Freelancer Limited

Hello and welcome to the Freelancer Limited full year of 2025 financial results. Apologies for the half an hour delay in getting going. We had some technical difficulties here in the conference room. Not sure what happened. We had a board meeting here last night and overnight the machine fried itself. So we've managed to sort that out and I do apologise for the waiting and we'll get going now. With me in the room today, I have Chief Financial Officer Neil Katz, Vice President of Products Andrew Bateman, August PR from escrow.com, and Mus from LoadShift. Today, this is the full year of 2025 financial results as we operate in a calendar year, and I'll get going. Financial highlights, the group gross marketplace volume, which is cash to the business, was $881.5 million, which is down 7.1% in FY24. The friends of GMB was up 2.3% at $133.4 million. Escrow was $748.1 million, down 8.6%. Group revenue was up 4.1% versus the full year 2024 at $55.3 million. Freelancer revenue was up slightly at $40.9 million. And escrow.com set an all-time record of $12.3 million, up 18.8%. We recorded an all-time record net profit up to tax of $2.2 million, which is up from a small loss in the prior year. Estro just completed its fifth year of consecutive profitability and is paying tax and going to its sixth year of profitability. And with low chips, we also achieved a maiden four-year profit. We also achieved an all-time record operating profit, excluding unrealized FX, of $2 million, which is up 162%. Operating cash flow was a positive $7.7 million, up 32% on PCP. Cash flow was $0.5 million versus $0.8 on PCP, but also included a net of $1.5 million in buyback of blockchain. to 73.4%. Cash-to-cash equivalence was $22.9 million, down 11.9% on the half year, but flat on the prior year, and so forth. So we achieved a significant turnaround in profitability. quarterly calls that my goal was to do half a million a month of operating profit consistently. We're about two-thirds of the way there. We have a little way to go, but we're working hard on both the revenue side of the business and also on the cost side of the business. We had a pretty decent cash flow of the business at $7.7 million. I said before, up 33%. And we decided to increase our stake in load shift. I think this year for load shift is going to be a pretty transformational year, as I'll describe a bit later on. So our ownership has been increased to 73.4%. Freelancer is working hard to build the Amazon services. There are many companies out there that are global marketplaces of products that are very large in terms of scale and scope, the likes of your Amazons, your Alibabas, and to an extent Shopify, which is a marketplace of products. We're trying to do that for services, and we're in the fields of labor payments and freight. We have over 90 million registered users across all our portfolio of businesses. Freelancer is the largest cloud workforce in the world. Escrow is the world's largest online escrow company, which facilitates and secures live baby payments. And LoadShift is Australia's largest heavyweight freight marketplace. And so we have services that meet the needs of consumers right up to very, very large organizations. For the core marketplace in FY25, we onboarded 7.32 million new users and 666,000 new projects were added to the marketplace. The average project size continued to decline and averaged at US$413, up 19.4%. And the sustained expansion average project size reflects on going shift towards higher value, more complex work across the platform and also our targeting of our customer acquisition programs. Liquidity is very strong and, in fact, in many areas we're doing some work, which we'll explain a bit later, to temper some of the liquidity because it is very, very high and nowhere else in the world is as liquid as we are for getting work done. On average, you get 54 people bidding on your project, which is up 8% on PCP, and contests have exploded to a fairly ridiculous step, 161 entries per contest, which is up 50%. So you can see here that really since 2020 we've had a trend up in average project size and that's across both the freelancer and the low-chip business. In terms of acquisition, in the fourth quarter we saw a slight decline in year-on-year performance driven by a decrease in the SEO channel. We've actually rectified that and it's bounced back down in Q1. Volume from SEM is at record levels as of right in the report and a relatively stable return on investment. We're starting to see a lift in AI-related jobs in the marketplace, and it's still at an early stage, but it is lifting. It's starting to contribute to GMB. It's about 5% of total marketplace volume in the marketplace. As I said before, I think we're in probably the third phase of transition of business thanks to the internet or transformation thanks to the internet. In 1994 to 1995, you had the internet go mainstream in Western economies and that led to businesses going online. For that, they got web development done as they wanted their presence to be built out on the internet. We then had mobile phones get deployed, and you had app development, and now with AI, you have AI development. And there's a whole range of features and functionality, not the least of which being AI agents, but also using AI to personalize workflows and accelerate productivity. And we do think, as I've foreshadowed, very big category in the time to come. You get out of the same place to get your AI developed, that you get your website developed and your app developed, which is, you know, small individual freelancers, small agencies, large agencies, and very, very large service-providing organizations, and we aggregate all of them on Freelancer. The shift with AI is creating a powerful two-sided effect in the marketplace. We're getting... an increase in new AI-related jobs from clients, but also freelancers have listed their skills quite dramatically through using AI tooling. We think the killer combination is humans with AI, and, you know, certainly the freelancers are probably one of the largest on our site, probably one of the largest and most active users of AI out there, with that 90 million people rapidly adopting tooling and lifting in speed, quality, and artwork. And so we think this is a great structural