Hello, welcome to the MONY Group plc prelims for 2020. I'm Peter Duffy, the CEO, having joined six months ago now. I'm also going to be joined this morning by Scilla Grimble, CFO, for this pre-recorded presentation. We're going to be holding a Q&A session at 9:30 A.M. today. That's Thursday the 18th of February, the details of which are going to be on our investor relations website, but also in today's RNS. I'm going to say a few words. I'll then hand over to Scilla for the financials, and I'll then come back and talk you through the priorities going forward. Can I begin by saying that MoneySuperMarket is a great business. We operate in attractive markets with a lot of potential, and that means we can confidently and optimistically look forward. What makes us different?
Well, I'd start by our purpose, which is helping households to save money. It's the reason why I joined the group, and I think it runs through the organization like the letters in a stick of rock. Like many companies, we have a skilled and capable team. The thing that fuels us is this desire to do the right thing by customers. Now, a second difference also appealing for me is the range of brands and routes to markets that we have. That's MoneySavingExpert, a publishing-led whole of market offer, which is based on independent editorial advice for anybody who wants to understand financial issues. It's one of the most recommended financial brands in the U.K. We've got MoneySuperMarket itself, a leading price comparison website that offers customers numerous ways to save through an advertising-led model.
We've got Decision Tech, which is our B2B brand, providing comparison services through other people's brands. Of course, TravelSupermarket with its particular strength in the package holiday comparison market. They're all strong brands. They operate in defined markets, and we have the opportunity to underpin them with common technology and data platforms, essentially building once for multiple brands. The breadth of what we offer people, so many ways to save money across our range of products, is a great opportunity to win share of wallet. Coming into 2020, we forecasted our markets would grow by around mid-single digits. Of course, we then faced COVID challenges, particularly with travel and money. We should still expect that kind of growth rate once we're through this pandemic recovery period.
In the meantime, I'm proud of how this business has adapted to the challenges of the COVID period. Productivity, but importantly, colleague wellbeing, have been well-maintained, and we've continued to contribute to the community through our partnership with The Prince's Trust as just one example. Importantly, we've also achieved beyond carbon neutral status. Let me now hand over to Scilla, who'll take you through the 2020 results, and I'll be back in just a moment.
Thanks, Peter. Good morning, everyone. Looking first at the financial highlights. Clearly, 2020 was a year dominated by COVID. In the circumstances, our performance was reasonable. Revenue fell 11%, or 4% if we exclude our travel channels of TravelSupermarket and travel insurance. They were heavily impacted by COVID restrictions, and from Q2 onwards, ran on average at about 10% of prior year levels. EBITDA fell by 24%, more than revenue reflecting gross margin pressures, which were slightly offset by lower OPEX, and reported EPS fell 27%. We remained committed to our tech investment, holding it flat year-on-year at GBP 34 million. As a result, our reinvestment rate grew given the decline in revenue.
Cash flow remained strong with no deterioration in working capital. That cash flow strength, our strong balance sheet, and our confidence in the business mean we're pleased to hold our full-year dividend in line with prior year levels. I do appreciate visibility is difficult currently. I'm going to spend some time describing the dynamics we saw last year to help guide as much as possible on what we may see going forward. Let's start with the overview of revenue by vertical before moving into the shape of revenue we saw through the year. We were pleased with our home services performance with revenue flat year-on-year despite a very strong 2019. In insurance, revenue fell 8%, but excluding travel was flat year-on-year. This was a tale of strong market growth in car, particularly in the second half, offsetting weaker home and poor life performance.
Money was the hardest hit of all of our verticals. As we previously highlighted, it was supply challenges that caused this, whether that was a lack of promotional products in banking or tighter lending criteria in borrowing. In other, Decision Tech continued to perform very well with good double-digit growth, mainly driven by strong home comms performance. That was offset by TravelSupermarket, which as I've said, has struggled given the travel restrictions. Let's look at the shape of performance through the year now, give you a sense of the 2020 exit rate, but also what we've seen more recently in the latest lockdown. Starting with insurance, our largest vertical, and here, 2020 started well, with performance benefiting from a tailwind in travel and life as the prospect of the pandemic loomed.
