Welcome to the MoneySuperMarket Group 2020 interim results presentation. I'm Mark Lewis, the CEO, and I'm joined by Scilla Grimble, our CFO. This presentation will be supported by a live Q&A session at 9:30 A.M. on Tuesday, the July 28th. Now, I've always characterized the group as having a strong business model, specifically that we benefit from trusted brands, diversified revenue streams, and an efficient marketplace model. While the group has been significantly impacted by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, our business model has proved resilient, and we believe we are well-positioned to trade through the crisis and to come out of it strongly. At a time when household budgets are under significant pressure, our purpose, to help households save money, has never felt more needed, and our brands are more relevant than ever.
Nevertheless, the pandemic and associated lockdown have significantly impacted both sides of our marketplace, and despite a strong start to the year and continued growth in some categories, we have seen an overall revenue decline of 8% in the first half. Taking our major trading verticals in turn, insurance was significantly impacted but is now improving, money remains highly suppressed, and home services has shown good performance throughout the half. We have traded all the way through lockdown, and our robust cash generation gives us confidence to announce today an interim dividend of GBP 0.031 per share. With our teams working productively from home, we've also progressed our strategic agenda to position us well for future growth. Notably, our MoneySavingExpert energy auto-switching proposition is now live, and we are seeing accelerated growth in our B2B partnerships. Our business is a marketplace business.
We connect customers looking to save money with providers seeking to acquire and retain them. We use smart technology and data to efficiently match individual customers to personalized products based on the match between the customer's risk profile and the provider's acceptance criteria. Both sides of this marketplace have been impacted by the pandemic. The impact has varied as we've gone through the different phases. Let me spend a minute or two to walk through what we have seen. First of all, the impact for customers. Before the U.K. lockdown, we saw healthy levels of demand across the group. As fear of the virus increased, we saw a notable spike in the demand for travel and life insurance. As the lockdown proper came into force in March, we saw a number of key changes in customer behavior. Overall, at first they were distracted.
They visited us less and had a large appetite for news and information. Car purchases, both new and used, were deferred, reducing the volume of insurance searches. Similarly, other big-ticket expenditures were initially deferred, slowing down the demand for borrowing. Of course, housing transactions were put on hold, impacting home and life insurance and mortgages. By contrast, all the extra time working and schooling at home drove significant demand in home services such as broadband. Now, as the lockdown has eased, we are seeing an improved picture in motor and home insurance. Demand for borrowing is returning, and at a slower level, so are the travel and mortgage markets. The interest in home services remains strong. Turning to the provider side of our marketplace, we saw a number of impacts across the different categories.
If we go back to the pre-lockdown stage, the product supply was strong across the business, and we were beginning to see signs of increasing premiums for car insurance. Once lockdown hit, we saw a number of impacts. First off, it took a little while for some providers to adapt their operations to home working, particularly some of those with significant call center operations. This initially suppressed their ability to onboard new customers. In Money, many of the banking and savings products were withdrawn from the market. More significantly, we have seen a tightening of the lending criteria for cards and loans. As lockdown eases, providers have worked through the operational challenges, but there are two ongoing impacts of note. Firstly, we now expect motor premiums to reduce rather than increase. Secondly, lending criteria remain tightened.
Although we are seeing increased demand for borrowing, those customers are seeing less pre-approved cards and loans in their search results. Within this context, I am incredibly proud of how the group has responded. Our purpose is to help households save money, this has never felt more relevant. I'm pleased to say that once again, we have helped households save over GBP 1 billion through switching products in the first half of this year. Whenever I share this figure, I always point out that it is only the savings we can count when we see somebody switch. It doesn't include the much larger impact that our brands, especially MoneySavingExpert, have through the more general information they provide to users. I mentioned that our users craved news and information through the early phase of lockdown, the teams pivoted to provide exactly that.
The MoneySavingExpert editorial team produced what I think was the best practical information regarding the impact of COVID on people's finances, digesting the daily news flow into a number of easy-to-follow guides. Likewise, MoneySuperMarket adjusted its communication towards the simple steps that people could take to save money, notably in energy and home services. We chose to keep things simple for the first few weeks of lockdown while people were distracted. More recently, we have reintroduced new messages from the brands with the launch of our new energy auto-switching service on MoneySavingExpert and updated advertising for MoneySuperMarket. These brands have Net Promoter Scores of over 90 and over 70 respectively.
