Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to NerdWallet Inc. Q4 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are on a Listen-Only Mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session.
To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Caitlin MacNabb, Head of IR. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and welcome to the NerdWallet Q4 2022 earnings call. Joining us today are Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Tim Chen, and Chief Financial Officer, Lauren St.Clair. Our press release and shareholder letter are available on our investor relations website, and a replay of this update will also be available following the conclusion of today's call.
We intend to use our investor relations website as a means of disclosing certain material information and complying with disclosure obligations under SEC Regulation FD from time to time. As a reminder, today's call is being webcast live and recorded.
Before we begin today's remarks and question-and-answer session, I would like to remind you that certain statements made during this call may relate to future events and expectations and, as such, constitute Forward-Looking statements.
Actual results and performance may differ from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements as a result of various risks and uncertainties, including the risk factors discussed in reports filed or to be filed with the SEC.
We urge you to consider these risk factors and remind you that we undertake no obligation to update the information provided on this call to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. You should be aware that these statements should not be considered a guarantee of future performance. Furthermore, during this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures.
A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. With that, I will now turn it over to Tim Chen, our Co-Founder and CEO of NerdWallet. Tim?
Thanks, Caitlin. Here at NerdWallet, our 2023 plans are well underway. We started the year on the right foot, ready to capitalize on new opportunities, grow our business, and help more people in more ways.
This is thanks to the hard work Nerds put in throughout the last year. In that spirit, today I am proud to share our strong finish to 2022 as we exceeded our revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance in Q4. We achieved this in the face of continued tightening and underwriting across lower credit bands during the 1/4.
Some of our resilience is driven by the fact that our revenue skews towards consumers with prime credit, but it is also a testament to our investment in building a brand that is trusted across a diverse set of consumer and SMB verticals. Our brand's appeal across multiple verticals has an important Follow-On benefit.
It becomes easy for us to land and expand into more verticals, and many of those verticals are inversely correlated to each other, allowing us to grow even during challenging environments. For example, the rising rate environment has created a tailwind in our banking vertical, offsetting headwinds in mortgage refinancing.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a massive increase in unemployment over a very short timeframe, creating headwinds in credit cards, but driving tailwinds in verticals that benefited from fiscal and monetary stimulus. These results are great in and of themselves, but I also value them because they reflect a concerted effort across NerdWallet to execute on our strategy.
With progress every 1/4 in our land and expand, vertical integration, and registration and engagement growth pillars, we ended 2022 several steps further in our journey towards building a trusted financial ecosystem or a single platform where consumers and SMBs can learn, shop, and manage their money.
In Q4, we continued to benefit from our diversified business as well as our investments in building a trusted brand. We now reach consumers not only in the U.S., but also the U.K., Canada, and as of early Q4, Australia. While we are still early in our land and expand efforts in Australia, we have confidence in our playbook. Our sustained investments in established verticals have also continued to pay off.
After years of a low interest rate environment, our banking vertical has surged with the rate hikes in Q3 and Q4, delivering another 1/4 of triple digit Year-Over-Year growth in Q4 as we helped consumers shop for High-Yield savings accounts and more.
While the insurance vertical has faced certain industry-specific headwinds over the past several quarters, the team has been hard at work preparing for a return to a more normalized environment, building and optimizing a new In-House auto insurance marketplace.
This gives NerdWallet more control over these consumer experiences. As a result of this work and the normalizing environment, insurance drove 43% Year-Over-Year growth in Q4. The team plans to extend this success to our life and home insurance marketplaces. Similarly, we feel confident in our ongoing vertical integration initiatives.
Our SMB vertical continued to outperform with 94% Year-Over-Year growth as the team invested in growing their organic and paid reach while continuing to help our installed base of SMBs meet their financial needs.
We have primarily integrated On the Barrelhead or OTB with our loans verticals. We are facing headwinds across loans verticals, including our organic and acquired business, broadly in line with the industry as interest rates rise and lenders continue to tighten underwriting in anticipation of a slowdown.
As with our insurance vertical, the loans team remains committed to investing in customer experiences in advance of a macro recovery. In Q4, we saw positive signals from the continued vertical integration of OTB's loan matching technology. The improvements have helped us double our match rate when users are directed through the updated personal loans flow.
These improvements position us well for an eventual macro recovery. We look forward to the continued enhancements that further integration will bring in 2023. We also continue to make strides in our registration and engagement efforts that will help power our trusted financial ecosystem by enabling us to drive repeat visits, collect data, and nudge our users with relevant, personalized insights.