enhancement to the value of our marketplace, the competitiveness of the freelancers, and the scalability of our model. We're seeing work coming quicker, we're seeing higher quality work, and we're seeing that across the whole breadth of skills that we have available in the marketplace. In early January, we successfully launched, as we talked about in previous quarters, not just audio and video calling, but client-initiated audio and video calling now. before you award the job to a freelancer. So you can post your job, get your bids in, and talk to some of the top freelancers over audio and video prior to awarding. We've managed to do that successfully because we have a real-time data science pipeline which does real-time analysis on those conversations to ensure that we don't have off-signing, et cetera. And so as a result, this functionality is great, not just for clients to interact with the freelancers before they make their selection, revenue there on the freelancer side. We've also managed to automate our project review using both AI and our data science pipeline called Iris. We used to have all the listings on both Freelancer and LoadShift go through human review before they went live in the marketplace. We've now managed to pretty much almost fully automate that, which has led to a lift in conversion as projects go a lot quicker and don't go through delays. Our focus in the first quarter will be to continue introducing AI into the primary job posting funnel. We're focusing not on the very top of funnel at this point in time. We're focusing more on the bidding process and to match talent more effectively in counter bid spam. Because, you know, we're in a world of AI now, Any form of user-generated content out there can be enhanced through AI submissions, and so we're really now focusing on ensuring that the bids that are coming in are true representations of the freelancer's skills and experience, and that very, very quickly we can make recommendations, we can annotate the bids coming in to provide what freelancers or platform thinks about the freelancers, and to ensure that the bids are accurate on the freelancer side. We're also working on improving our payments infrastructure. In the first quarter as well, we've also now launched a prototyper. This is our AI-powered collaborative whiteboard, enables clients and freelancers to basically prototype ideas in real time, and also what we call make it real and generate code to interpret those drawings and turn them into software with one click. So you start with a blank canvas, you sketch out your concepts using whiteboard tools, traditional things like sticky notes, annotations, images, and more. And then with clicking the Make It Real button, we transform those wireframes into clickable interactive prototypes with no coding required. And so we can... conversations with actual visual collaboration, and it provides freelancers clarity early on and clients clarity in terms of where their building is going. So I think that's pretty cool, and there are a lot of different directions that this can head in the future. And of course, all this stuff is powered by the mainstream foundational models. So we plug into, you know, OpenAI and Claude, et cetera, powering this back end as well. So that we always keep up to date with all the latest advances in model technology. We remain to be the number one profitability platform in the world in terms of freelancing and cloud work. We're rated now 4.5 excellent on Trustify from 18,000 reviews, 4.7 on SiteJob for our 20,000 reviews. Yet again, we maintain our number one position and we've won awards that have celebrated that from those review sites. Our enterprise division continues to work to expand its client base and operational infrastructure. We launched concierge services for premium customers and established a Bangalore office to drive sales and operations in that region. It's very clear to us that India is the body shop to the world, and every BPO there and every large major tech company has operations there, and that's the place that they source talent, and all those BPOs don't have breadth and the depth of talent that we have. across geographies and niche skill sets. So our engagements span technology, business services, financial services, education, We're marshalling very large fleets of people to work in everything from AI to field services to sales to so forth. And over the course of this year, we'll probably be making a couple of announcements about that. And so we're really focusing on FY26 on deep pools of repeatable work and workflows. And I think we're pretty excited to, hand in hand with our office, be building out some features in the enterprise product over the course of this year to enable it to happen on a scale. Now, second half of last year, the Bangalore office started as a sales office and operational office to service enterprise demand and global fleet across India. We've got good momentum and a good pipeline. We're pretty excited about the pipeline of opportunities we've got, and that's headed up by Gerard Christopher, who has worked for us for a couple of years on engagements such as the Gillette Packard engagement. Generally, our work continues throughout the year with projects across a variety of different languages, transcriptions, image collection, going to locations, collecting data for surveys, collecting data for going into foundational model training, et cetera. We've also got a new company where we're doing field service repairs of laptops. There's a picture there of a new company brand of laptop that we're repairing in Kolkata. And the priority for F226 is to really double down on the office, scale up the delivery volumes and scale into the North American markets. On the innovation front, over the course of FY25, we've announced previously that we are a joint winner of NASA's upscaled 10-year, $475 million US Noise 3 contract. That contract is a big upscaling of Noise 2, which we were also a winner of, which went from $75 million to $125 million. Now it's $475 million. There have been, over the course of the second half of last year, some delays in task orders being awarded and funded due to various government shutdowns and restarts and shutdowns. Task orders have started flowing recently again, and we're bidding on