Good day and welcome to Queen Street's Fiscal First Quarter 2027 Financial Results Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. Following prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press Store 1 at any time. To withdraw from the question queue, please press Store 2. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Vice President of Investor Relations and Finance, Robert Amparo. Mr. Amparo, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us as we report Twin Streets fiscal first quarter 2027 financial results. Joining me on the call today are Chief Executive Officer Doug Valenti and Chief Financial Officer Greg Wong. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that the following discussion will contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those projected by such statements and are not guarantees of future performance. Factors that may cause results to differ from our forward-looking statements are discussed in our recent SEC filings, including our most recent 8K filing made today and our most recent 10K filing. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these statements. Today, we will be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP measures. A Reconciliation of Gap to Non-Gap Financial Measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is available on our investor relations website at investor.quinstreet.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Douglas Valenti.

Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, Rob. Welcome, everyone. The September quarter, our fiscal Q1, was a good start to fiscal 2027.

We grew revenue 46% year over year to a record $416.7 million. And we grew adjusted EBITDA 108% year over year to a record $42.7 million. We saw continued strength and broadening of carrier demand in auto insurance. Auto insurance revenue grew 42% year over year and is now running at over $800 million per year in revenue. We also made good progress expanding our footprint for future growth in that important client vertical. We continue to see strong momentum and to deliver strong results across our home services platform as well in the core modernized business with the HomeBuddy integration and

with the continued broadening generally of our product portfolio to serve contractors.

Home services revenue grew 86% year-over-year in the quarter and is now running at over half a billion dollars in annual revenue. Our overall footprint for company growth and expectations for continued strong performance, short and long term, have never been greater.

and that includes AI.

We remain highly enthusiastic about the prospects and opportunities AI represents for Quinn Street. AI is a powerful tool in business systems that drive value with proprietary data integrations and workflows and that is what we do at Quinn Street. We are applying AI across our business

to improve productivity and impact with impressive results. And we foresee much, much more to come.

We are also engaged with clients, media partners, AI platforms, and AI agents on new ways to together powerfully incorporate AI to expand and improve

The Digital Performance Marketing Channel, and on ways to limit AI risk. We plan and expect to be a critical partner to our clients in new AI channels, providing the compliance, channel integrity, marketing optimization, and as always,

Unsurpassed media efficiency at scale necessary to make them maximally productive, just as we do in other areas of digital media.

We also expect to partner and integrate with AI platforms and AI agents, providing the structured data, integrations, and workflows necessary for them We further expect that our growing AI applications and integrations will enhance our industry position as a technology leader and will strengthen our already formidable role as an acquirer and consolidator.

Now, what we do not expect and what you should not expect is that AI shopping agents will be allowed unfettered direct access to client systems.

The security risks, compliance risks, brand commoditization risks, and channel conflict risks, among others, are simply too great.

nor should any of us expect that AI agentic shopping for complex and custom products like those in our verticals can scale affordably without access to the structured data, proprietary workflows, and integrations we are so uniquely positioned to provide.

Turning to our outlook.

We expect revenue in fiscal Q2 to be between $360 and $380 million and adjusted EBITDA to be between $32 and $33 million. That represents 29% revenue growth year-over-year and 54% adjusted EBITDA growth year-over-year at the midpoints of their respective ranges.

We are raising our outlook for full fiscal year 2027.

We now expect full fiscal year 2027 revenue to be between $1.5 and $1.6 billion, and full fiscal year adjusted EBITDA to be between $155 and $165 million. That represents 20% revenue growth year over year and 42% adjusted EBITDA growth year over year at the midpoints of their respective ranges.

It is still early in the fiscal year.

We believe that there may be opportunities to grow revenue and expand margins even further.

We will continue to refine our outlook as the year progresses. With that, I will turn the call over to Greg.

Thank you, Doug.

Hello, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Fiscal Q1 was another record quarter for Quinn Street.

