NERDWALLET, INC. 10-K

Item 1. Business. Overview NerdWallet provides trustworthy financial guidance to consumers and small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Our mission is to provide clarity for all of life’s financial decisions. Our vision is a world where everyone makes financial decisions with confidence. At NerdWallet, we empower consumers—both individual consumers and SMBs—to make smarter financial decisions with confidence via our digital platform. Technology has changed the way consumers manage their financial lives, making them more comfortable with comparing and shopping for financial products online. This change has accelerated with the dramatic growth in companies offering innovative financial products. At NerdWallet, we are leveraging this transformation to democratize access to trustworthy financial guidance—ultimately helping to improve the financial well-being of consumers and the financial services industry as a whole. As the financial services industry becomes more fragmented and complex, we believe the need for trustworthy and knowledgeable financial guidance increases. Our objective remains the same: serve as a trusted financial ecosystem that consumers and SMBs can rely on to learn about various financial topics, shop for products, connect their data and receive data-driven nudges.. We deliver guidance to consumers through educational content, tools and calculators, product marketplaces and the NerdWallet app. Our platform delivers unique value across many financial products, including credit cards, mortgages, insurance, SMB products, personal loans, banking, investing and student loans, and has grown to include the United Kingdom (UK), Canadian and, more recently, Australian markets, with further international expansion as an opportunity for future growth. Across every touchpoint, the cornerstone of our platform is our consumers’ trust in the independent, objective and relevant guidance we provide, free of charge. This trusted guidance has helped us build a large, loyal and well-informed audience of consumers who turn to us as a resource for many of their money questions and to shop for the best financial products for them. We then use machine learning to present personalized options using aggregated and scalable information. As a result, we have become an attractive partner for financial services providers wanting access to high-value consumers—consumers who might not otherwise trust these financial services providers’ recommendations because their guidance is inherently biased toward their own products. By operating at the intersection of consumers and financial services providers, NerdWallet drives value for both. Through our platform, our financial services partners can reach a substantial audience—we had 20 million Monthly Unique Users (MUUs) per month on average in 2022. After doing research on our platform, these consumers are better informed about the financial decision they’re about to make and often primed and ready to transact. When consumers are more informed about their financial options, they make the appropriate decisions for their needs with confidence, increasing their lifetime value to financial services providers as customers. We have also received feedback from our financial services partners that our users ’ approval rates can be significantly higher than those applying through other channels. Plus, as consumers’ smart money moves expand their options, they are eager to explore additional opportunities and products they are now eligible for, driving further demand for NerdWallet’s financial services partners. To meet the standards of more informed consumers, financial services providers in turn must engage in healthy competition for consumer mindshare and develop better financial products, further improving the outcomes for consumers. For 13 years, NerdWallet has strived to provide consumers with clarity for all of their financial decisions: cutting through jargon, parsing terms and conditions, and simplifying complex ideas so consumers can make informed decisions about their money and pursue lives well-spent. As a mission-driven, consumer-first company, we have long had a company culture oriented towards being responsible and socially conscious. In 2022, we published our first-ever Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report to formalize our commitments and highlight how we achieve our goals with integrity. Our commitments are a natural extension of our mission and while ESG considerations have been part of the NerdWallet story since our inception, our 2022 ESG report has allowed us to articulate our vision and priorities clearly, and it will ensure we hold ourselves accountable for progress on critical ESG initiatives. Our revenue was $538.9 million and $379.6 million for 2022 and 2021, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 42%. We generated a net loss of $10.2 million for 2022, which decreased 76% from a net loss of $42.5 million for 2021. 3 Table of Contents Industry Trends in Our Favor Many trends are transforming the way consumers and SMBs manage their finances and several of these trends accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating tailwinds in our industry. Consumers Manage Their Lives Digitally, and Financial Wellness is at the Forefront of This Change Increasingly, consumers use a digital-first approach to managing their lives: they manage appointments, book vacations, plan events and shop using apps and this has been especially true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the past several years, this digital-first approach has also permeated personal finance with consumers expecting to have the ability to manage all aspects of their financial wellness online. To meet this consumer demand, traditional financial services providers have established digital interfaces and are continually adding new functionality. At the same time, successful fintech companies are proliferating and setting new standards for digital experiences. These new players are responding to changing consumer expectations by disrupting nearly every aspect of personal finance and offering a wide range of faster, better and cheaper digital services, continually altering the competitive landscape. By focusing on distinct personal