them, et cetera. And we're doing some pretty exciting things, everything from genome-edited delivery for the NIH. We did some work for the Orion spacecraft in the compiler technology for software testing. you know, south pole navigation concepts, zero gravity indicators, et cetera, and so on. We currently have a challenge live for detecting underwater explosive ordnance for the United Nations. We've also got another challenge being launched shortly to model the particles AI and ML techniques. In addition, our government division is progressing. We've got now, I think, a solid program that can be appealed to both state and national governments around the world, and going to the workforce. We're pioneering that. We pioneered with a few countries, and now with Bahrain, with the TAMKEEN accelerator, I think we've got a pretty robust program that we can scale up and reapply all around the world. In FY26, the key focus will continue to be, one, to enhance marketplace engagement, continue to improve user experience and matching capabilities to attract, activate, and retain high-quality freelancers and clients. I'm pretty excited about the work we're doing here. I mean, obviously, you can address questions at the end to any of the people in the room, but Andrew Bateman, who's here, and myself, were pretty excited last night talking through the range of capabilities that are literally over the next two weeks going live to allow you to very, very effectively find great freelancers, have recommendations from the platform in real time on those freelancers, do natural language search to find those freelancers and to curate the bidding lists, the directories and notify the freelancers and so forth. In addition, we have a whole bunch of trust and safety measures cracking down on bad actors. We're also accelerating our AI-driven innovation, expanding our integration of advanced AI solutions across products and services, allowing efficiency, automation, and new opportunities for enterprise growth. Our vision here is basically that we provide access to all the tooling of all the major AI tools through the platform to the freelance. So we act as a distribution channel. As I said before, we have a very large network of users of AI. The freelancers are very active in adopting layers tooling across a range of different areas, and we think we can be a place that can really distribute those products and services to those freelancers to lift their skills and lift their earnings. And we're also expanding our financial service offerings. We're really... our payments infrastructure. We're doing that in a global way to ensure that we have, you know, excellent acceptance and excellent native payment methods, no matter what geography we're interacting in. And hand-in-hand with that is we're building up quite a sophisticated capability in our ability to levy taxation. Governments from all around the world pretty much broke and they are looking towards platforms to, at minimum, provide reporting of earnings, but also to start collecting taxes in various jurisdictions around the world. We're quite advanced with that in many jurisdictions and I do think regulatory shield for us. We've already had some of the biggest trillion-dollar tech companies in the world come to us who, while they may be able to solve this problem, don't want to solve this problem or find it very hard when they do product innovation to solve this problem, and so they've come to us to basically... solve it for them. So I think as we build a more robust offering there, that could be very, very attractive to some very, very large companies. We're also focusing on driving operational excellence, strengthening... This meeting is being recorded. ...quality and performance through rigorous internal processes. Andrew Bateman's leading to a complete overhaul in the way we develop product, the way we ship product, the way we think about product, and the way we think about product quality. We're also enhancing customer satisfaction and market leadership. And I've said before, you know, I want to get sustainably 500K a month. for operating profit every month on an ongoing basis. And, you know, it turned up over time, and, you know, we've made some significant progress, as you see, with our record profit this year in the FY25 period, and I expect to do even better this year, doubling down on that. In terms of awards, we were recognised for our 13th Webby Award, which is really the Emmys or the Grammys of the internet, so we're very pleased to receive our 13th Webby and our 26 Gold Stevie. And, you know, I think it's just testament to the hard work the team is putting in ASCO.com has GPV of $195.8 million in Aussie dollars in the fourth quarter, up 3.8% on PCP, slightly down in US dollars. Full year 2025 GPV came in at $760.4 million, 8.2% down, primarily due to a lapping of a large IPV4 transaction in 2024. I'm pleased to report the Q1 numbers as well. I don't want to predict them too much, but they're up a bit from here in Q1, so we're seeing a good entry into 2026. Revenue for the full year was up 18.8% to $12.3 million. As I said before, it's our fifth year of probability, ending into our sixth year of probability, and we've used up a lot of tax, deferred tax assets. So we're paying tax now, which is a good first world problem to have. So I think we've got the business into a pretty robust state. As you can see, there's a long-term trend line, which has been continuing through the business, and we hope now to not just continue that trend line, but also to start really kicking in and accelerating that. And as I said before, punching out five years of profit and going to a six-year profit now, this is a very solid and strong business, and also very unique and very strategic in the fact that it has licensing for 55 jurisdictions for payments. We're also positioned for strong, sustainable growth with various e-commerce partnerships. Our pipeline is actually the best it's ever been, both for high-value transactions and also for sales. We were just actually going through the high-value transaction over the last couple of weeks. We're pretty amazed by the quality of things that we're seeing in from our broker network, but also, in additionally, We have quite a wide range of new verticals that we're going into, and I think