For the September quarter, total revenue grew 46% year over year to $416.7 million. surpassing $400 million in quarterly revenue for the first time. Adjusted net income was $29.2 million, or 50 cents per share. Adjusted EBITDA grew 108% year-over-year to $42.7 million and came in at a 10.2% margin, a 300 basis point expansion over the year-ago quarter. Looking at revenue by client vertical, our financial services client vertical represented 65% of Q1 revenue and grew 31% year-over-year to $271 million, a record revenue quarter for that vertical. Auto insurance remained strong in the quarter and grew 42% year-over-year, driven by continued strong broad-based demand. Our home services client vertical represented 35% of Q1 revenue and grew 86% year-over-year to $145.7 million, also another record revenue quarter for that business. Turning to the balance sheet, we closed the quarter with $141.5 million of cash and net debt of $10 million. We continue to have a rigorously disciplined approach to capital allocation, and continue to prioritize, one, investing in new products and initiatives for future growth and margin expansion, two, accretive acquisitions, and three, share repurchases at attractive levels. Right now, our priorities are to invest in a wide range of attractive growth initiatives and in our active acquisition pipeline. We believe that using cash for growth initiatives, margin expansion, and Accretive Acquisitions are likely the best drivers of long-term shareholder value. All that said, we will remain flexible in allocating our capital as opportunities and markets change. And we certainly believe that our shares are trading at a significant discount given our numbers and the value we are creating. As we look ahead into Q2, I'd like to remind everyone of the seasonality characteristics of our business. as I do every year at this time. The December quarter, our fiscal second quarter, typically declines sequentially. This is due to reduced client staffing and budgets during the holidays and end of year period, a tighter media market, and changes in consumer shopping behavior.

This trend generally reverses in January. Moving to our outlook for fiscal Q2, our December quarter,

We expect revenue to be between $360 and $380 million and adjusted EBITDA to be between $32 and $33 million. As Doug mentioned, given the strong results in Q1 and continued momentum we see in the business, we are raising our outlook for full fiscal year 2027. We now expect full fiscal year 2027 revenue to be between $1.5 and $1.6 billion. The full fiscal year adjusted EBITDA to be between $155 and $165 million. And we believe that there may be opportunities to grow revenue and expand margins even further, and we will continue to refine our outlook as the year progresses. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you, and ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press the star followed by the number two. With that, your first question comes from the line of Jason Creyer with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, guys. Really great quarter. Nice work.

Thank you, Jason.

So, Doug, you'd mentioned, you know, being a critical layer in AI channels. Wanted to see if you can break that down further. And I'm kind of thinking about this from the perspective of the role you play today in AI with AI platforms and what you think that role evolves into over the next few years.

Yeah, Jason, I think it's an extension of what we do today in all digital media channels. We provide our clients with what I call a control layer that allows them to access highly fragmented media that combines a lot of integrations that they don't want to have and don't have for lots of reasons, including security, brand, all the things I listed, and then allows them to work through that layer to access that broader spectrum of media and a safe way in a way that allows control things like compliance and allows segmentation matching for media optimization and scaling. And so the AI from our perspective as we've been in deep conversations and integration with a number of these platforms is the same thing. Clients are not in a position to want to have integrations with particularly AI agents directly because of the reasons I listed. There are security risks. There are brand commoditization risks. What I mean by that is if you allow an agent to go directly into your system and fill out forms and get a quote and bring that quote back, A, you don't know if it's a really accurate depiction of that situation. And B, you're then being shopped completely on price. And that's something that the carriers have fought hard for good reason to resist over time because of the broader value proposition. And with other big digital players who had every bit as much, in fact, more market power than any of these AI agents have, which of course are at this point quite, quite small and in the overall scheme of things. So, you know, having that, again, what I call a control layer, but others may call other things what you call, you know, kind of a critical layer between is going to be important for them and it's important for us and we're completely set up to do it because we do it in all the other media channels and we can allow them to get that traffic, have access to that traffic and vice versa, but to be able to do it in, again, a secure way, a compliant way, a brand way, and so forth. who, you know, the cost to compute is not zero. And being able to access or the idea that they would access clients directly and have to run in all these, run their agents into all these systems uniquely to iterate in many cases a quote or a pricing and bring it back and make it comparable for shopping purposes is beyond formidable from a cost to compute standpoint. and really makes no sense when you look at the economics of the overall system and search and value to them or to a consumer in that process. But we have already got the segmentation and the integrations and we've refined them so that a shopping agent or an AI platform can go into our structured data and our systems and very quickly and very easily access the right data, access it accurately, and bring it back much, much faster so that the cost of compute and the accuracy are both dramatically better than they could have been otherwise. And so the economics, if you follow the money economics, don't make sense. And if you follow the technical requirements, they don't make sense. And if you follow the brand protection and compliance protection, security protection, from the client standpoint, it doesn't make sense. So We're just trying to, and you've heard others in our industry and elsewhere explain this as well, and I heard Orlando Bravo talk about it today and said, listen, these platforms are going to be great infrastructure. They're not going to be able to do everything because they don't have the capacity, the costs are prohibitive, and the economics aren't there to do so. So you need folks at our level that are vertically oriented and deeply integrated and have those structures on the data side, the integration side and the workflow side to make the whole thing work. And that's where we fit and that's where we are fully confident that's where we're going to continue to fit. And as a result, I think AI is obviously very promising as applied to our business model, but it's also incredibly promising as a new channel into digital for us and our clients.