financial products, fintech companies have unbundled personal finance and have provided value that conventional financial services providers cannot, often improving and expanding consumers’ choices and therefore, overall financial wellness. Consumers Are Inundated With Choice and Complexity, but Unbiased Financial Guidance is Difficult to Find While digital access and an increasing number of fintech companies are making it easier to invest, make payments and even take out a loan, the explosion of market participants also makes it increasingly difficult and time consuming for consumers to sift through all of the options to determine which product is best suited to their personal financial needs. Financial products and services are complex and consumers are seeking ways to compare and better understand their options. Many consumers do not have a trusted financial advisor to help them navigate this complexity and instead seek advice online. Unfortunately, finding trustworthy financial guidance online can be challenging. Fees are not always transparent, there is not a standard route to achieve financial literacy and creative marketing can leave consumers feeling overwhelmed. Consumers Want to Know They’ve Made the Right Choice in Their Financial Lives Consumers want to take control of their financial well-being, ensure they’re getting the right deal, understand exactly what they’re signing up for and have confidence in their decisions. This desire to understand and feel well-informed about finances is prevalent across all generations. Even among the newest Gen Z consumers, many of whom may not have much experience with personal finance or even own a credit card, 89% surveyed in a 2021 Tallo study said that it’s a priority for them to learn about personal finance and 75% are interested in taking personal finance classes. Our Platform We have developed a consumer-first platform that empowers consumers and SMBs to make well-informed financial decisions at the right time and with confidence. The cornerstone of our platform is consumer trust in the independent, objective, and relevant guidance we provide, free of charge. Given it is incredibly difficult for any one person to be deeply knowledgeable across all areas of personal finance, we have a 100+ person editorial team that functions as the “brains” behind our guidance. Our writers and editors, many of whom have joined us from notable publications, cover specific verticals day in and day out, and, as a result, are deeply knowledgeable about the financial areas they cover, producing high-quality and award-winning guidance. The work of our editorial team as a whole is not only a key reason consumers trust our brand and turn to us for many of their financial questions, it is also the foundation of our personalized guidance and our “nudges.” The guidance developed by our editorial team is codified by our product team to create the insights surfaced across our platform. It’s through this unique combination of human-powered guidance and machine learning capabilities, that we can provide consumers with high-quality and personalized insights, which help us advance toward being a trusted financial ecosystem, a single platform consumers and SMBs rely on to learn about various financial topics, shop for products, connect their data and receive data-driven nudges. This trusted guidance has enabled us to build a large, well-informed audience, many of whom are ready to transact. Accordingly, we have become an attractive partner for financial services providers wanting to reach these high value consumers. Today, our platform stretches across many financial products, including credit cards, mortgages, insurance, SMB products, personal loans, banking, investing and student loans. Our platform aligns the interests of consumers and SMBs seeking financial guidance and products with the financial services providers that offer these products. A successful initial experience often leads to follow-up activity on our platform and we believe it also leads to higher customer lifetime value for the financial services providers. This alignment of interests, enabled by our unbiased and trusted guidance, benefits consumers, the financial services partners and NerdWallet. 4 Table of Contents We built NerdWallet with the following key assumptions: • Everything starts with trust; • Consumers have an unmet need for unbiased guidance to inform their financial decisions; and • There is a compelling opportunity to use data to personalize and automate guidance at scale. Starting with these assumptions, we offer the following benefits to consumers and to our financial services partners. Benefits of Our Platform for Consumers and SMBs Our platform is designed to empower consumers and SMBs to gain clarity about their financial decisions, help them make optimal decisions and instill them with a sense of confidence in their choices. We accomplish this by: • Providing Comprehensive Guidance with an Independent, Unbiased Editorial Team. We build trust by offering guidance that is credible, consistent and grounded in our consumer-first values. We establish credibility with financial product reviews and content that cover a myriad of topics, developed by our editorial team which is not influenced by monetization. One of our core values is “Consumer, Company, Team, Self.” Consistent with that value, we uphold rigorous editorial standards, and all of our articles, reviews and recommendations are written by our independent editorial team. The value of our brand and long-term relationships with consumers are more important to us than any short-term benefit we may derive from any transaction conducted on our platform. We believe that the result of this approach is the direct, ongoing, trusted relationship we have with our users. • Using Simplicity and Transparency to Enable Well-Informed Decisions. We write our articles to appeal to everyone, ranging from the casual reader to someone looking to understand more complex details on a topic. Regardless of the consumer need, we bring a level of clarity to help consumers make sense of even the most complex financial topics. Our content is delivered in a variety of digestible formats, and our comparisons provide transparency on both price and features, given that a particular financial