Through content and personalization optimizations, we drove improvements in click-through rates for NerdWallet email campaigns. Within our registered user dashboard, we also launched courses which provide registered users with curated content on financial topics they're interested in. These have also seen strong engagement.
The team plans to expand the catalog of courses to provide our registered users with relevant, trusted guidance. Our consumer trust competitive advantage underpins all of our achievements this past 1/4. Consumers and SMBs increasingly know, trust, and prefer NerdWallet.
We have invested thoughtfully in building this trust, particularly through our brand marketing. Our prior brand campaigns continue to deliver durable results. In Q4, a 1/4 where we typically pull back on brand campaigns, we achieved our Highest-Ever brand awareness measures, and we are building on this with our newest national brand campaign, which launched in late December, as well as new tactics, including sports sponsorships.
As discussed last 1/4, we plan to continue with our recent cadence of running large-scale brand campaigns during the first 3 quarters of the year. While we will increase our investment in brand, given the results we've seen so far, you should expect the growth in that investment will be less than in 2022. Financial institutions also continue to recognize the value we provide consumers, and they make decisions accordingly.
In Q4, our content team revised our star rating for a financial institution when they changed their deposit account offering. Knowing the weight our ratings have with consumers, the institution ultimately reversed course and will continue to offer a competitive product for all consumers.
These results speak not only to the tremendous value we provide consumers and SMBs, but also to the strength of the business we've built. I look forward to sharing more in the months to come. In the meantime, I'll pass it to Lauren St. Clair, NerdWallet's CFO, to share more about our financial performance in Q4.
Thanks, Tim. We're proud of the execution we delivered throughout this past year, exceeding our financial commitments in every 1/4 and expanding our adjusted EBITDA as a result of our incremental margins and maturing cost base. We delivered Q4 revenue of $142 million, up 43% Year-Over-Year and above the high end of our guidance.
We finished the year with $539 million in revenue, a 42% increase versus 2021. While the focus of today's commentary will be on our fourth 1/4 performance, we are encouraged by the full year growth we've been able to achieve, highlighting Years-Long success in areas such as credit cards and SMB, as well as strength in our banking vertical, offsetting the pressure we saw in mortgages.
We know that certain macroeconomic factors will impact individual areas of our business from time to time, but we remain confident that our level of diversification and our continued ability to expand on that in the future will provide growth tailwinds for us for years to come.
Now let's take a deeper look at the revenue performance during the 1/4 within each category. Credit cards delivered Q4 revenue of $53 million, growing 52% Year-Over-Year. Our credit cards vertical has shown resilience and sustainable growth in Q4 and also reflects what we believe is a normalized seasonal cadence.
While the market still feels in good shape, we continue to monitor consumer health, are focused on providing the guidance and products that are most important through our site, and are keeping our eye on key metrics such as unemployment to help inform where the industry might trend in the near term. For the full year, credit cards delivered $210 million of revenue, growing 70% Year-Over-Year. Loans generated Q4 revenue of $22 million, declining 24% Year-Over-Year.
Our mortgage vertical saw another 1/4 of increasing pressure from the heightened interest rate environment, offsetting that decline was growth in personal loans due to the addition of our recent acquisition of OTB.
As Tim mentioned, we continue to make investments in key areas of our loans verticals that may not immediately drive outsized revenue gains in the current landscape, but will set us up to take market share when the macro environment recovers. For the full year, loans delivered $109 million of revenue, declining 14% Year-Over-Year.
Finally, other verticals finished Q4 with revenue of $66 million, growing 90% Year-Over-Year. Our SMB vertical grew 94% Year-Over-Year, we are proud of the team's ability to showcase that our vertical integration strategy has immense opportunity.
Banking grew over 280% Year-Over-Year as we saw an acceleration in consumer interest driven by the rising interest rate environment and were able to effectively capture high intent consumers. In fact, the growth we saw in banking was nearly twice the corresponding decline in mortgages.
After a year of decline due to a pressured macro environment, our insurance vertical delivered revenue growth during Q4 due to a record 1/4 in auto insurance following the launch of our revamped marketplace and industry recovery. For the full year, other verticals delivered $219 million of revenue, growing 70% Year-Over-Year. Moving on to investments and profitability. During Q4, we earned $31 million of adjusted EBITDA at a 22% margin.