Very comprehensive response, Doug. I appreciate it. I wanted to pivot a follow-up over to Greg just on numbers. And you talked about seasonality for expectations. As we look over the last couple of years, we've seen the December quarter be a little bit more, you know, consistent or slightly better than the September quarter. So curious your thought with that perspective and kind of what dovetails with that is I know the last couple of years have had somewhat of a budget flush in auto insurance. I don't think you're factoring it in, but I'm just curious what you think the prospects are for something like that occurring this year.

Yeah, you're exactly right, Jason. What you saw over the last couple of years is really a budget flush in auto insurance in the December quarter, which is completely different Not in line with the seasonality that we've seen over decades being in business. And so, as you can imagine, no, we are not including in our outlook any type of budget plush happening in the December quarter. Could it happen? Sure. Yeah, it can, but we're not going to count on it including our outlook.

All right. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Jason.

Andy, our next question comes from the line of Luke Horton with Northland Securities. Please go ahead.

Yeah. Hey, thanks for taking the question, guys. Congrats on a really nice quarter here. Just wanted to touch on the margin expansion here. So on adjusted EBITDA, like 300 basis points of margin improvement year over year and even more on the gross margin side. I guess how much of that expansion is coming from the mix shift with HomeBuddy included versus just kind of efficiencies throughout the business or AI-driven kind of cost improvements?

Yeah, it's tough to quantify the mix loop, but it's all of the above. You know, of course, there's the basic operating leverage of having a lot more volume of revenue and margin dropping into the business while we're at a good growth rate while growing our semi-fixed cost base very much slower and, in fact, pretty much flat year over year but for the acquisition effects on top of significant margin improvement initiatives in places like auto insurance combined with a heavier mix or more home services in the mix generally, which is helpful This quarter, we also had very strong auto insurance in the mix, and we expect that auto insurance is going to continue to be fairly strong. Given it was so strong this quarter, even if it's seasonally down in the existing quarter, the December quarter, you still have a good amount of it in the mix. So all of the above. We're working hard on volume growth. We're controlling our expenses. We're applying AI and other things to be more productive and efficient in the expense side of the business. We have a good margin mix in all of the businesses. I'd say it's exactly how to quantify them. Greg, I don't know if you have a better idea. I wouldn't be able to do that. We are working every lever and obviously and clearly it's having a good impact.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And then just on the auto insurance side, are you seeing any difference in spending from the large carriers versus the smaller carriers or what did you kind of see during the quarter?

Not really. Obviously the large carriers dominate, generally speaking, because they just move so much more budget. But I think we had eight or so carrier clients that spent over a million dollars a month with us. I would say that we're seeing very strong demand across the board and across the risk spectrum, if you think about the way auto insurers think about who they want to write for. So not perceptibly, perceptibly no, but I would say the industry, generally speaking, the industry is in great economic shape. And they're very much in growth mode. And there's certainly much more demand than we can fill. And we're working very hard to be able to continue to create capacity to fill more. But I don't think I perceived any big difference between carrier clients based on their size.

Okay, fair enough. And then last one, just on the home services side, I guess, how are you guys kind of budgeting or thinking through just from a macro perspective with the rising rate environment, maybe a little softer consumer, just kind of the puts and takes that you guys are kind of budgeting for going forward?

Yes, a great question. A couple things. One is we're still in market penetration mode in home services, so I think we'll continue to be driven more by our own execution and penetration than anything else. As interest rates rise, if and as interest rates rise, the effect you would likely see is that homeowners will continue to stay in place rather than move because of the not wanting to pick up a higher mortgage rate, which means that you'll see more nesting and more aging in place. Those are big drivers of our business mix and home services. If interest rates were to come down, then you might see the opposite. You may see more mobility and a big driver of home services in our mix of business is when homeowners move into a new home and they decide they want to customize it, upgrade it, fix things when they move in. So we kind of at this point, you know, rates going up, rates going down unless there's very, very severe in either direction to the extent that they affect consumer, you know, homeowner purchasing power. And as you know, homeowners right now are in great financial shape. So that would have to be pretty extreme. We kind of got you coming and going on interest rates.