product may appeal to different consumers for different reasons. For example, while some consumers may be looking for the lowest interest rate on a credit card, others may never plan to carry a balance and instead may be looking for the best cash back or rewards offering. • Acting as a Trusted Guide and Navigator, Providing Personalized Guidance. Democratizing access to financial guidance is only half of our vision; the other half is to make it frictionless for consumers to make financial decisions. We built our platform to appeal to both consumers looking to “do it themselves,” as well as those looking for more support managing their financial well-being. We make it easy for our Registered Users to stay on top of their money by centralizing many of their product decisions in one place. A Registered User is defined as an individual who has created an account on the NerdWallet platform, and is a standalone metric calculated independently from whether an individual accesses our platform in a given period. Consumers can get a holistic view of their finances, and hone in on specific details about their spending and saving patterns across accounts. By combining insights from our award-winning editorial team with our machine learning capabilities, we are able to recommend smart money moves via contextual “nudges.” As a result, we have become a one-stop-shop for consumers to track, manage and plan their financial futures. • Providing Comprehensive Coverage Across Major Financial Verticals. Today, we have financial services partners in eight financial verticals: credit cards, mortgages, insurance, SMB products, personal loans, banking, investing and student loans. We partner with over 400 organizations, ranging from the largest financial services providers to the most disruptive startups. This comprehensive coverage shows consumers who may be seeking guidance in one area, such as credit cards, the expertise that we provide in other relevant verticals like renters insurance and deposit accounts. Our guidance, however, is not limited to areas with existing partner relationships or those that we monetize. We quickly adapt to the evolving financial interests of consumers and can easily add coverage in new areas. Throughout 2022, our Content Nerds reinforced trust during another period of macroeconomic volatility, providing guidance across a variety of pressing topics, including the impact of interest rate hikes on credit cards, mortgages, bank accounts and personal loans; how to save at the gas pump; the return to travel and student loan forbearance and repaying student debt. 5 Table of Contents Benefits of Our Platform for Our Partners We bring our financial services partners well-matched and well-informed consumers. These consumers also frequently have desirable characteristics—they have higher credit scores and maintain higher levels of investable assets—making them highly attractive for our financial services partners. We have received feedback from financial services partners that our users ’ approval rates can be significantly higher than those applying through other channels . Benefits that we provide to our financial services partners include: • Huge Audience and Reach, with an Average of 20 million Consumers Turning to the Nerds This Year. During 2022, we averaged 20 million MUUs, up 4% from 2021. We also over-index on attracting consumers with high credit scores who are inundated with choices and seek an independent third party to help them find the right product for their distinct needs. These individuals receive many offers for financial products because they are often the most attractive customers for financial services providers as they tend to drive long-term value. We believe we drive strong conversion both on and off our platform. For example, tracking tests with our financial partners in our credit cards vertical have shown that on average, for every transaction that happens through NerdWallet, one or more additional transactions with a user occur with the partner as a result of the user previously engaging with our platform. This encourages our financial services partners to continue promoting their products through NerdWallet, as we are a channel for them to acquire attractive customers. • Access to Consumers Who Are Ready to Transact. While our expertise and personalized guidance is helpful for consumers at all stages of the financial decision-making process, many of the consumers that use NerdWallet are already poised to make a transaction, using NerdWallet as the final check. For our financial services partners, this leads to more engaged potential customers, who have a better understanding of our partners’ products than the average customer. We believe that these high-quality matches can result in higher customer lifetime values for our partners. In addition to providing our financial services partners with attractive potential customers, we do so just as consumers’ purchase intent is the highest. Because of this, some financial services partners choose to market special or unique offers first or only through NerdWallet. • Positive Brand Association. All of our articles, reviews and recommendations are written by our independent editorial team, and because of this, we believe consumers trust our assessment of the financial services and products offered on our platform. As a result, we believe that our financial services partners greatly benefit from placement on our Best-of Awards lists, in our reviews and within other NerdWallet content. In fact, nearly 60% of the financial services providers who won a 2022 Best-of Award promoted their designation in their own marketing efforts. • Exposure to Consumers Seeking a Broader Range of Financial Products. Given the breadth of our expertise, consumers are able to use our platform for multiple facets of their financial well-being beyond their initial transactions. Through the wide range of guidance that we offer, consumers are exposed to relevant products outside of the one they are researching at a given time. For example, a consumer researching credit cards may see a relevant article regarding mortgages, then remember that article when they are in the market for a mortgage at a later date. As a result, consumers are exposed to our financial services partners’ products at various points in their financial journey, increasing the value of our platform both to consumers and financial services partners. 