For the full year, we earned $67.1 million of adjusted EBITDA at a 12% margin, a 5-point increase versus 2021 as we were able to deliver leverage across all areas of our business. In the fourth 1/4, we had GAAP net income of $8.9 million, which includes $0.6 million of the final contingent consideration expenses related to our 2020 acquisitions.
The associated cash outflows are expected to happen in the second 1/4 of 2023. Please refer to today's earnings press release for a full reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures. Consumers continue to turn to NerdWallet for their money questions. We provided trus2rthy guidance to 20 million average monthly unique users in Q4, up 9% Year-Over-Year.
Growth was a result of the impact of our acquisition of OTB combined with strength in many areas across NerdWallet, such as banking and travel. We're still seeing the same headwinds as earlier in the year, with pressure from mortgages and investing given the current macro environment. Our outlook includes investments in top of funnel through brand and performance marketing to drive increased user growth.
As we double down on engaging acquired users, we expect that revenue growth will continue to outpace MUU growth. On to our financial outlook. As we look forward to 2023, we know that the uncertainty we weathered last year remains. We plan to continue providing 1/4ly guidance and will also provide qualitative commentary for full year expectations.
For the first 1/4, we expect to deliver revenue in the range of $165 million to $170 million, which at the midpoint represents 30% growth Year-Over-Year. We expect to see continued growth contribution from credit cards, insurance, and banking during Q1. For the full year, despite the uncertain macro environment, we expect to deliver strong revenue growth, though not to the levels of what we saw in 2022.
Let me provide some more context. First, the credit cards vertical is still experiencing a healthy environment, but growth rates will begin to decelerate versus 2022 levels as we are no longer lapping the easier comps related to COVID recovery. Second, we will face headwinds in loans during Q1 as we lap the toughest comps from last year.
While we don't expect macro factors to materially change in the near term, the mortgage comps will be a bit easier as we move throughout 2023. Third, as our SMB vertical scales, we expect that growth rates will drop below triple digits this year, though we will continue to expand our current offerings and deliver sustainable growth. Moving to profitability. We expect Q1 adjusted EBITDA in the range of $17 million-$19 million or approximately 11% of revenue at the midpoint, a four-point increase versus prior year.
Consistent with what we've mentioned previously, we anticipate that the cadence of our brand spend will be similar to 2022, where the majority of spend will occur during the first 3 quarters with minimal brand spend during the 4th.
As a result, we expect relative adjusted EBITDA margins to be roughly similar during the first 3 quarters compared to a higher margin in Q4, all while increasing our annual margin for yet another year. We plan to deliver increasing margins as a result of slowing growth in our cost base. We expect 2023 to be a continuation of our journey to get back to and eventually exceed 2019 adjusted EBITDA margin levels while strategically investing in our long-term vision.
We enter this year clear-eyed and pragmatic on the current macroeconomic environment, knowing we have the responsibility to consumers to help them navigate their financial questions, all while being optimistic about our opportunities to deliver profitable revenue growth. We're ready for questions. Operator?
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. I show our first question comes from the line of Ross Sandler from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Congrats on a good 1/4. Can I ask 2 questions? First is on just overall engagement of registered users compared to regular users. How is that trending? Is the 38% growth in registered users a decent kind of proxy for or a leading indicator for, you know, what you tend to see on the revenue side? It kind of seems like those 2 are converging.
Similarly on that, why do you think your growth rates overall are diverging so much from Credit Karma of late? What do you think the biggest factors are that are allowing you guys to outperform them so significantly? That'd be the first question. The second question is just the obligatory performance marketing that was up another triple digits in the fourth 1/4, running ahead of revenue.
How do you think about that as we move through 2023? Thanks a lot.
Great. Yeah, thanks. I'll take the first one. You know, throughout this past year, we've been prioritizing user registration as a focus area, that's really helped us to drive growth there, ending the year with 14 million cumulative registered users, which is up 39% Year-Over-Year. We're also starting to see the benefits of the OTB integration in driving even more registrations.
You know what we're seeing is that, unsurprisingly, personalization drives engagement, the key to driving personalization is First-Party data. That's all about registration. You know, from a product development perspective, we're improving registration On-Ramps throughout the site, improving on those personalized nudges. You know we've launched things like courses during Q4, which provides registered users with curated content on financial topics they're interested in.