In the spring lockdown, we had major disruption across all channels, so revenue in Q2 fell significantly, down 22% year-on-year. As we exited Q2 and went into Q3, we enjoyed a particularly strong car insurance market, which we think included some pent-up demand. Cars still grew in Q4, but to a lesser extent than Q3. Home insurance fell year-on-year in Q3, but recovered to low growth in the final quarter, and life remained in decline throughout the second half, reflecting trends seen in the broader market. As we've moved into 2021, our insurance performance is reflecting lockdown measures again. We currently expect Q1 to be similar to Q2 last year in terms of year-on-year % decline. Whilst recent declines in car, home, and life are less marked than we saw in April last year, we'll shortly be lapping that strong life and travel insurance performance I've already mentioned.
Moving on to Money, and again, 2020 started well with both banking and borrowing returning to growth early in the year. After that, we saw a material decline driven by COVID. The initial drop in consumer demand that we saw early in the spring lockdown soon rebounded, and indeed, our visitors grew ahead of the market for the full year. As I've said, it was supply issues that challenged performance. For us in borrowing, it's both about the number of providers we have on site, and that strongly recovered as we went through the year. It's also about the lending appetite of those providers. That's what impacts the number and attractiveness of results a customer sees.
Providers tightened their scorecard significantly in the spring lockdown, which heavily impacted our conversion, and we saw only a modest recovery in conversion as we moved into Q4 as those criteria loosened slightly. As we've moved into 2021, those tight lending conditions have been compounded by a market-wide drop in demand, similar to that we saw in the spring, and that's amplified in January, as it's traditionally a peak demand month for borrowing. Finally, to home services. In the first half, we were pleased with revenue growth of 11%, driven by strong tariffs and our ability to amplify them through MSE editorial. Throughout the year, COVID helped by focusing consumers on the need for resilient and fast broadband. We saw good growth here in both home services and Decision Tech.
As we moved into the second half, the energy price cap fell by GBP 84. Wholesale prices also began to rise sharply. That meant savings available to customers fell dramatically. In the first half, they were over GBP 400. By Q4, that had fallen to under GBP 200, impacting our conversion. Savings levels continue to be very low as we've moved into 2021. Revenue to date is down significantly year-on-year. We're also lapping a strong comp when savings levels were high. Of course, we've recently had the announcement of a price cap increase, this time up GBP 96. Performance may improve then as the quarter progresses. Do remember the saving we show customers only changes once energy providers have published their new detailed rates for each region. Let's turn now to gross margin. You can see it fell just over two percentage points in the year.
About two-thirds of that fall was due to the poorer conversion in money I've mentioned. The main driver of the rest of the reduction was the lower SEO positions we saw in insurance in H1. The impact of that SEO in the second half was negligible, given we were lapping already weaker positions in 2019. Peter's going to come on to describe the changes we're making to help improve SEO going forwards. I thought it worth also describing some mix impacts which, although they've broadly netted out in 2020, are important to understand going forward. We've previously talked about the shift to mobile creating a headwind on margin, and this did continue in 2020. Across the year, this was offset by a significant decline in tablet traffic, which particularly in the second half shifted to desktop, which has higher margins than tablet.
The other call-out I'd make in mix is within channels. Margin benefited from a mix out of travel insurance, which is a lower margin channel for us, but that was offset, though, by the strong relative growth of the Decision Tech B2B business, which as you all know, has structurally lower margins than the rest of the group. Moving on to costs, these fell 4% in the year. Whilst we took actions to control costs, for example, redeploying people from channels that were COVID impacted into vacant roles elsewhere in the group, we also continued to invest for future growth. The main driver of the lower cost was staff costs, which were GBP 6 million lower year on year, driven mainly by lower incentive accruals. Whilst marketing costs were broadly flat at GBP 150 million, the mix of these did change, as I'll come on to.