6 Table of Contents Our Growth Pillars We believe our ability to execute against our strategy and invest in our three pillars of growth- “Land and Expand,” “Vertical Integration,” and “Registrations and Data-Driven Engagement''- helps us advance toward becoming a trusted financial ecosystem. With our trusted financial ecosystem, we will provide a single platform that consumers and SMBs can rely on to learn about various financial topics, shop for products, connect their data and receive data-driven nudges. This will provide our users with more clarity and confidence around their finances and help grow and diversify our business through reoccurring engagement and revenue. • Land and Expand. Our trusted brand and organic reach keep us well-positioned to land and expand in new financial areas and geographies. As we look to add capabilities within our existing verticals and enter new verticals like Medicare and cryptocurrency, our brand paves the way for us to meet consumer demand. By improving the quality of our guidance within existing verticals, we believe we can enhance the experience for our users and continue to build recurring revenue streams. Our approach for new vertical expansion is well-defined—provide trusted content and tools to attract organic traffic, then leverage our brand and marketing expertise to accelerate growth. Expansion to new verticals allows us to address more of our consumers’ needs and increases our potential for cross-selling, thereby making existing verticals and marketing channels more efficient. We also believe there is significant potential for us to grow the global reach of our platform. Our success in the United States and our strong brand give us a solid foundation to expand our international footprint in markets like the United Kingdom in 2020, Canada in 2021 and most recently, Australia. • Vertical Integration. Our distinct ability to combine our trusted brand and massive top-of-funnel reach with best-in-class user experiences helps us vertically integrate in areas and topics that capture re-occurring revenue. For example, in 2020, we acquired Fundera to improve our offering for SMBs. Upon integration, we combined NerdWallet’s top-of-funnel strength with Fundera’s monetization strategy, which added a recurring revenue tail. In 2022, our SMB vertical achieved triple digit year-over-year growth as they successfully directed organic traffic through an efficient funnel. Given this success, we furthered our vertical integration efforts in 2022 through our acquisition of On the Barrelhead, a loan matching platform that provides consumers and SMBs with product recommendations. Similar to the vertical integration approach utilized with Fundera, we expect that by pairing On the Barrelhead’s loan matching platform with NerdWallet’s trusted brand and massive reach, we can offer our users more personalized and compelling recommendations, leading to better customer experiences and improved monetization. • Registration and Data-Driven Engagement. Critical to our aspiration of delivering consumers and SMBs with a trusted financial ecosystem is our ability to register and engage users - in turn allowing us to drive repeat visits, collect data and provide users with unique insights via nudges. We are focused on growing the traffic and engagement on our platform, as well as increasing our number of Registered Users, who have a lifetime revenue value five times greater than our non-registered users and more than twice the transactions and sessions, on average. We have made significant progress in our efforts, and since 2016, we have started converting unique users into Registered Users that utilize our consumer decisioning tools and increased machine learning functionality. We had Registered Users of 8 million as of December 31, 2020, over 10 million as of December 31, 2021 and 14 million as of December 31, 2022. Full-year Registered User revenue increased over 80% from 2021 to 2022. We will continue to invest in building efficient and scalable technical capabilities to deliver personalized guidance and nudge consumers, at the right time, to take action based on our advice. With better machine learning, we believe our recommendations and contextual nudges will encourage repeat engagement and user registration on our platform. As more consumers use our platform and engage with our extensive financial guidance and tools, our consumer and transaction database grows and our product recommendations yield higher success rates. This increases user satisfaction, converting more users into Registered Users and improving repeat user rates. As we apply machine learning to match more high-quality consumers with products and services, our platform becomes increasingly valuable to financial services partners, too. This, in turn, attracts new partners and new financial products to the platform. More partners and more products serve to further increase the success rates of consumers using our platform, all of which drives our growth. This creates a unique value proposition for all constituents in our ecosystem, making our platform more valuable. Our Market Opportunity We have a substantial market opportunity in the growing global market for financial services. Our comprehensive platform serves a broad set of financial verticals, including credit cards, mortgages, insurance, SMB products, personal loans, banking, investing and student loans. 