Moneysupermarket fills its tills

Mr Lewis's agreement to become executive chairman of MoneySavingExpert.com gave him licence to sell 9m of the shares he received from the sale of the company to Moneysupermarket.com in 2012. A foundation to which he donated 4.3m shares also cashed in its chips. The share sales dealt another blow to market sentiment; Ofgem recently requested information from Moneysupermarket.com as part of a collusion investigation.

But sales rose in all three segments of the flagship Moneysupermarket.com website, as more customers logged on to compare the best deals on credit cards and current accounts, motor insurance and utilities. Combined with buoyant demand for travel savings and a sharp rise in profits from MoneySavingExpert, that drove the group's adjusted operating profit up 28 per cent to £50.8m.

Management invested a further £8m to improve data usage, build a new aggregation engine, personalise the group's websites and make them easier to use on all platforms. The upshot was a 5 per cent rise in average monthly unique visitors to 24.2m, and higher gross margins as more consumers connected directly to the websites.

Broker Canaccord Genuity raised its full-year EPS forecasts to 14p, from 12.2p in 2014.