Looking forward into 2021, I expect Opex, and here I mean admin and distribution expenses before depreciation and amortization. I expect that Opex to be slightly higher than 2019. This reflects both the consolidation of CYTI and the ongoing shift to Opex from CapEx. Moving on to marketing costs in more detail then, you can see that changing mix in spend I mentioned in the chart. In online spend, our approach of bidding up to break even on first transaction remained unchanged. Clearly, we did adapt bidding to the changes which we saw in traffic and conversion, and so online spend fell 13%. TV and radio increased GBP 5 million in line with the investment we'd flagged, and the increase in the other category is largely driven by the growth of Decision Tech, leading to higher affiliate costs.
The marketing margin reduction of four percentage points reflects the gross margin trend I've already covered and that increased level of brand investment. You're going to hear from Peter on the opportunities we see for more efficient customer acquisition going forward. Looking at cash now, I'm pleased that in the year our cash generation has remained strong, allowing us to pay over GBP 60 million of dividends, invest into the business, and still hold net cash flat year on year. Working capital was also flat. It's worth highlighting that in creditors we deferred about GBP 8 million of VAT payments into 2021 under the government scheme, this was offset by that lower incentive accrual I've already mentioned.
Cash CapEx was GBP 11 million, we also paid GBP 4 million of deferred consideration from the acquisition of Decision Tech and GBP 3 million for the acquisition of our initial stake in CYTI. We also extended our RCF, which now matures in September 2023. We have access to GBP 90 million of committed funds under that facility and also an accordion option over a further GBP 100 million. As we've seen, we continue to enjoy strong cash generation, and our framework for how we deploy that cash remains unchanged. Funding organic growth remains our first priority, then comes our commitment to the ordinary dividend. After this, we'll look to M&A to support and accelerate our strategy. Finally, as ever, we remain committed to returning excess capital to shareholders.
Turning finally then to outlook, as I described, our markets continue to be impacted by COVID, and we're lapping a good Q1 2020 performance. More broadly, the pace and shape of easing of lockdown measures and how quickly money providers ease their lending criteria will clearly determine our trading shape this year. That level of uncertainty is reflected in a very broad range of consensus for 2021 EBITDA, from GBP 129 million to GBP 96 million. While the macro uncertainties significantly impact visibility, reaching the upper end of that consensus range will require strong and rapid recovery in money and travel-related channels. If the dynamics in money are close to those we saw in Q4 and travel restrictions remain in place, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be closer to the lower end of the consensus range.
Given the current trading I've described and the likely shape of trading recovery, I do expect revenue and profit performance to be firmly weighted to the second half. Despite the current uncertainty, we remain confident in the group's long-term growth prospects, and I'll now hand you back to Peter to describe those in more detail.
Thanks, Scilla. I want to unpack some of this confidence that I spoke about at the start. Here are a few observations about where I see the opportunities. Perhaps I can begin with the Reinvent strategy, which essentially said we should run the core business more effectively and then look at some sensible additional ways to grow. I certainly heard no significant challenges to that strategy. In fact, the questions that I've heard have all been about execution, and I share that view. We need to deliver against the promises already made. That means that this morning won't be about a three-year investment program or the kitchen sinking of profits. I just don't believe that's what's needed.
Equally, please don't read that as a lack of ambition or indeed that we have a perfect business with a future-proof tech platform, because that certainly isn't the case. The group does need to refind its growth momentum. We do need to do M&A where it makes sense to do so, and we need to be prepared to change with the customer and the market as technology opens up new ways for them to save. Much of this is self-help, by which I mean using efficiencies we can find in the existing model to fund the investments we need to make tomorrow. You all know that we operate in a marketing-heavy industry, partly because of how we've done this in the past, but partly because customers come to us relatively infrequently in what is a low-engagement product area.