7 Table of Contents Our current and primary addressable market opportunity is U.S. financial services digital advertising spend, which is expected to be more than $32 billion in 2022 and has been growing at double digit rates annually, according to eMarketer. As digital advertising spend continues to increase as a percentage of overall advertising spend, we expect our addressable market opportunity to grow along with it. We believe the services provided by financial advisors, insurance agencies, loan brokers and others will increasingly transition online in the coming years, which will expand our addressable market. As a result of this offline-to-online shift, offline sales commission dollars will be reallocated to better align with the growth and importance of digital channels. As financial services providers modernize their approach to sales commissions and related compensation, we expect that our addressable market opportunity will continue to grow. Our Product Offerings The NerdWallet platform is designed to empower consumers at every stage of their financial journey through our personalized offerings. Whether consumers have a specific money question, are shopping for the “best” financial product or want to proactively stay on top of their finances, we provide financial guidance to meet their varied needs. We offer guidance across eight verticals: credit cards, mortgages, insurance, SMB products, personal loans, banking, investing and student loans. We believe our unbiased and comprehensive approach to financial guidance and personalized insights provides a competitive advantage for NerdWallet. This advantage will compound as we further expand our product offerings and as we continue to apply the power of machine learning to further refine our personalized insights. To ensure we are able to meet distinct consumer needs and preferences, our financial guidance is delivered in a variety of ways, organized in the following core categories: Learn, Shop and Manage. • Learn. Our mission is to provide clarity for all of life’s financial decisions, and we provide resources that make even the most complicated financial questions and topics simple to understand. The resources consumers can access on our platform include articles, calculators, videos and podcasts. We do this with our award-winning editorial team of Nerds who create and curate NerdWallet’s house views on a wide variety of personal finance topics. Our writers and editors, many of whom have joined us from notable publications, cover specific verticals day in and day out, and, as a result, are deeply knowledgeable about the financial areas they cover, producing high-quality and award-winning guidance. This trusted guidance has enabled us to build a large, well-informed audience, many of whom are ready to transact. Accordingly, we have become an attractive partner for financial services providers wanting to reach these high value consumers. Today, our platform stretches across many verticals, including credit cards, mortgages, insurance, SMB products, personal loans, banking, investing and student loans. These capabilities help consumers make educated decisions about financial products, while allowing us to provide our financial services partners with informed consumers ready to transact. • Shop. NerdWallet’s platform and intuitive user interface help consumers find the products that best match their searches, instilling confidence in their financial decisions. Consumers can easily explore available products, filter results according to their specific needs, sort by NerdWallet rating and narrow down their options with the help of various tools, including side-by-side comparisons, “Best-of” lists and financial product reviews. In our credit card and loans verticals, we also offer the ability to personalize our recommendations by matching consumers to the appropriate lender for their unique needs. • Manage. NerdWallet makes it easy for our Registered Users to stay on top of their money by centralizing many of their financial decisions in one place. Consumers can get a holistic view of their finances, and hone in on specific details about their spending and saving patterns across accounts. By codifying insights from our award-winning editorial team, we are able to recommend smart money moves via contextual “nudges” for example, letting consumers know that the improvement in their credit score means that they could qualify for lower auto insurance rates. As a result, NerdWallet has become a one-stop-shop for consumers to track, manage and plan their financial futures. Our Technology We built our scalable technology platform to serve both the growing number of consumers searching for financial products digitally and the increasing number of financial service providers looking to reach consumers with the right characteristics for any given product. Additionally, beyond enabling all elements of our consumer “Learn, Shop, Manage” product experience, our technology is key to keeping our platform secure and compliant. The key capabilities and features of our platform include Content Management, Partner Access, Recommendation Engine and Personal Financial Management. 8 Table of Contents Content Management Our content management platform leverages structured data components to showcase our financial guidance to consumers at scale. By codifying our editorial team’s house views, we are able to dynamically recommend relevant content using machine learning for consumers seeking guidance and thus increase product matches. Our personalized article recommendations lead to higher click-through rates, ultimately increasing transactions on our platform. Partner Access Our platform manages over 400 f inancial services partners across eight verticals. We have a team focused on ingesting and aggregating data from our financial services partners across our verticals and financial products to surface and apply product details and attributes for matching with consumers. Our partner data ingestion, quality and compliance processes ensures accuracy and scalability across our platform. We are able to onboard new partners quickly with significantly lower partner marketing compliance risk—for example, inaccurate displays of rewards, fees, or interest rates. Our partner platform also includes the ability to integrate prequalification experiences and targeting engines. Recommendation Engine Our proprietary recommendation engine uses machine learning to match consumers to financial products and partners that meet their unique needs. Examples include, but are not limited to: • For credit card products, our approval odds model determines a consumer's likelihood of getting approved, which ultimately saves them time, enables users to avoid unnecessary hard credit checks, and drives stronger conversion rates for our financial services partners. • For some loans products, we operate a prequalification system that assists consumers through the underwriting process. Additionally, On the Barrelhead’s loan-matching platform unlocks more personalized and