we're going to have pretty significant merchant adoption in 2026, so much so that we're building a go-to-market team as we speak. We've got ads up, and in our North American sales hub, which is in Vancouver, we're building out the account management team under Tony Yen, who's been just promoted to Director of Operations, as well as... building out our go-to-markets and our activation team. So we're really trying to copy here what Afterpay did. They had a very aggressive team going up to merchants and platforms on the sales front, and then they had an activation team, which really took you to market once you became a partner and integrated the Afterpay checkout solution. So we really want to use that as inspiration for how we see building our checkout product. We continue to see strong interest in digital asset marketplaces seeking trust, fraud prevention and cross-border transactions. Partnerships include Dynadot and Connexly, market leaders in domain and IPv4 transactions. We're also continuing to invest in through the flow for those verticals. We've got some great B2B electronics marketplace. Some of these guys do very, very big volumes. One of them is over $900 million of GMV per month that they do in entirety. Now, we're not going to get anywhere near that number from them, but I think we could if we execute well get a substantial volume from these partners. And obviously when you're selling things like B2B electronics, you've got all sorts of trust and safety issues. Are you getting what you think you're getting? Is the equipment in good condition? Is it not stolen? Is it not damaged? Et cetera and so forth. We've got key broker marketplaces offering escrow payments through integrated and non-integrated solutions. Sites like Brokerbin, which is the world's largest B2B electronics database, broker site, secondhand electronics, broker forum, trade loop, all wholesale markets. We're doing interesting things in other international trade markets. We've got a Very large agricultural transaction that's currently being set up that we should go through shortly. We've got premium luxury goods marketplace in advanced stages of integration and all sorts of other marketplaces, including regulatory marketplaces that are coming on board. And we've got some work also happening, particularly in automotive transactions. New partnerships, sworn in 2025, increased our visibility and reputation. Quite a number of US sort of businesses. This is from Watchfacts, a luxury marketplace that we did some partnership work with that do fine jewellery, handbags, luxury watches, et cetera. Grid brokerage and domains, Immobilin, with real estate agents. We're starting to tiptoe into real estate, which is obviously the holy grail. At Acquire.com, we really doubled down our relationship there in the M&A of businesses and businesses from the digital side up to medium-sized businesses. And we also just brought on Pitch Capital, which is a capital-raising platform which has secured more than $370 million in US funding for startups, and now those transactions will start to go through escrow for fundraising for ventures. We also presented our top Marker of Domains Award. We published a quarterly report on domain pricing. We're actually, I think, next week, publishing our first IPv4 pricing index, which will be a quarterly pricing index, and so forth. We're also releasing next week our quarterly domain report. We did see an uplift in domain volumes. We saw a tripling in .ai volumes. over the course of FY25. And then while not a second cousin to .com, we are seeing a very, very big lift in volumes. It was up 189%, was that right, Austin? Sorry, August. It was tripling in the volume, I think, to about 27 million. So we are seeing a contender come in, and we're just going to see where that continues. The other thing we did I should mention is we completed our first transaction for straight through financing through our funding.com subsidiary. We've done over $670 million of vendor financing through escrow to date. in the domain space, and we've actually just completed our first straight-through financing transaction with a third-party financier. We believe domains offer a premium form of security well above, you know, the assets of a business because you can flick off someone's website or payments or email in five minutes and flick it back on again. So we think that's... It's a premium asset. We have a custody service where we hold things like domains for lease-to-purchase options, and we've now got financiers taking advantage of that custody service. We've also now 24-7 with our customer support. That was a very important thing we wanted to do for Shopify. We've got the government-to-market team that's being built out for Shopify specifically. We're onboarding more and more merchants. It's still very early days. We're not visible because we haven't crossed the 50-merchant platform three years ago. we will be building that quite rapidly. We needed to make sure we got all our ducks in a row in terms of our operational and service capabilities before we could really pump a lot of volume through this business. So we've really been working on that and we've been making some changes in terms of the management team to be able to support that. We're also in the process of migrating the front-end technology. It's 189%, I think it's close, 189% to 26 million to AI. We're also in the process to migrate the front end of escrow to the freelancer technology stack. That's the stack that runs load shifts. It's the stack that obviously runs the freelancer platform. That allows some very modern features. It's a single-page architecture, so it's very quick and very... Lovely to use. You've got real-time chat and messaging capabilities, obviously audio and video calling capabilities, which are not available currently on escrow. We've got AI agent capabilities, the whole framework there. We've got AI agents doing support and doing sales and operational sort of work. That will become available on escrow as a result of doing this, and a range of other features. Additionally, it will also allow escrow transactions to be available on Freelancer and on the load shift. start extracting more synergies between all of those businesses. And down the track, that will also allow us to do things like upsell