Yeah, I think the growth in registered users is gonna continue. You know, we really think about that in relation to our registered user revenue growth, which was up 80% Year-Over-Year in 2022. There can be some puts and takes there, you know.
You know, we expect that to continue outpacing registered user growth. In terms of the divergence with Credit Karma, or other people in the industry, you know, we really have 2 factors going on. One is that our revenue mix skews upmarket relative to some others. We're more prime and super prime.
I guess the second factor is that, you know, we're pretty diversified across a wide variety of verticals, and some of them are, you know, inversely correlated to the credit cycle, like our banking business.
I'll take the second part of that question regarding performance marketing. Just taking a step back, as a reminder, 70% of our traffic comes through organic channels, which over time has allowed us to diversify into other channels like performance marketing and brand. We've always thought about performance marketing as a variable expense that we can dial up or down depending on the returns. When we see better conversion or pricing, we're able to lean in with more efficient spend.
I think more importantly, we view performance marketing as a means to an end as part of our registration and engagement initiatives. As we create more seamless registration experiences, to connect more first-party data, we're able to proactively nudge our users to make smart money moves.
In Q4, we were able to continue that recent pace of investing and growing users through these channels. Where we see similar opportunities during 2023, you should expect us to continue to lean in.
Thank you. I show our next question comes from the line of Justin Patterson from KeyBanc. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks. Two, if I can. Just building off of personalization, I know with the OTB acquisition, one of the key levers there was to improve personalization across the rest of the portfolio. Just would love to hear an update on just how that integration is proceeding and, you know, whether we've seen that conversion benefit take place yet?
Secondarily, you know, there's been a lot of talk about chat out there, so I'm curious whether trust the bot becomes a potential threat or even opportunity for NerdWallet over time. Thank you.
Yeah, I'll take that one. As a reminder, our general M&A thesis is that we can pair our top of funnel brand and reach with these best in class shopping experiences, like OTB. You know, the key components of the acquisition thesis look very promising. You know, most notably we're seeing conversion from integrating their technology, where, as I mentioned, we're seeing double the match rate now for consumers coming through our improved personal loans flow.
We're serving a larger audience, and we're registering a lot more people than we were previously. That gives us a lot more to work with in terms of those personalized nudges going forward. That said, yeah, the macro for loans is more challenging than we anticipated going into the second 1/2 of 2022.
We're still working through certain components of integration as well. That, that's kind of a headwind. But taking all that into consideration, you know, super positive about what OTB will contribute to NerdWallet in the long term, especially as we go into more of a recovery. Yeah, in terms of the chat AI question, you know, we see both risks and opportunities for NerdWallet.
There's some obvious benefits in terms of using chat AIs as a productivity tool for teams like content and engineering. I think more relevant to NerdWallet is how chat AI affects the future of search engines. You know, we really think about that by stepping back and thinking about what consumers are trying to do.
Today you might go to a search engine to find a quick factual answer, or you might also be looking for a more nuanced answer. For quick answers like, you know, what's the temperature outside, the search engine gives you an answer immediately. For those more nuanced answers, there's often subjectivity involved and more data needed.
That's why you might seek out a brand you know and trust first, and then turn to a search engine if you don't have a go-to. You gotta really think about the dynamic of internet marketplaces too. For example, if you're looking for a loan and a bank increases rates on Tuesday at 9 A.M., that needs to be factored into the marketplace instantly, and that's not something a machine learning model can do in real time, right?
Now if we look forward to the futuristic part of this, I think about chat AI as being able to extend what search can do. For example, it's not a great website for rap songs about 529 plans because nobody has a commercial incentive to create that webpage because nobody searches for that.
These bespoke and frequently asked questions are where you'll get a much better result from chat AI than a search engine, especially if there's a good training set to work off of. As we think about the opportunity for NerdWallet, you know today you need to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in investable assets to justify a financial advisor's time One-On-One. It's expensive.
A chat AI trained on NerdWallet's first-party data or marketplace data or house views, it can have an opinion, and it can provide a response at a much lower cost than a human. This lower cost can drive democratization of very personalized and bespoke, you know, money question help, right? All in all, I'd say it's very early days, and we see this as an opportunity to serve our audience in new ways.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. I show our next question comes from the line of Youssef Squali from Truist. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you very much. Couple questions here. First, can you maybe just elaborate a little more on what you're seeing on the insurance business? I think you've actually turned the corner there. I think it was up 43% year-on-year in Q4.