compelling recommendations, leading to better customer experiences and improved monetization. Our technology is flexible enough to engage with financial services partners in ways that align with each industry’s unique requirements and business practices. Personal Financial Management The logged-in experience for Registered Users serves as a one-stop shop for consumers to track, manage and maximize their finances, all in one place. We analyze first-party data, third-party data from financial account aggregators and credit reports to understand our users’ unique financial situations. Our recommendation engine surfaces insights and actions that users can take to make smart money moves, such as improving their credit scores, maximizing their credit card rewards or earning a higher savings interest rate. Additionally, our credit score predictive modeling can estimate the impact of financial decisions on consumers’ credit scores, thus enhancing the insights and recommendations that we can provide to them. Security and Privacy As a consumer-first company that is building a trusted brand, we are both committed and mandated to adhere to the strictest privacy standards. We believe our commitment to data protection and privacy, as well as our superior insights and guidance, are the primary reasons why consumers provide us with personal data on our platform. We practice a security-first approach to product development, with our security team involved in building our products, features, platforms and infrastructure from the beginning. This approach allows us to build with security as a core requirement rather than treating it as an afterthought. Our security team has a wide range of expertise, from corporate security to network security to application security, giving us the ability to design security into everything that we do, from product development to vendor selection to the tools that we use in our day-to-day work as Nerds. 9 Table of Contents Marketing Our marketing function is a critical way we reach and build trust with consumers and is an important growth lever for our business. Our marketing strategy is diversified across brand marketing, organic and performance marketing, customer relationship management and communications. Importantly, these strategies build on and reinforce one another, optimizing for building consumer trust and managing spend efficiently. Brand marketing campaigns, which encourage consumers to turn to NerdWallet with all of their money questions, increase awareness and drive top-of-funnel interest, while amplifying the effectiveness of our organic and performance marketing channels. All of our marketing programs and channels are measured by a data-driven media mix model to determine results and effectively allocate marketing investments to drive maximum business impact. We have a substantial organic and performance marketing presence that drives high-intent traffic. Our organic marketing program leverages our substantial, proprietary body of trusted guidance coupled with expertise in SEO and public relations, to reinforce NerdWallet as a trusted authority in personal finance. Our performance marketing is also highly optimized for profitable revenue growth. NerdWallet’s editorial team is made up of writers and editors who are deeply knowledgeable about personal finance. Our editorial team provides well-researched guidance across all areas of personal finance and for various stages of consumers’ financial journeys, from basic information about saving for retirement to timely guidance about applying for unemployment to in-depth product reviews. Our high quality content is distributed by news sites such as The Associated Press, and our writers are frequently featured providing guidance in print, online and broadcast media such as The New York Times and Good Morning America, among others. Our communications team oversees the execution of consumer, product and corporate communications to both reinforce NerdWallet as a trusted brand and support our organic growth strategies by generating considerable media and syndication coverage, particularly for NerdWallet’s consumer finance spokespeople. We believe our marketing strategy will position NerdWallet as the trusted brand of choice in personal finance, improve traffic acquisition at all levels of the funnel, drive engagement with users, and enable us to scale quickly across new consumer finance verticals and geographies. Environmental, Social and Governance Our mission, to provide clarity for all of life’s financial decisions, is rooted in our belief that both individual consumers and SMBs should be empowered to make financial decisions with confidence. As a mission-driven, consumer-first company, we have long had a company culture oriented towards being responsible and socially conscious. In 2022, we published our first-ever Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report to formalize our commitments and highlight how we achieve our goals with integrity. You can find the report at https://www.nerdwallet.com/environmental-social-governance . Our commitments are a natural extension of our mission and while ESG considerations have been part of the NerdWallet story since our inception, our 2022 ESG report has allowed us to articulate our vision and priorities clearly, and it will ensure we hold ourselves accountable for progress on critical ESG initiatives. Our ESG strategy is founded on three pillars: • Achieving Our Vision, or the work we do to create a world in which everyone makes financial decisions with confidence. We know that not everyone has access to the information they need to make confident decisions, that not everyone is adequately served by financial incumbents, and addressing these inequities is endemic to our DNA. • Investing in Our Nerds, or the work we do to provide our talented Nerds with an equitable and inclusive workplace in which they can thrive professionally and personally. Our Nerds are eager to make an impact, and we want to empower them in pursuit of our shared and individual goals. • Building a Socially Responsible Business, or the work we do to ensure that our business practices protect and improve the lives of our consumers, our Nerds, and our wider world. 