freight off the back end of the sales to escrow of products, something that's been a long time coming, but with a unified front end will allow us to do that more easily. The other thing we'll be able to do is have a unified payments infrastructure and a unified identity service. So what that will mean is if you KYC once with any one of our platforms, potentially separately. You can just do it once and it'll be done everywhere. So that's some of the synergies we look to extract this year through this unification process. The other advantage is that it allows us to be a lot more nimble. We'll be able to move engineering and product and design between the businesses a lot more easily and fluidly. And so we will see a real, I think, acceleration in the product development of all three platforms as a result of unification all in the same technology stack. Low Shift, I think, is going to have a breakout year in 2026. We're obviously Australia's largest heavy haulage freight marketplace. Midweek, we get somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 loads posted on the site, which is the Earth to the Moon. And it's basically the freelancer stack for heavy haulage freight currently, and it's currently also in Australia. But we are looking to broaden it out and take that global and we're starting to do some things in the back end to enable that in the later of this year. We had record performance in FY25, our strongest operational and financial results to date. Revenue and GMV increased year on year through improved ops team, marketplace efficiency and other innovation. Revenue was up 12.4% on PCP. GMB was up 7.7% on PCP. We had an all-time record quality revenue consecutively in the third and fourth quarter, up 15% on PCP in the fifth, fourth quarter. So you can see it's lifting. 2026, I think, will be a breakout year for us. Job postings are up. Award rate was up. Total jobs awarded up. Delivered workloads were up. So we're starting to see that take off. The big thing that was holding back load shift last year was audio and video calling. You know, the big use case difference between freelancer and load shift is that the majority of the work in the heavy knowledge freight business happens over the phone and not through a desktop website, for example. So we had to build out the audio and video calling capabilities. And, you know, this year, in addition to that, we'll be building out audio capabilities et cetera, we're pretty excited about where this goes. Not only do we have audio and video calling now fully deployed, but we've got in real time, you know, the conversations being transcripted so we can assist with project management or customer safety purposes. In addition to all of that, you'll be able to interact in the future with the app, you know, through voice. So you don't have to... If you're driving a vehicle, you can't interact with your handset with your hands, so you'll be able to talk to your load shift. Obviously, all the capabilities we make available for load shift will be available for Freelancer and Vifersa, so we're pretty excited about the future of that and being able to have a fully agentic version of load shift in the future and where that's going to go. So, yeah, a key innovation is obviously, again, that audio and video calling app, which is out. We also made it, we plushed it with several rounds of improvements, which allows you to use the app very nicely once you're in a call, et cetera, and so forth. We're also... now focusing on enhanced GPS tracking capabilities. We're pretty excited about the features and functionality there. We're going to not just have real-time tracking of all of our fleet, no matter where in the world that will be, but there's a whole bunch of features that are rolling out hand-in-hand with that around compliance, around delivery notifications, pickup notifications, you know, tracking of the state of any cargo to ensure that it hasn't been damaged in transit. And really, it's going to be a pretty comprehensive suite of functionality over the course of this year, which I think is going to be pretty, pretty exciting. We've also got a number of large enterprise clients now starting to come and talk to us wanting this technology, and that – ranges from companies that do equipment hire, that do options of automotive and storage and so forth. So we're pretty excited to see where some of those conversations go and we're engaged with some of the largest mining companies in the country. So we've got some pretty solid client base here. So overall at group level, we had MPAT of 2.2 million positive. It's an all-time record. That's the smallest of last year. Additionally, we had a positive cash flow of half a million. Operating cash flow is $7.7 million, up 33%. We had outflows of $6.9 primarily. We're able to lease payments to office premises. Across the offices, the cost is coming down. In fact, I think it's next weekend we're moving into our new office in Manila. We've got some improvements. Neal Katz has done a phenomenal job every time we do a lease renewal of chipping down the leasing costs in pretty much every office location we've got around the world. And I will say in Sydney in 2027, we'll be moving offers as well, and we'll also get a reduction in our lease costs. So that's a line that will continue to tick down. As of 31st of December, we held $229 million in cash and cash equivalents. It's down a bit because we did a buyback of load shift shares primarily. We now own 73.4% of load shift shares. That's fantastic. In terms of group management, we strengthened our management team with several key appointments and promotions. bring over two decades of technology and product leadership experience. He sits to my right, and after this call, you can, in the Q&A, ask any question of Andrew if you wish. Owen Smith is the Director of Legal Compliance, an expert in regulatory affairs. He heads up our compliance team, and he's doing a great job kind of building that up and building our capability for world's best compliance and AML. Brent O'Halloran joined us as Director of Communications. He ran the foreign news desk for Sky News. He's been a pretty serious foreign correspondent for quite a number of news organisations, and he's really lifting our communications capability across the business. Tony