You talked about launching a new house marketplace. Can you expand on kind of your experience there so far? Kind of within insurance, what are kind of the bright spots that you've seen? Is it kind of across the board or just one or 2 products? Then on the credit card revenues were down sequentially. Can you maybe speak to the level of credit tightening out there and maybe just, you know, how much of that may be seasonal versus just softening demand? Thank you.
Okay. I'll take the first one. You know, we spent the past year or so facing all the same headwinds in insurance that you've heard about from others. You know, inflation and supply chain issues making it more expensive to fix a car or replace or fix a house, right? During that time, we launched this enhanced marketplace experience, and we're gonna soon follow up with marketplaces and home and life insurance.
That was all about improving the user experience, giving more personalized responses and increasing conversion rates. That was successful. You know, that drove the success here. Really excited about the investments we made during the downturn and how that'll help us as things recover. Things are looking strong going into 2023.
Yeah. I'll maybe I'll comment on sort of the credit card performance quarter-over-quarter, and then Tim, if you wanna maybe add more color on just the environment right now and what you're seeing for credit cards overall. You know, we've talked about credit cards performing incredibly well over the course of 2022. We talked about 2 things.
One was the pricing recovery from the lows of COVID, and the second piece that we've talked about has been conversion improvements that we've made within our product. The expectation around credit cards is that pricing improvement and the growth that we are getting from the pricing improvement is going to level off as we move into this year and a little bit as we talked about in Q4 of 2022.
Again, we still expect lots of headroom there, lots of opportunity, and we will continue with those product improvements.
In, in terms of seasonality, yeah, Q4 traditionally is seasonally weak in credit cards, so no surprises there. Yeah, I'd say more broadly, you know, it's a healthy environment out there for prime and up and, you know, there's a pretty broad expectation from loan officers about unemployment increasing, you know, 100 basis points throughout the course of 2023 as kind of a low case scenario. Assuming we don't go too far beyond those levels, you know, we're expecting to be kind of in line with our expectations.
Okay, that's great. Thanks, and congrats.
Yep.
Thank you. I show our next question comes from the line of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, Tim and Lauren, it's Michael Infante for James. Congrats on the 1/4. Lauren, I know you mentioned Q1 being the toughest mortgage comp, but what are your general perspectives on, you know, the extent of the recovery we may potentially see in 2023 in mortgage specifically, particularly given, you know, some of the bank executives have started to note that a lot of the excess capacity has already been drained from the system?
Yeah. I'll maybe reiterate some of my commentary from my prepared remarks, and then I'll also hand it over to Tim to give his perspective. Yes, as we said, in Q1 of this year, we expect this to still have really tough comps relative to a year ago when the environment was not quite as bad. We're not expecting any massive change in sort of the macro environment around mortgages for the rest of this year.
Yeah. You know, I guess I just add, you know, it's a challenging macro environment for both refi and purchase. Volumes are low, interest rates are high. We're really using this slowdown as an opportunity to invest in our home equity marketplace. It's a really small part of our business today, but in the spirit of landing and expanding, we've launched new comparison tools here and continue to onboard partners. Yeah, our longer-term outlook really incorporates the view that it's gonna be challenging, as Lauren mentioned. Yeah.
Understood. Thanks for that. Secondly, I know Ross asked earlier about the relative outperformance Vis-A-Vis one of your competitors, but I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper and ask whether or not over the last 3 to 6 months you've seen an acceleration in partners that perhaps previously were allocating marketing dollars across a variety of financial marketplaces, but now may be sort of consolidating that spend on your platform, just given the quality of the user base that we've talked about previously.
I'd characterize the primary driver as just, you know, the deterioration in really near prime has been, and subprime has been just much more accelerated than prime. I think that's probably something you would typically see in a normal credit cycle, and that's probably driving a higher beta. Of course, like we're investing in our experiences, and the OTB integration, I think, has really leveled up our product experience in our personal loans, search, for example. I'd. The first one's probably the major driver.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. I show next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Just going back to insurance. You know, you mentioned the a new consumer experience. I mean, I think insurance has always typically been a product that's hard to sell, and probably some of your competitors, it's a lot of phone calls. Can you just touch on like where you're, you know, sort of disrupting, you think, the consumer experience in insurance? And do you see that becoming a big enough segment to where you could break that out separately one day?
