The news: LendingTree, an online financial services marketplace, announced Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings last week.

The company reported $319.7 million in revenues and net income of $144.7 million. The consumer and insurance segments drove revenues and profit, while LendingTree’s home lending business lagged.

Zooming out: LendingTree, which started as a mortgage-comparison marketplace in the 1990s, has expanded from mortgage resales into a financial-services shopping platform that also includes personal and business loans, credit cards, savings accounts, and insurance. The platform matches customers with offers from financial institutions and insurance carriers.

Digging into the data:

• Insurance was the primary revenue driver, and it keeps growing. Insurance revenues were $214.6 million, up 25% YoY. Profit was virtually flat at $48.1 million.
• The consumer segment was the primary profit driver. It’s also growing quickly: In 2025, consumer revenues were $68.6 million, up 23% YoY. Profit was up 24% YoY to $35.0 million.
• Home lending weakened due to primary mortgage originations. Its $36.2 million in revenues, half of consumer and less than a fifth of insurance, was up 6%. Its $10.4 million profit was an 11% YoY decline.

Trendspotting: On the earnings call, management argued against the idea that large language models (LLMs) could disintermediate LendingTree’s marketplace, but they’re thinking about how to take advantage of LLMs and agentic AI.

Management noted that genAI-enabled tools are important to increase traffic. They’re tracking website visits from AI platforms and planning how to stay visible as search moves toward conversational interfaces and the value of traditional SEO declines.

Other financial marketplaces have jumped into genAI-based shopping. Experian, for example, launched an auto insurance comparison app inside OpenAI’s ChatGPT that lets users ask questions, review coverage options, and compare estimated rates from more than 35 carriers. Insurify introduced a similar ChatGPT app for auto insurance.

Implications for banks: Web-based marketplaces used to be a way banks could widely distribute their financial products. With genAI, that distribution strategy is changing. The marketplace model still holds, but as the way consumers shop changes, the interface for marketplaces will too. Static product comparison pages are on their way out.