Yen is Director of Operations for escrow. He's overseeing partnerships, account management, the global support team under Dean. and parts of payments, and he's a scientist by background. And Tricia Epp, who runs innovation, was promoted to direct innovation for NASA. Gerard Christopher runs our India office. And we wound down the Buenos Aires office at the end of last year on 31 December, which was no longer fit for function. It was supposed to be a second 24x7 freemium support team for very, very high-end account management. We've moved that to Vancouver now primarily. Instead, it was a bit hard to communicate with the time zones between Sydney and BA, and it was a little bit of a fit for purpose. And particularly a number of the functions now we've managed to automate with AI or move to Manila as well at the back end. So instead, what we've done is we've opened up an office in Bangalore, and it's a sales office, an operational office that's on the front end, pointy end of working with enterprise customers. I will also say another notice went out today, this morning. Neil Katz, our Chief Financial Officer, has announced his retirement. We've had a very, very good run with Neil. He's with business for 16 years. He took us from start-up to a listed entity. He was very instrumental in many parts of the business. They're very, very complex on the financial side. The 55 jurisdictions we're licensed in, and Neil pretty much spearheaded most of that. in 2015 when we bought it to 55. That is a very, very, very complex thing to do. And in fact, I could not do that again from scratch if I tried. And, you know, it takes five to seven years for jurisdictions to get a licence. You're then audited every two years on average by the regulators. We've managed to go through that, you know, very smoothly, albeit it did take time because it does take time, but he did that very, very well. He went through the IPO with us. He's been through the expansion of the businesses. I don't know how long his dongle chain of bank account access tokens is. We've got bank accounts and currencies all around the world that he controls and manages and all the treasury function and so forth, the modelling. And so on. And in fact, Neil and I have obviously worked together, not just at freelance, but also in my prior company where he was chief financial officer. There's been about a 20 or so year history of this. So, you know, it is, you know, it's been a long, a long track record. And I do thank Neil very much from not just the Madden team, but also the Bullfoot last night and the board of directors for his service. It's a very orderly transition. It's been well flagged for the last couple of years. We have been out there looking for a 2IC understudy for some time for Neil's group. As of today, we'll be upgrading the job listing to a Chief Financial Officer search. But we are kind of well-advanced in kind of succession planning and have been for many years here. Neil's notice period is six months, so he's going to be with us to August 2026. And he's also very graciously, in the board meeting last night, offered to potentially stay on past that and potentially in the should the new CFO wishes and so forth. So, you know, from all the company and myself and the board, you know, a heartfelt thank you to Neil for his service. It's a very, very long and a track record full of achievement. But we're out there and we're active and in the process of searching for a replacement and we'll make notifications to the market in due course when we select the final candidate. Now, I apologise again for starting half an hour late on this call. We had some technical difficulties, though. I'm sure it does not happen again. You may now direct questions to anyone in the room to remind everyone of who's in the room. You obviously have myself, Matt Barry, the Chief Executive and Chairman of the business. You have Neil Katz, Chief Financial Officer. You have Andrew Bateman, who is VP of Products. You have Urs Fjall from Estro, and that's from LoadShift. we'll now open it up for questions from the audience. And if Oscar could read them out, if any are in the chat.

Yeah. First question from Ray Johnson. Have there been any tangible outcomes from the expansion of the board?

Ray asked, have there been any tangible outcomes from the expansion of the board? The answer is absolutely yes. Over the course of last year, we added Craig Scroggie, who's the chief executive of Next DC, and also Patrick Grove, who's the founder of many businesses, from iCarAge to iProperty Group, and is chairman of Catcher Group. Yes, they have certainly, there's a whole spectrum of things they've done. One is we've improved how the board functions in terms of just generally how we run meetings, what we talk about, strategy and so forth. Patrick has been pretty instable in pitching a few ideas that we're currently evaluating. Craig has been very instrumental in the execution and thinking about the execution of those ideas and how we can actually go about organizationally implementing them. I think the discussion has really lifted to the strategy and even the governance. We obviously had our board meeting last night with the audit committee. meeting, et cetera. Craig's probably led quite a number of questions of the orders, et cetera. So I think we've really lifted the capability of the board to the next level. I'm very pleased to be able to attract to the business such world-class entrepreneurs. Craig, for example, is probably one of the hottest CEOs in town right now, obviously running NextDC and building data centres Pretty much anywhere there's a square metre of real estate in a city in Asia-Pac, he's building data centres. And then Patrick, obviously, one of the greatest entrepreneurs that Australia's produced, having built marketplaces in property, in automotive and, you know, media. He's got marketplaces in Latin America. Last night he was in Panama with his latest business, et cetera. So, no, it's been a phenomenal step up, I think, in the board's sophistication and capability.

Next question from Catherine Thompson. Within the enterprise part of Freelancer, could you rank the contribution to revenue from the various areas, e.g. NASA, field services, Gen AI, in full year 25, and how you expect this to develop in full year 26?