We have this expensive marketing loop, lots of advertising, lots of PPC or paid search to acquire a customer who can then frequently go on to only buy a single product. Then we seem to go through that whole cycle again at renewal. If I contrast that with other digital sectors, it does feel that price comparison doesn't have the same focus on customer lifetime management. We don't really look at concepts like vintage or cohort analysis. I think this is the thing that's really got to change. We need to get customers to come back to us directly and then keep coming back because we can offer them such a broad number of ways to save. Going forward, the strategy is going to have three objectives.
We've got to get better at attracting our customers in the most efficient way possible, whether that is through smarter PPC, strong SEO performance, or sharp differentiated advertising. We're going to need to retain our users better, making it easy for people to reswitch with us on renewal, but also growing our relationships with them by getting them to buy more. Both of those should directly support and ultimately improve our margins. Third and finally, the business needs to continue to expand in sensible and profitable ways. What underpins and enables these objectives? Well, this group has spent a lot on technology over the years, and we do have a reasonable platform as a result of that. It's not perfect for 2021. Some of that investment dates back a number of years now.
What it is what's known as a microservice or a componentized technology architecture. It also means we're almost entirely cloud-based, and it also means we extensively, although not completely, use APIs. All of that is good. What there isn't, is a common infrastructure across all our brands. Our working practices really, they could be a lot better in a number of areas. Also, like many companies, we offer some level of tech debt or technical obsolescence, in other words. We certainly aren't always as consistent as we could be. My message here is that it should be possible to remedy much of this with really limited impact. I see the work to do in our technology area, again, as very much self-help, by which I'm saying it's doable within existing spend budgets. Now data needs more work.
I've delivered enhanced products for customers, new revenue streams based on data and data science in other businesses. I did it at Just Eat. I did it when I was at easyJet as well. If we're going to do this at MoneySuperMarket, we've really got to improve our data capability. We've already started doing this over the last few months. We've hired fresh talent. We're centering our approach on Google Cloud Platform. We're bringing together all of our data for real-time reporting, marketing, but importantly, product enhancement. In turn, this is going to become our platform for data science, for AI, for machine learning. Again, this is all achievable within our existing cost budgets. I'm hoping that you're going to start to see some results towards the second half of the year, but I'm going to come back to that in a moment.
Can I now go on to talking through these three major objectives and what we need to do, starting with attracting customers more efficiently? Firstly, PPC, which is our biggest marketing cost. We're in the process of moving to a new PPC bidding platform. That's going to be one that allows us to optimize our bidding decisions at a much more granular level and in real time. Importantly, it's going to allow us to use our developing capability with data science better. The difference here is going to be not just that we're improving our bidding strategies, but we're going to do that through the real-time application of our own data. Next was SEO, where we've speeded up changes to our content management platform. Some channels are now already live with faster page speeds.
They've got leaner, more efficient pages and a series of other technical advantages. This is going to help us deploy new content faster onto the site, all of which should help our natural search rankings. Above the line advertising is still going to be very important, but the brand has to be simply and sharply communicated to customers. It has to hold its own in the market against some known and loved competitor campaigns. We're in the market now to check if we've got the best creative to do that. Of course, efficiency also includes the customer experience when they come onto the site. How easy it is and how compelling are the offers, which is essential for any online digital business. I'm going to speak about that in a moment as well. Can I move on to retain and grow?
We've got to make returning easy for customers, which in turn means stronger CRM or customer relationship management. Just as an example today, if you switch your energy provider with MoneySuperMarket, we're not emailing you when your tariff is expiring. It's the same for pet insurance and for a number of other products. We're going to fix this as soon as possible. Energy will be done this half. We're going to use our product capability to productize renewal. What do I mean by that? I mean something similar to what the market has called auto-switching, which I will speak about just in a moment. We've got to also cross-sell. We've got to get people to understand how much more they could save if they used us more, not just their car insurance, but also their home insurance, their broadband, et cetera.