They are some of the most trusted and helpful brands in the U.K. in any category, and I believe are very well positioned for the future, having been there to help their users at their time of greatest need. Operationally, we have moved the whole group to remote working before the lockdown. All our people are fully deployed, and we have not applied for any government support. We are proud of maintaining our corporate social responsibility commitments through the crisis, and as a small vignette, while our offices have been closed, our in-house catering team has been preparing free meals for local key workers on a daily basis. Look, COVID has had a significant impact on our business, but the team has risen to the challenge, and our business model has proved to be resilient. Let me now pass over to Scilla to go through the financials in more detail.
Thanks, Mark. Good morning, everyone. Looking first at our high-level results. You've seen that revenue fell 8% in the half, with growth of 2% in the first quarter, offset by a decline of 20% in the second. EBITDA fell 14%, more than revenue, reflecting gross margin pressures partially offset by lower year-on-year costs. Reported EPS fell 19%, reflecting an increase in the effective tax rate. We've remained committed to our tech investment to facilitate future growth. Our reinvestment rate was flat year-on-year. Cash flow generation remains healthy, with operating cash flow of GBP 42 million. The resilience of our business model and strength of our balance sheet and liquidity position allowed us to pay the 2019 final dividend and to maintain our interim dividend. That's the headlines.
I'm going to give you the breakdown of revenue by vertical before giving some more color on the shape of performance over the half. As I've already said, the story of the half was very different between the growth we saw in Q1 and the 20% decline in revenue we saw in Q2. It was also a very different story by vertical, as you can see from the slide, where again, we've benefited from being a diversified business. We were very pleased with our Home Services performance, growing 11% in the half against the tough comps last year. Insurance had a good Q1, but performance suffered in Q2 due to lockdown measures, so we were down 7% in the half. Money was the hardest hit of all verticals, with both demand and supply challenges in Q2 causing a significant step down in performance.
Revenue in the Other category fell 14%, having had a Q1 that was broadly flat. Remember, the Other category includes Decision Tech and TravelSupermarket, and there are very different stories for the two. Decision Tech has continued to perform very well with strong double-digit growth, and we've made good progress on new energy partnerships, as Mark will come onto. However, the growth in the first half was largely driven by broadband. As we've highlighted in previous statements, TravelSupermarket has struggled due to COVID travel restrictions, and in Q2, revenue here was negligible. I thought it's helpful to share what we've seen across Q2 for our key verticals, and I'm going to turn to Insurance first. Remember that for us, if you looked at 2019, car insurance was less than half of our insurance revenue, with the other large channels being home, life, and travel in that order.
The slide shows the year-on-year performance for Q1, then by month for Q2. In Q1, we were beginning to see a return to premium inflation in car, we benefited in the second half of that quarter from strong growth in travel and life driven by COVID uncertainty. We moved into lockdown, initially we saw consumer distraction, traffic fell in all categories. As travel restrictions kicked in, travel insurance completely dried up, indeed, we didn't have a provider panel for much of Q2. The lack of housing market impacted us in both life and home insurance. In home, about 10% of our inquiries come from those who've moved in the last month. In life, a mortgage is one of the two main triggers to take out a policy.
In car insurance, we saw the impact of no car sales, changing car being a good trigger to switch insurance. In addition, we believe some people maybe let their insurance lapse as they were no longer driving. All those factors combined to lead to a material fall in revenue in April, with some slight improvement as we moved into May. In June, as lockdown measures eased, performance improved, moving to only 10% lower year-on-year. Whilst travel insurance was, and indeed remains negligible, car and home revenue recovered strongly in June. It's difficult to call how much of this is as a result of some pent-up demand, particularly in car, but for the moment we see car and home as returning to more normalized levels. Life insurance recovery is ongoing, and we think will take some time through H2 to return to previous levels.
Turning now to Money, which is where we've seen the most significant impact from COVID. Here it's worth touching on Q1, where in January and February, we've seen good turnaround from 2019 exit rates, and we're seeing growth again. In March, though, we began to see some COVID impacts. Traffic in certain categories slowed, and we saw a withdrawal of product in current accounts and tighter lending criteria in some, but not all credit channels. In April, we saw a marked step down in performance. We suffered on both sides of our marketplace, with search volumes falling dramatically and this being compounded by substantial tightening in lending criteria. What that meant was that for those who came to our sites and did a search, they had substantially fewer, and in some cases, no results returned.