Yeah, so we don't break them out in the financial results. They are currently fairly de minimis, to be frank. We do expect a big uptick to be coming from NASA, for example, very shortly. There's been some government shutdowns that have kind of held up the deployment of capital from the Noise 3 program, but that... We are the largest company that is a winner of Noise 3. It is a joint tender, for example. But we are the largest cloud workforce capability, and that's represented in all of NASA's presentations. On the enterprise side, the focus, we think we have a lot of work happening in terms of activity on the AI services side. We had a whole call last night with a very large major BPO that is using us actively on some small-scale stuff. The trick we have figured out is we have to build a bit of product so that we We can effectively scale these workflows up to very, very large scale. The company to look at is Scale.ai. That's a company that's only a few years old that's metaport half of for about a $14 billion purchase. We can do everything Scale.ai does and better. We have a deeper network of workers with more skills and more capabilities and greater geographic reach. In fact, I wouldn't... I would not be surprised if actually Scala got a bunch of freelancers from our site, to be honest, through various means. But we have to build the workflows. Where I think we have... somewhat been misdirected with the enterprise work we've done with freelancer is, you know, we've had pretty much every major Fortune 500 come to us looking for a contingent labour solution. They're saying, OK, we can do... We've got full-time staff in our office, we've got... service providers that provide us with contractors. We've got various HR technology infrastructure that can manage those fleets of people. But what we don't have is we don't have a contingent labour capability with, you know, gig or cloud. And that's the approach we have been taking is really to, you know, to really react to that demand, you know, whether it's a Deloitte or whether it's a, and Arrow Electronics and literally all the Fortune 500 are in there and try and build them like this capability. Now, the challenges we run into when we discovered is even though those customers pay us, you know, I think the Lord paid us about five million US dollars to build their capability, it's quite complex and it's quite custom. You have to integrate with their vendor management systems, you have to integrate with their single sign-on system so that all the staff can log in and it's got the same look and feel. You've got to potentially integrate with their time tracking system. Active Directory, this, that, the other, and then you have to do quite a large amount of customization. While we are chipping away at the product capability to make that easier and easier and simpler and simpler to be able to deploy that for any large enterprise, you know, really what we've come to discover is you've got to find where the deep pools and then automate those workflows with freelancers. And, you know, I come back to my comment about scale.ai. I think they did that very, very well and very, very efficiently in a very, very narrow niche area where they built very effective workflows, a very small number of workflows. But they did that very effectively, and then they managed to rip through there with huge volumes of work. And that's really the focus we're taking now moving forward with enterprise and freelancers is we're really... We know the pieces we need to build. We've put together a whole product plan. In fact, there's probably 80 iterations of that product plan in terms of that capability. We've got quite a number of partners that potentially might be interested in building that capability with us and financing that capability. We know what needs to be done. We're building some of the building blocks, and I'm pretty confident when we get up and running we have a workforce that ultimately is more capable and deeper and more sophisticated and more skilled that will be able to rip through that work better than anyone out there that's done it before. So there are some examples of people who have done this with workflows. They've built very big businesses quickly because it becomes very easy to pump work through. We know what to do, and we're going to do it. At the moment, the contribution is fairly small, but we are learning a lot. We're bidding on some big stuff for field services right now. There's a big satellite installation dish capability we're bidding on. We've got another partner that we started up with field services, laptop repairs, I think, and we've got some big things happening in field sales. I've got some big expectations, for example, with the India office and kind of what they're doing. Contribution right now is fairly small. We have learned a lot with enterprise, trying a lot of different things. No one has really figured it out globally out there, and I think we have the inherent, innate advantage with the largest cloud workforce in the world to be able to do it very, very well. No one's done it yet. We're working towards it. There's a trillion dollar problem to solve, both the consumer level and the enterprise level, and we're chipping away at it, but not big. With escrow, I have said this repeatedly before, and I can feel it getting closer and closer. One of the customers we're going to onboard or partners we're going to onboard will do the entirety of escrow GMV times by some multiple. There's some very, very, very big volumes that are out there in the global payment space at the high end. We have to... For example, we have a Shopify solution to go into the Shopify ecosystem and I do get asked by investors, well, why isn't that fully guns blazing just yet and turned on? I have purposely slowed that down because we need to make sure that the support, the compliance, the back end systems, the payment processing, everything is as slick as possible so that we can really scale and do so reliably. We now have 24 by 7 support. We now have done a complete review of all our AML controls and a process of automating quite a number of them. We have done a couple of team restructures in terms of making sure we've got the best And we're just getting our ducks in a row. So, you know, while that business is ticking up fairly well, you know, I do think we're going to have some really blowout years soon with escrow. But we need to get just all our ducks in a row with terms of capabilities and processes and systems to be able to cater for that. But we're getting there and it's getting closer and closer. And with load shift, the good thing about load shift is, I mean, the frame industry that we focus on is extremely chunky and It's high value loads, it's the big end of town, and we are starting to see some pretty good enterprise interest coming in. We've got a couple of proposals out for multi-million dollar integrations. that would lead to pretty significant volumes. They are relatively early days in terms of progressing, but we are now at the point where we are focusing more on enterprise in our sales process and we are out there actively pitching proposals. We've built an enterprise dashboard, for example, which has been very well received. And I do think that very soon we're going to have a pretty robust enterprise capability. So I know it's been a long time coming across these businesses, and I will be very open and honest about that. We have learned a lot from dealing with enterprises. We know what works. We know what doesn't work. We kind of know how to think about now structuring and building the products And I do think that we are chipping away at the problem across all three businesses. Thank you for your question.

