back to Peter.
Thanks for that, Niall. Let me start with a quick reminder of our strategy before giving more detail on operational progress and our plans for future growth. You'll now be familiar with our two-sided marketplace that describes how we are growing loyal and engaged members, alongside supporting our extensive provider base that's helping them to become more successful businesses. We're transforming our customer base from transactional users into longer-term members, moving away from a reliance on expensive PPC advertising to attract customers. By giving members great reasons to come to us directly time and time again, we're helping them save more, increase transaction volumes, build revenue per user, and in turn, reduce cost of sales. For our providers, by giving them even more reasons to use the MONY Group, we're helping them improve their businesses because when they do well, we do well.
That includes helping them reach customers via our tailored tenancy slots and gain a competitive advantage by using our proprietary data insights like Market Boost. The investment we have made in data and tech, means we have a scalable platform for growth, but it's one that is also allowing us to leverage AI, expanding into new markets, innovating on existing journeys, and effectively helping us to manage cost. Let's get into some detail here, and there is no clearer demonstration of our strategy in action than the SuperSave Club which we launched in September 2023. Since then, we have actively built out the proposition, adding nearly all of our products, so that 18 months later, the club now covers more than 95% of Money SuperMarket's products sold by volume.
To briefly remind you, the club offers members a cash reward of up to £20 for every purchase, allowing them to earn up to £130 each year, a guarantee that they get best prices, and then we make the customer experience simple by using their data to skip lengthy application forms. We offer free credit monitoring, selected cashback, and retailer discounts, and increasingly, we're storing product and policy data, which all encourage members to come back more frequently. We're pleased to have welcomed over half a million new members since we announced our full-year results, and importantly, we're starting to see consistency in the trends as we build out the member base.
In short, the club is achieving what we hoped because when we compare with the baseline traditional Money SuperMarket users, we see that 40% more customers are coming to us directly for their second purchase, that members are then buying more from us with a threefold increase in renewals and a threefold increase in second purchases. T hey're also more engaged, with a twofold increase in their propensity to interact with CRM and a fourfold increase in their preparedness to take up the Money SuperMarket app. While we're still in a phase where we're learning, it's clear that the club is growing customer loyalty, which in time is going to reduce our reliance on expensive third-party paid marketing. We therefore extended the club membership in February to include people making their first purchase.
We call that first-purchase rewards because previously, you had to buy something to then join the club. W e've seen growth rates of members increase in line with the expectations since then. Just over a year and a half after launch, the club is now accounting for 14% of group sales and we see much potential as we look into the medium term from here. MoneySavingExpert is the U.K.'s leading consumer finance platform. It has a highly engaged, loyal, and growing user base, with over 9.5 million subscribers receiving Martin Lewis's weekly MoneySaving email. We developed and launched the MSE app over two years ago and now have reached 2.2 million downloads, with more than half a million monthly active users.
Over the last year, we've continued to enhance the MSE app, by expanding personalization features and introducing new tools, including scaling our MSE Compare+ functionality into home insurance, and also most recently, the trial of an MSE Savings Hub. Our growth plans for MSE going forward will focus on financial tools to expand the app, its functionality, its reach, and its engagement. Moving on to Quidco, which despite a challenging retail backdrop has still grown profitability, w e continue to make Quidco better, with greater personalization, in better comparison services and faster cashback with retailers, and we're also expanding cashback into the SuperSave Club. Now, the other half of our strategy is the way we can support our providers to become better businesses, and that's an area where we have delivered 11% growth in the half.
By offering B2B switching to third-party brands who want to offer comparison services, we enable them to monetize their digital traffic. W e in turn extend our reach, and attract new audiences at limited incremental cost to the group. We now offer B2B comparison across car, home, broadband, mobile, and energy, and we've expanded our partnerships and we're driving strong growth. Now, another example is Market Boost, which uses our aggregated data to help providers better understand how well their products are performing versus their competition. It is now used by over 100 providers. Finally, tenancy. There are advertising slots by which providers can promote specific products to cohorts of customers, and it's available right across the group, including the SuperSave Club. To drive growth, we are focusing on products for customers and providers that enhance customer journeys, that boost conversion, that tap into new markets.
Initiatives in the half have included simplifying renewal journeys across our main product categories, and we're now using data to shorten question sets, so customers only have to check and update, only completing questions when they are doing something new. This is industry-leading. We've also launched our new life insurance product on MoneySuperMarket, and as mentioned a moment ago, we've also scaled Compare+ into home insurance on MoneySavingExpert. They are both working well and helping mitigate the headwinds in car insurance. We've relaunched our Cheap Energy Club and our broadband services, again, both contributing to the strong growth we've seen in our home services channel. We're also trialing the MSE Savings Hub, which is going to unlock opportunities to gain further depth in this channel.
Now, the investment in the data and tech platform over the last few years has provided a strong foundation for our ambitions in AI, which is an area of enormous focus for the business and one where we are already seeing benefits. We touched briefly on our agentic mesh at full-year results. That's a system architecture that allows multiple AI agents to collaborate. It's core to our AI agenda, and it's also advancing rapidly, bringing together different data sets and tools to enhance users' experiences, whilst at the same time, further improving the efficiency of our core operations. Now, looking forward, we see three notable areas of near-term opportunity for AI. First, the improved customer experience, from smarter personalization to more intuitive journeys.
A good example of this is our Agent [Eye] capability, which is now working across money, insurance, and energy, using internal and external data sources to provide more personalized recommendations, in turn, meaning better outcomes for customers. It's already live today, helping customers to better understand the cost of their car insurance premium, improving their product understanding of different energy deals, and in the case of credit cards, offering a much more personalized example of how a specific product would work for them. In time, and that's not too much time, you should expect to see more of these types of experiences rolling out right across the site, which in turn will start to transform the user experience. Now, moving on, secondly, operational efficiency, streamlining internal processes and reducing manual efforts to free up resources to focus on areas that contribute to our strategic growth.
You can already see some of the benefits coming through in terms of our cost base. A specific example here would be our contact center, where AI now answers around 60% of customer contacts. Thirdly, marketing optimization, where thanks to our strengths in data, technology, and our existing relationships, we're ready to make the most of the changing search behaviors, including the rapidly evolving area of AI overviews. The group is positioned for continued success because of our clear strategy, our strong brands, our differentiated propositions, and our data and tech platform that sets us apart in the market. We've achieved both financial and strategic milestones with our resilient financial performance, reflecting our strength in breadth across the group.
We see a compelling outlook for growth, with significant headroom in our member-based propositions, increasing loyalty and customer lifetime value, our continued focus on our innovative product development pipeline, that's both organic and acquisitive, that will complement and extend our capabilities, and then the elevated position of our scalable platform, enabling us to capitalize on AI, but also helping us to reach new markets and new audiences. Our disciplined approach to capital allocation, combined with our clean balance sheet, provides flexibility and also the capacity to deliver. For our shareholders, we'll be returning £96 million over 2025, through a package of returns that's dividend and buyback, focused on maximizing shareholder value. Thank you for your time today, and we're looking forward to any questions you may have in the call at 9:30 A.M.