Yep, fair enough. Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the questions and congrats again on the quarter.

Thank you, Luke.

And your next question comes from the line of Patrick Scholl with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking the question and congrats on the strong results in the quarter.

Thank you, Pat.

If I could follow up on AI, Could you maybe provide a little bit more color on just where that stands on as a customer funnel and I guess maybe like the testing and learning phase on getting, I guess like sort of like the profitability of that customer funnel.

Sure.

The most advanced as you would imagine is Google AI search results. Now, you know, vast majority of the searches on Google now have an AI answer, AI-driven answer as a component of that. That's going very well. We are a big participant in SEM on Google and that part of our business continues to grow and the AI search results create a lot of very strong ad inventory in which we're participating and Profiting. And that right now is by far, in a way, the biggest part of what's going on with AI in the channel from a marketing commerce standpoint. The second place would be the promise and the development, I think, of the AI platforms most prominently, of course, ChatGPT or OpenAI. They have an ad platform now. They continue to iterate it. We're integrated with it virtually, I think, on all of our verticals, and we're working closely with them. It is not that big yet for anybody, and it's not nearly yet as productive or effective as what Google has, of course. Google's been doing this a very long time. But they're working their way up the curve, and they're working their way up the curve very rapidly, and they have a good, strong user base. We expect them to continue to grow at very strong rates in terms of both their volume and their effectiveness. We are committed and close with them in terms of being a part of that platform and making sure that we are able to capture and make productive that channel and their platform. and their user base for our clients. Super important. We think it's going to be huge. It's not huge yet, but I think it's on the journey there. It's going to take a while, but they're on that journey.

It's a big, complicated ecosystem.

The third place, I guess, would be agents and some of the, you know, like Muse, for example. We think some of them, while there have been enough, they're even much, much smaller, of course, than, say, the OpenAI ad platform at this point. You really just have the free versions that are going to be that active. They're the only ones that are ever going to be big in scale, by the way. I don't think you're going to have huge consumer adoption of paid agents for shopping for things like insurance visits. really doesn't make sense at big scale economically. But those are going to be important as well. They're going to be a part of the ecosystem. And it's going to be, and we think that, again, it will be eventually a big channel with big opportunity for our clients to integrate with and engage with very, very early at this point. And you've heard from others in our industry and you've heard and read that a lot of clients are blocking the agents. And they're blocking the agents for all the reasons I talked about. Listen, there's just too much security risk, compliance risk, brand commoditization risk, channel conflict risk. There's just risk after risk after risk. But over time, and today that channel, the agent channel from a consumer shopping standpoint is tiny for our verticals. But over time, the agents, and folks like us who can give them a gateway that solves that long list of risks for our clients will develop and evolve. And that's going to be a meaningful channel. And we are in very active discussions with a number of them about how that would work. And we have gotten, for all the reasons we knew and all the reasons that would push them to someone like us, like the fact that they get blocked, very productive, promising discussions and are moving forward on a couple that I think we will have a real role in. And over time, I think we'll have a role in all of them for our clients. So that's kind of how I would think about the current landscape or ecosystem of AI in the marketing channel in our verticals.

Okay. Thank you. And then maybe sort of related like on the other financial services side, I guess, Steve, maybe just talk about how like the current Macro environment is shaping up for those verticals. And, you know, I guess that was actually the vertical I was seeing most frequently of blocking the AI agents. I was kind of curious how they, if they said that you're, you know, integrating with some of the AI channels across your verticals, how they value that type of traffic or if it's kind of just, again, just another consumer funnel since it's not an agent.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand. In terms of the other financial services verticals, very same story in terms of kind of how we, the outlook for AI and in terms of how they think about the AI channel versus, say, the application of AI. And I think what we're talking about here, of course, is the AI channel versus applying AI to the business model. Credit card is going very well for us, strong growth in the quarter year over year. The interest rate environment had a little bit of an effect on what we call our banking or source of funds client vertical. That business was down some year over year because of, you know, the rates looking like they're going down, they're looking like they're going up. You know, we had some pauses of budgets as people tried to figure out what product made sense, which is, of course, has to align with the interest rate environment and Once it was pretty clear that rates were probably going up, we saw a new good surge there and a very strong growth sequentially in that business. Then the personal loans business, which is the third piece of that, other financial services other than insurance business, it's a good, strong business for us. It's the biggest of the three. It's been a very strong growth business for us over the last number of years. Lately, It's been more flat for us as we have it. I think I said this on previous calls. We're really focused more on a couple of things in that business. We're retooling it to have a higher quality revenue in terms of its sustainability and margins and a broadening of that business. We're actually really narrow now. We do about $100 billion in it, but it's a really narrow footprint. We think it could be, and I'm not exaggerating, we think it could be five to ten times that footprint. and we're working on that and I'm very excited. Again, we had good strong sequential growth in that business this quarter again and have a new leadership team in there with a lot of experience building these kinds of businesses and taking it to the next level. So I think you'll hear a lot more about that business, what we call our AM1 business in coming quarters and years as we aggressively expand that. But in terms of their interplay with AI, very similar story. in terms of the channel dynamics as we just talked about more broadly.