This is going to come through changes to the product and by building a recommendation engine that generates informed suggestions for a customer that they will then see consistently across all their interactions with us. The customer dashboard is the core of this. This is where we're going to be combining monitoring tools, relevant articles, prompts towards further switches. You can see it here on the right. It has to be consistent across web, mobile, app, email marketing, the same message regardless of how the customer touches us. Up to now, we haven't had the data platform or the approach to product to do this at scale. This is an important area for us to focus and to deliver. The dashboard is a good way to talk to our customers by showing them relevant and personalized content.
Credit Monitor is a really good example of what we can show on it because it demonstrates what we can do if we find the right ways to engage. Credit Monitor now has almost 1 million users who deliver a higher profit contribution by more than 50% in their first year. Why? Because they're inquiring more often, they're inquiring across more channels, and importantly, they're coming back to us directly. Underpinning all of this, as I mentioned earlier, is the need for excellence in data management and data science. Currently, we have data in different places on different technologies, and as much that we actually don't even capture. Our ability to repurpose it for use across all our products, analytics, and data has really been quite limited. The cost investment for this fix, again, I believe can be funded through existing efficiencies.
We started working with Google Cloud Platform and Braze already to bring the data together into one place. We can then deploy leading edge CRM, data science, reporting, everything you'd expect from a modern digital business. Our first CRM campaigns are going to be delivered in a few weeks, and we'll soon be able to then feed that data through to our product platforms, such as a dashboard, and then in turn begin to start the machine learning algorithms to begin to hone the proposition. Now, I said I'd speak about auto-switch, and I'm going to return to MSE's energy auto-switch as an example. In energy, we actually introduced two new journeys last year. Something called Pick Me a Tariff, and also auto-switch, which is essentially Pick Me a Tariff configured to repeat the process annually.
Broadly speaking, we've seen a fairly even split between the traditional DIY journey and then the two new journeys. A third. I guess to me, that's no surprise that we see that sort of mix because different people want different levels of control, and essentially, it says we've got a good solution for everybody. The picking option within Pick Me a Tariff is genuinely helpful. We know that customers struggle to choose a supplier, weighing up, say, green credentials versus service versus tariff length versus price. Pick Me a Tariff makes this really simple by taking these preferences and then returning personalized results based on individual preferences. Energy providers like it too, because they can compete on more than just price. In turn, that means they're staying on the panel, whereas for auto-switching based purely on price, that isn't always the case.
So far, over 70,000 users have switched via Pick Me a Tariff, and we've a further 60,000 switched up for the auto-switch every year proposition. Both are converting really well, as you can see in the chart. Stepping back, the objective here is to secure free recurring traffic. It's key to us first stabilizing and then growing our margins. It's a good example of what I'm describing as productized renewal and something we're going to be exploring in other categories, in other verticals, in other areas. Moving on to expanding our offer. I want us to think broadly about how we're going to win in key markets, both organically and inorganically. That means we're very open to M&A where it makes sense, particularly if it's taking us to places adjacent to our business today or it's adding complementary technology or skills.
Recently, expanding our offer has meant B2B through Decision Tech and mortgages. Decision Tech has been a great acquisition. We've taken B2B into energy. We now have 23 partners, and you can see some of them on the right here. We've leveraged our existing group infrastructure and our commercial arrangements, joining these with DT's account management skills. The preexisting business has grown really successfully. I guess the one thing I'd like to shine a light on today is the excellent engineering capabilities of DT. It's a real jewel in our crown with skills and approaches that I'm keen to share more broadly across the group. I've been very impressed by the innovation and the drive shown by the team at Decision Tech. I think it's really great.
Moving to mortgages, where the goal is to build a platform that allows customers to search out best deals, for the customer's application to seamlessly integrate into backend systems of the lender. Ultimately, we're going to do this for all four use cases that you're seeing on this slide. Our focus at the moment is very much on remortgages. Excuse me. As this is a large part of the market and relatively easier to digitize. Over 60% of our mortgage revenue comes from remortgages. The transformative element of this is to build deeper integrated connections into lenders. We now have seven product transfers with lenders. We've added another five this year, which is when you remortgage with your existing lender. This option is simple for the customer, it's good for the lender, it has good economics for us as well.