On the banking side, whilst in April we had a good month for savings as people tried to secure rates before they disappeared, supply in the rest of the quarter has been very low. You can see from the shape of the chart that performance has not improved as we've moved through the quarter. Whilst search volumes have improved, provider lending criteria remain very tight, and conversion remains much lower year-on-year. We think that lending criteria are likely to remain tight until banks and providers have better visibility on macro factors such as unemployment. On the banking side, we currently have extremely low supplier product. Home services was much more upbeat, and here there's less to learn from the monthly shape, so we've just given you the quarterly numbers. It's worth remembering we do have strong comps from 2019.
The store remained consistent on energy through the half, with good growth driven by strong tariffs and our ability to amplify through MSE editorial. While we saw some initial impact for providers as they transitioned to remote call centers, it wasn't material to the performance of Q2. We delivered strong growth of 27%. Where COVID has brought benefits is in sharpening consumers' focus on the need for resilient and fast broadband. We saw good growth in broadband, both in our home services vertical and in Decision Tech, as I've already mentioned. More recently, we've continued to see good switching volumes and energy. Those of you signed up to the MSE tip will have seen we've had a big energy switch event in July. Looking further forward, though, we do expect the energy price cap to fall in the autumn, which could dampen both savings and demand.
That's what we've seen in the verticals. Let's look now at the shape of the P&L. As we've seen, adjusted EBITDA fell 14%, more than top line, due to a reduction in gross margin rate of nearly 3 percentage points. That reduction in gross margin is driven by three things. The impact of poorer conversion, particularly in Money, which cost us in the region of 100 basis points. Secondly, as we've touched on before, we've experienced volatility and lower on-average positions in our natural search rankings, particularly in Insurance. Natural search was therefore a smaller part of traffic for us year-on-year, which cost us about 100 basis points of margin in the half. Finally, whilst we're continuing to improve mobile conversion and to narrow the gap with desktop conversion, we've still seen some margin pressure here.
I'll come on to costs in more detail shortly. OpEx was 10% lower year-on-year in the half. As we move further down the P&L, depreciation and amortization was in line with plans at GBP 9 million. As expected, adjusting items now only reflects charges for the amortization of acquisition intangibles. The tax charge was broadly flat year-on-year, despite our lower profits due to a revaluation of deferred tax balances, reflecting the change in the future statutory tax rate back up to 19%. Looking now at costs, you can see our total adjusted costs fell 5% year-on-year, and that was driven both by lower incentive accruals, lower amortization, and lower discretionary costs. Whilst total marketing costs were broadly flat at GBP 78 million, the mix of those costs has changed year-on-year.
In online spend, our approach to digital marketing remained unchanged, and you know that that will bid up to break even on the first transaction. We have been able, though, to adapt our bidding rapidly where we've seen demand slow or dry up. For example, pulling bidding on travel insurance and banking products. It's this that has driven the reduction in online spend rather than any material fall in CPVs. TV and radio spend was broadly flat year-on-year as our additional GBP 5 million of brand investment is phased into the second half. The increase in the other category is driven by the growth we've seen in energy, driving an increase in cashback costs and the growth of Decision Tech, which leads to higher affiliate costs. The marketing margin then reflects the gross margin trend I've already covered, falling to 58%.
Looking at tech investment, you'll see it remains broadly stable year-over-year as we continue to invest for future growth. It also reflects the ongoing shift towards OpEx and away from CapEx. We continue to expect tech CapEx to be about GBP 10 million for the year. Our cash generation remains strong, delivering GBP 42 million of operating cash in the half. We did defer GBP 8 million of VAT payment into 2021, in line with government-permitted payment deferrals for Q2. This cash flow benefit was largely offset in the half by the change to the corporation tax payment schedule, which meant that our cash tax was GBP 7 million higher than our P&L charge. CapEx and investments of just over GBP 10 million includes our acquisition in March of a stake in CYTI and some payment of deferred consideration on the Decision Tech acquisition.