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Pat.

And your next question comes from the line of Navid Khan with B Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Thanks a lot.

I think you said, you know, in talking about Google, you mentioned they're doing a great job with their AI mode and the leads you get from them are good. But maybe just talk a little bit about, is it straight off between volume versus quality, meaning the quality of the leads you get from AI mode? maybe a lot higher, maybe the volume is not that much, maybe just help us clarify with that. And the other question I have is just on the sort of M&A pipeline and broadly how does that look and some of the conversations you're having today with respect to things like valuation and such, thanks.

You bet, Naveed. Generally speaking, the quality of what we're gaining out of the kind of Gemini-driven search results on Google is as good or better than we've ever seen out of Google search. Obviously, there's very high-intent traffic. And very often, and I think this may be what you're alluding to, Navid, very often in an AI format, the consumer will ask follow-up questions to clarify and narrow and refine their queries. and as they do that, it gets even more high quality. And that's something I think that folks are seeing, we and others are seeing on the OpenAI platform as well, by the way. It's very, very promising in terms of the further refinement, which for us equates to further qualification of consumers as they come through those platforms. Volume-wise, that SEM for us in the Gemini and many more. for a non-paid basis. And that business is in a Gemini format search. There are very, very few clicks. We know people in that world, of course, because we grew up with that world around us and have partnered with them historically. And it's not unusual for those types of web properties to have their volumes down 80% to 90%. But that doesn't affect us because we're really not driven by SEO It's something we had de-emphasized over a decade ago and just not a material part of our mix. So volume for us is good and up because SEM campaigns in the search results, the ad search results, have a lot of opportunities for great ad programs in SEM, search engine marketing programs, and we are a big participant there. And quality is as good or better and the more consumers refine their search, the better the quality gets.

So that's kind of how I would characterize that.

On the M&A front, strong pipeline, active pipeline, you will see when we file our queue in a week or so, a little less than a week, sorry, that there was a subsequent event to the quarter where we did make an acquisition, a home services acquisition that we're very excited about, smaller than, much smaller than HomeBuddy. This one totals to somewhere around high single-digit millions and then an opportunity for the seller to maybe double that over time with earnouts, just like we did the ABM acquisition. But a very good add-on to our product suite in home service is called Get the Referral, which is a platform that had already sold into a number of the larger contractor clients that we serve and that we think we can roll out across the contractor base. It really leverages up. What we do for our clients in customer acquisition and allows them to manage and make productive referrals from their existing customer base, hopefully most of which we help deliver to them. So we like to get the referral acquisition. Again, you'll see that in the queue as a subsequent event. Pipeline broadly is strong, both from a there are proactive customers things we're looking at where we have identified strategic priorities add on to certain of the verticals and we're working through those pipelines and are pleased with what we're getting done there and also opportunistically we're a known acquirer in these verticals of course and we have had some inbound of some very interesting and very attractive opportunities and and, again, most prominently right now in home services. And as I think I've said in other calls, our priorities right now are, well, we'll look at acquisition opportunities across the performance marketing spectrum and particularly in our current verticals, of course. Our priorities right now are to add on to the home services platform and potentially a couple of our other newer vertical platforms. So,

Very strong, very active, and already had, you know, again, a good success and get the referral very recently. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, Naveed.

All right. Thank you. And that concludes our question and answer session. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join Queen Street's earnings call. Replay information is available on the earnings press release issued this afternoon. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.