We've also launched a market-first decision in principle integration. We did that early last year with Nationwide, and then we've added Santander in November. Again, here, the economics are good, but to translate this into meaningful revenue, we're going to have to add further lenders, and we need to get more of our mix to come from these products. This is a slow process. It was always going to be. Mortgage lenders do want this, but they're hampered by their legacy systems. Even if the prize is a few years away, it really is a prize that's worth us pursuing. That's the strategy. Before we look at execution, let's take a quick look at the regulatory backdrop. Two in particular, one more medium-term, one more immediate.
In December, we have the government white paper on our carbon net zero future, which they're talking about implementation in 2024. That contains some early thoughts on ways to drive more energy switching, and the proposals look interesting. There may be opportunity for us. Given the time horizon, I'm going to park that for now. More immediately, we have the FCA General Insurance Pricing Review. They published proposals in the autumn. The responses have now been submitted, and the final policies paper will come out in Quarter 2, and there's going to be an implementation period of at least four months. I think two relevant points for us. First, the removal of price walking in car and home insurance. Basically, a proposal to equalize pricing for new and existing customers. We support this intention. It aligns well with our purpose.
There's some commercial risk for us here, remember, we're a well-diversified business. Car insurance in '19 was a bit under half of our insurance revenue, home insurance, quite a bit less. Remember, there are lots of reasons to switch. Insurers' risk appetites change, customers' personal circumstances change, and the one place where they can check they are getting a good deal is on a price comparison website. My second point is that the proposal to make it easier to opt out of auto-renewal, that's across all of general insurance, not just home and car. Auto-renewal has been a real pain point for customers. It acts as a barrier to switching. This proposal is a very good thing and would likely lead to enhanced switching levels overall.
The impact on us will depend on the final regulation and the implementation date and how that nets out. There's risk and there's opportunity here. Finally, let's talk about execution. My view on joining was that some parts of the organization were too complicated. They were unclear in terms of process, ownership, and direction. Not everywhere, but enough to put a brake on getting things done. We've made some changes. First, we've appointed general managers who now align and prioritize all of our commercial, product, and tech priorities. We have one leading each of our verticals. The clarity here is going to make a big difference because previously, accountability sat within each function, leading to competing priorities and a lack of single-mindedness. I do think this is very important. Secondly, in insurance, we've completed the acquisition of our partner, CYTI.
We can now own those journeys ourselves and integrate pet, life, travel with home and motor rather than run them as separate businesses. Perhaps the biggest change is in home services, where we've integrated the B2C aspects of Decision Tech, that's broadband and mobile, with MoneySuperMarket's home services. This is not just more efficient, but it's actually bringing DT's expertise right into the heart of the business, that product engineering capability that I mentioned earlier. Finally, the exec now has data science and data engineering around the table, which is essential for a business like ours. Now, there is much more to do, but these changes alone are going to make a difference on how we deliver and how we build on our data advantages going forwards. I'm now going to wrap up.
This is a great business operating in fundamentally attractive markets, despite what we're seeing right now in MONY and, of course, travel. There is a lot we can do, and we will do to improve. The work has already started. Challenging that expensive marketing loop through efficient acquisition, we're on that already. Getting our customers to stay with us and buy more from us, retain and grow, is a major prize for both revenue and margin. This is a huge area of focus as we begin to look to productize renewal and build out our data capabilities. Then, of course, expanding our offer, which we will look to do as and when the right opportunities arrive. We're making progress on all of these fronts already.
We've got the right plan, and as we set ourselves up to deliver better against that, it leaves me really excited and optimistic about the opportunities ahead. I'm going to be looking forward to sharing the journey with you, but also in the meantime, I'm going to take your questions a little later this morning. With that, I'm going to thank you and hopefully speak to you later.