Yeah. Great question. I mean, of course, that's something we think about a ton in terms of user experience. Internally, the conversation's often, can we do better than that user experience while leveraging our brand and our brand trust to drive parity in terms of things like conversion rates, right?
Without getting into specifics, those were a lot of the iterations we're trying to drive with an in-house experience. Yeah, I mean, the results have been pretty promising.
Yeah. I'll take the second part of that question around breaking it out. As you know, we have 3 revenue categories with increased disclosure. It's credit cards, we have loans, and we have the other verticals. Insurance today sits within that other verticals.
For right now, that is the plan that we will continue to provide that level of disclosure. We are always looking at the subverticals and making sure that we're disclosing the right information externally, and so we'll continue to evaluate them.
Thanks. Just to follow up, you've obviously generated a lot of synergies with your past acquisitions, On the Barrelhead being the most recent. Can you give us an update on any potential acquisition opportunities or products you would wanna add to the NerdWallet, you know, to the NerdWallet platform?
Sure, yeah. Just quick reminder, general M&A thesis has been, you know, match our brand and reach with these better converting user experiences, right? Where you tend to find opportunities is areas where there's complexity, where you see humans like advisors, agents, and brokers trying to help people through transactions.
You know, we're looking at quite a wide variety of things, just trying to be opportunistic and disciplined from a capital allocation perspective about what we take on next.
Thank you.
Yep.
Thank you. I show our next question comes from the line of Ralph Schackart from William Blair. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Just on Australia launch, I know it's very, very early, but just curious, you know, what are the signs that you're seeing there, and how would that compare to other markets, you know, similar, launch, stages? Just more broadly, you know, how are you thinking about the opportunity, compared to other markets? Then I'll have a follow-up.
Yeah. Just to level set, I mean, the U.S. is our ordinal priority, right? It's just a huge market. We feel like we have so much room to land and expand within the U.S. and vertically integrate given our existing, reach and traffic and brand trust. In terms of Australia, you know, it's really early.
We're excited to see, hopefully a repeat of Canada. It feels like running a similar playbook. It's something we're very familiar with and just feels very familiar to, for example, the early days of the U.S. market. We'll keep giving you updates as we progress in these areas. Yeah, the ordinal priority is the U.S. market.
Great. Just on the loan segment, you know, you talked about on the call about investing in consumer experience before the improving or potentially improving macro. I think you also talked about some positive signals in the shareholder letter. Just curious, you know, if you could provide some more color there. You know, what are the positive signals there that you're seeing?
To be clear, we have a pretty muted outlook for 2023 in terms of the macro. We expect unemployment to keep on rising throughout the year. We think that's largely what loan officers are pricing into both their underwriting models and their pricing.
Not baking in much optimism about a recovery there. If we deviate from those expectations, then we could see upside or downside on the margin. I think we're a bit lower beta with regards to others, given just the skew towards prime.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. I show our next question comes from the line of Nicolette Radomski from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi, this is Nicky Radomski for Peter Christiansen, Citi Research. Thanks for taking my question. Have you or do you expect to see an impact from Goldman's removal of Marcus in the personal lending space? Any details regarding timing or quantity would be helpful. Thank you.
Could you repeat the question? It didn't come across very clearly.
Oh, sorry. Have you or do you expect to see an impact from Goldman's removal of markets in the personal lending space? Any details regarding timing or quantity would be helpful.
Right. Yeah. Okay. Got it. We do see lenders pulling out of the space and going into the space pretty frequently, right? I think the way I would think about personal loans is there's a few players competing in the different bands, credit bands within that market.
You typically have 2, 3, 4, 5 lenders in the, for example, super prime band or the near prime, et cetera. Any one lender pulling out or coming in doesn't tend to have a huge impact on the marketplace overall. We really tried to just make sure we're presenting the right options and the set of options to the consumer, and balance that.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions in the queue. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over back to management for closing remarks.
All right. Thanks, all. Before we wrap up, I want to be sure to thank the Nerds for their hard work, which made these results possible. As I reflect on this past year and our plans for 2023, I'm really encouraged by the progress we've made, the financial performance we've achieved, and the opportunities available to us as a result.
Looking ahead, we know this financial environment will continue to challenge our consumers and SMBs, and we plan to meet this moment with ingenuity, focus, and meaningful investments, specifically around driving engagement, iterating quickly, and providing clarity for all of life's financial decisions. Thank you.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.