Our strong cash flow, as Mark said, gave the board confidence to pay the 2019 final dividend and to hold the interim dividend. We finished the half with net cash of GBP 7.5 million. A brief recap of our capital allocation framework, which remains unchanged. Funding organic growth continues to remain our top priority. Comes our commitment to the dividend, and after this, we'll look for M&A to support and accelerate our strategy. Any excess capital would continue to be returned to shareholders. To recap, there are still many macro uncertainties that make our rate of recovery hard to predict. We're continuing to see different dynamics in each vertical. In insurance, motor and home appears to have recovered, with life slower to return and no significant uplift as yet seen in travel.
Money remained highly suppressed due to that lack of product and tight lending criteria. We're seeing no real signs of a change in provider appetite here. In home services, we're continuing to trade well. Our marketing investment is second half-weighted. I expect admin costs in the second half to be slightly ahead of H1. All these factors are likely to mean greater earnings pressure in the second half than we've experienced in the first. Thanks very much. I'll hand you back to Mark.
Thank you, Scilla. Given the underlying financial strength of our model, we have also remained committed to moving forward on the delivery of our Reinvent strategy. I now want to spend a little time talking through some of our work in this area over the last few months. I mentioned earlier, our teams have been fully deployed working remotely, and we have seen strong productivity from our product engineering teams throughout the lockdown. Having trailed this at the prelims, we have now launched an energy auto-switch service to the MoneySavingExpert Cheap Energy Club members. Let me remind you of the key elements of this service that we think make it unique in the market and a compelling model for users and providers alike. The key thing is that we have built an auto-switch service populated with all the energy deals in the market.
This gives users the confidence that they will be moved to the energy deal that best matches their preferences. In effect, the same deal that they would have chosen themselves, given how they balance factors such as price, service, green energy, and so on. For providers, this means that they have sustainable economics within the existing commercial frameworks from our comparison business. Let me confirm all our providers are on the auto-switch service. As market leaders in this space, and with the scale of the existing MoneySavingExpert user base, we've been able to build this service on our existing tech platform and take it to market through our existing communications channels. As you know, we are changing the customer relationship with MoneySuperMarket, moving to an ongoing personalized service that monitors customers' bills.
At the prelims, I shared some of the customer value impacts we are seeing from this change to our proposition. The customers who opt for bill monitoring return more frequently and find more ways to save. This positive impact has continued through the first half, particularly for customers of our Credit Monitor service. We have confidence in this proposition and the strength of the MoneySuperMarket brand. Despite the disruption in our markets, we remain committed to investing behind this work with an increased level of media spend as guided at the start of the year. We have, of course, adapted our media mix to reflect new customer behaviors and media market value and are pleased with the reception of our latest communications work featuring the Money Calm Bull. The MoneySuperMarket brand strength tracking metrics have increased through the second quarter.
We have added the calm monitoring service to our web proposition, and the number of customers whose bills are now being monitored has passed over 1 million. I'm delighted with the performance of our B2B business, Decision Tech, since our acquisition in 2018. It's a great business which continues to deliver strong double-digit growth. The home communications category has traded well through the first half. This category includes broadband, where provider deals and customer appetite have remained strong. Leveraging the group's core commercial and technology capabilities, Decision Tech have created what we believe to be a market-leading B2B energy service. Their growth is accelerating. They now service 15 commercial partners, some listed on the chart here, notably securing a partnership to bring energy deals into the Revolut banking app. Let me wrap up there.
The pandemic has had a significant impact on our marketplaces, both on the customer and the provider side. We tried to call out today what trends we have seen through the different stages, which of those trends we are now assuming to be behind us, and also which we think will persist into the second half of the year. There remain significant levels of uncertainty in our core markets, but our business model has proven to be resilient, and our cash generation remains robust and gives us confidence to announce the interim dividend payment. As I hand over the leadership of the group to Peter Duffy in September, I am confident about its future. Our brands are strong and meaningfully helpful for our customers.
The investments we have made in the business have equipped it not only to trade through the pandemic, but also to have confidence in the future opportunities. During my time as a group, we have helped households save over GBP 7 billion and returned almost GBP 300 million to shareholders. There aren't many businesses like that, and it's been my privilege to have led this one. I'd like to thank the board and all my colleagues at the group for their help, hard work, and support in delivering our purpose these last few years, and let me wish them well for the future. Thank you.