10 Table of Contents Employees and Human Capital NerdWallet is defined by its vision, a world where everyone makes financial decisions with confidence. We attract people who are passionate about bringing our mission to life and inspired by the possibility of making real change—to brighten futures, ask hard questions, usher in solutions and provide our consumers with clarity and confidence. As of December 31, 2022, we had over 770 full‑time employees, of which approximately 92% are located throughout the United States and 8% are located internationally. None of our employees are represented by a labor union or covered by collective bargaining agreements. We consider our relationship with our employees to be good and have not experienced any work stoppages. Our Culture and Engagement Our Nerds are the key to our success and the reason we believe we will achieve our mission; they are also one of our most crucial areas of investment. At the core of our Nerdy culture are our values. They’re not just words written on a wall or printed on t-shirts, but lived and breathed every day by every Nerd: (1) Consumer, Company, Team, Self; (2) Relentless Self-Improvement; (3) Ownership; (4) Informed Risk-Taking; and (5) Open, Candid and Constructive. We measure employee performance against these company values and measure employee engagement through surveys, and participation at all-hands and town hall style meetings with leadership. We’re consistently recognized as a Fortune “Best Place to Work” due to our competitive employee benefits, commitment to employee growth and empowerment, and our flexible workplace environment. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion At NerdWallet, we aspire to provide people with the confidence they need to live their best lives—however they identify. For our consumers, this means building their financial confidence. For our Nerds, this means fostering an inclusive culture that allows all Nerds to be their authentic selves, grow their skills, contribute, and thrive with the confidence of belonging. Our three-year DEI goal involves continually increasing representation among women in leadership and women in tech, and in the U.S. across underrepresented races and ethnicities. Our key initiatives include: • Offering learning sessions and resources for Nerds and managers to help build an inclusive workplace. • Supporting 5 employee-led employee resource groups, which provide supportive communities for various employee populations and their allies: NerdOut!, NerdParents, NerdWomen, Nerds of Color and NerdWallet Women in Data & Engineering. • We received Plan Approved status by Black Equity at Work from Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT). This rigorous three-year route to certification features a data-driven and comprehensive plan to drive and support racial equity at NerdWallet. • We use a third-party platform to analyze our employee salaries for gaps based on race or gender twice a year. • Offering Learning and Activism Days to inspire and encourage Nerds to grow and give back to their communities. In 2022, we launched our First Annual Nerds Pay It Forward Day, a dedicated volunteer day to encourage all NerdWallet employees to give back to their communities. Talent Attraction, Recruitment and Retention Our remote-first culture allows us to reach, attract and retain more diverse talent across all levels of our organization. Attracting and retaining highly skilled, diverse talent is a key component of our burgeoning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and is absolutely critical to our success as a business and to fully realizing NerdWallet’s mission. Once employees are at NerdWallet we invest in their well-being and development offering competitive compensation and benefits and opportunities for career growth. • Training, Learning and Development - In line with our Relentless Self-Improvement value, we encourage our employees to seek out professional development opportunities and we provide them with a yearly education stipend. In addition, we provide in-house opportunities for career development, including in-depth training as part of our New Manager Lab and our Career Accelerator Program (CAP) and Leadership Empowerment Accelerator Program (LEAP) aimed to increase representation of underrepresented races and ethnicities, women in leadership and women in tech and propel underrepresented women into leadership positions. • Compensation - NerdWallet offers market-competitive compensation to attract employees and a pay-for-performance philosophy to engage and retain our employees. We want our employees to feel invested in the future of NerdWallet by offering all full-time employees equity-based compensation upon hire and through annual performance equity grants. 11 Table of Contents • Comprehensive Healthcare and Other Benefits - In order to attract, engage and retain our employees, we offer a wide array of benefits to help achieve life balance: ◦ Comprehensive healthcare including medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans; ◦ Flexible paid time off and flexible work schedules; ◦ Mental health benefits and Company mental health days off in addition to an annual week-long Company shutdown at the end of the calendar year; ◦ Remote-first work environment; ◦ Generous parental leave; ◦ Country-specific retirement or pension plans, with a match for U.S. 401(k) plan contributions; ◦ Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP); ◦ Access to certified financial planners; ◦ Referral bonus program for recruiting new Nerds; ◦ Charitable matching program, matching of up to $1,000 of employee donations per calendar year; and ◦ Access to online and automated legal services. Competition We have built a scaled and highly differentiated online platform. We face competition from both online and offline financial guidance providers in four primary categories: • Financial advisors, agents, and brokers who provide guidance and expertise as part of their offerings; • Traditional media such as the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report and other print and broadcast media; • Friends and family , as many consumers consult friends and family for financial guidance; and • Influencers on social media platforms. In addition, we compete with the following for advertising budgets designated for financial products: • Financial services providers’ own marketing : Financial services providers connect directly through many different channels, digitally (in-app, email, etc.) and offline channels (direct mail, printed media, etc.); • Online search engines : Financial services providers spend advertising budgets with online search engines, primarily Google AdWords, as many consumers turn to Google to answer their personal finance questions; and • Online marketplaces : including Bankrate, Credit Karma, LendingTree and Zillow. We believe we compete favorably due to the breadth and depth of our financial guidance, the trust we’ve built with our consumers, and our brand, organic traffic, convenience and simplicity. Intellectual Property We believe that our intellectual property rights are valuable and important to our business. We rely on trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, license agreements, intellectual property assignment agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements, and employee and contractor non-disclosure and invention assignment agreements to establish and protect our proprietary rights. Though we rely in part upon these legal and contractual protections, we believe that factors such as our skills and the ingenuity of our employees, the quality of our guidance to consumers and the functionality and frequent enhancements to our platform are larger contributors to our success in the marketplace. We have trademark rights in our name, our logo, and other brand indicia, and have trademark registrations for select marks in the U.S. and many other jurisdictions around the world. We also have registered domain names for websites that we use in our business. 12 Table of Contents We intend to pursue additional intellectual property protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost-effective. Despite our efforts to protect our intellectual property rights, they may not be respected in the future or may be invalidated, circumvented, or challenged. For additional information, see the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Technology, Security and Intellectual Property—Failure to protect or enforce our intellectual property rights could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.” Regulation We market and provide our products and services in heavily regulated industries through a number of different channels across the U.S.,the UK and Canada. As a result, aspects of our business are potentially subject to a variety of U.S., UK and Canadian laws and regulations, including: • The Truth-in-Lending Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, the Fair Housing Act, the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, and similar state laws, all of which place certain restrictions on the manner in which mortgages and other consumer loans are marketed and originated, and some of which impose restrictions on the amount and nature of fees that may be charged to lenders and real estate professionals for providing or obtaining consumer loan requests; • The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which imposes, among other things, a broad prohibition on Unfair, Deceptive and Abusive Acts and Practices (UDAAPs) in connection with consumer financial products and services, limitations on fees charged by mortgage lenders, and requirements related to mortgage disclosures and is enforced by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and state regulatory authorities; • The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC Act), which, among other things, imposes a broad prohibition on Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices in or affecting commerce, and is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and Canada’s Competition Act; • State laws that impose prohibitions on Unfair, Deceptive and Abusive Acts and Practices similar to the Dodd-Frank Act and FTC Act’s prohibitions; • Federal, state and provincial licensing laws; • Federal and state laws, which impose restrictions on activities conducted through telephone, mail, email, mobile device or the Internet, including the Telemarketing Sales Rule, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL); • Federal and state laws relating to offering of credit repair services to consumers, including such laws that impose restrictions on the usage and storage of consumer credit information such as the Credit Repair Organizations Act and the FCRA; • Federal and state laws and regulations relating to data privacy and security, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which impact how we collect, use, store, share and otherwise process personal information of consumers and other individuals; • Recent state laws regulating data privacy and security such as the CCPA; and • Foreign laws and regulations relating to data privacy and security, such as the UK General Data Protection Regulation, the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679, each of which regulates our collection, processing, disclosure and other use of data relating to identifiable living individuals (personal data). Available Information We maintain an investor relations website at the following address: https://investors.nerdwallet.com . The information on our investor relations website is not incorporated by reference in this report. We make available on or through our investor relations website certain reports and amendments to those reports that we file with or furnish to the SEC in accordance with the Exchange Act. These include our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and our Current Reports on Form 8-K. We make this information available on our investor relations website free of charge as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file the information with, or furnish it to, the SEC. The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at the following address: https://www.sec.gov . 13 Table of Contents In addition, we routinely post on our investor relations website news releases, announcements and other statements about our business and results of operations, some of which may contain information that may be deemed material to investors. Therefore, we encourage investors to monitor the https://investors.nerdwallet.com website and review the information we post on that page.