Catherine asks again, in the low-chip business, are you able to say which country you would like to enter next, and how high do you think you could get the rule? Next country would be Canada.

It would be Canada because it's very similar to the freight we do in Australia. We're well advanced in our planning for that, and we also have an office in Canada. and how high do you think you could get an award rate? For load shift? Yeah. So I literally had a conversation about this this morning, massive smiling. I literally went to his desk and discussed it with him. Look, I personally think, you know, so when you have a marketplace of, you know, whether it's freelancer or load shift, and to an extent when you have... an account-managed transaction on the escrow, if you leave transactions alone and self-serve, and obviously you can chip away at this over time with better product and features and so forth, particularly with AI, you can do a lot, you know, transactions will close, will match at a certain percentage, right? And across the labour space, you know, and you look at any of the marketplaces that are out there, so I'm just talking about, you know, and I've looked at about about 200 or so financials of marketplaces, because we've bought about 35 businesses over the life of this company, so I've looked at a lot of these things. You know, the labour matching in these marketplaces match around plus or minus, you know, they're at 30%, right? So all the jobs being posted, about 30% get matched and paid and so forth. If you put a human in there, And that human chaperones the transaction, so it gets on the phone and talks to the client and talks to the freelancer and you do a bit of market making or you kind of do a bit of recruiting, et cetera. You can bump that number by plus 20% pretty much across the board. With a peak performing human doing the matchmaking and the market making and so forth, You can get up to about 65% or so in terms of the conversion on the award rate. You can burst a little bit, maybe a little bit above that, but that's kind of the peak. Above that, you have clients that just lose interest, which makes up the other 35%. You've got people posting jobs for time machines, wanting to get things done for 99 cents, completely unrealistic or unrealistic. or non-firm, you know, just trying to get an idea or maybe in the shower they want to be an entrepreneur one day and they quit the job and the next day they kind of, you know, get busy or whatever it may be. So that gives you a feeling. for, you know, adding a human in. The same's in escrow. When you put an account manager in an escrow transaction, they lift it by a 20% absolute, the conversion rate of a transaction closing, because there's hand-holding. And you've got to remember, escrow plays with the complex high-value end of deals. So some of these deals, you know, there's a lot of complex negotiations, brinkmanship, there might be multiple sellers, multiple brokers involved in the transactions, et cetera, and so forth. But you can usually bump by plus 20% when you put a human in there. On load shift, I think we're doing somewhere between 27% to 31%, I think, of award rate at the moment. The primary thing holding back load shift award rate has been the fact that most of the transactions happen by audio. They happen over the phone. And so we still, to this day, still hand out all the phone numbers a month and you kind of, if someone posted a job, you saw the phone number. So that business, you know, traditionally, that's how it operated. We managed to transform that success into a marketplace model, you know, have the payments flow through us. We cleaned up, you know, all the trust and safety in the marketplace. There were a lot of cowboy operators, et cetera, people who were not licensed properly, not insured properly. We cleaned all of that up. We now have feedback. We have reviews. We have a whole compliance system. enhanced functionality, et cetera, and so forth. But we still hand out the phone numbers. With the in-app calling, which is live, you can do audio and video calling, et cetera, it currently does not bridge to the PSTN or the Packet Switch telephone network. So it's, you know, if you've got the app installed on both sides, or if you're on the desktop experience and you've got the app on the other side, we now connect. And very shortly, we've literally got it in testing, we'd be connecting to the phone network. So it'd be like an Uber, where the driver can call you on your phone number, rather than on the app. Once we have that, we think we'll be a big leg up in the award rate, just simply because we've just been easy as it goes in terms of transforming the business model from a bulletin board model primarily to a marketplace model. I personally think that the award rate on load shifts should be higher than on freelancer, simply because if you've got a it from Kalgoorlie to Woop Woop, you have the excavator or you are looking at a price check because you want to buy it. They're basically two scenarios. I personally believe that the ultimate peak award rate of load shift should be around 85%. So I think there's a significant way to go in terms of where we can lift been just very gentle. We obviously took it from 0% to somewhere between 27% and 31% now. The next leg up will happen with the PSTM calling, because we'll obviously be able to control the marketplace a little bit better, and we'll be able to clamp down on off-siting and so forth, which we've really started to do on the freelancer side recently, and through the audio and so forth that we've deployed. So I think we've got a big leg up there. Even on existing volumes we have right now, there's significant... So it is actually a great question. You know, there is a debate for kind of how high we think we can get it to, but, you know, I think that, you know, if you're posting a load and you want to move something, the thing that you're posting a load for exists and you either own it or you're about to own it or you're doing a price check on it, and as opposed to on a freelancer, you know, some people wake up in the morning and they want to be an entrepreneur and they post a job and they realise how hard it is to actually start a business and they kind of flake out. So I personally think the award rate on loadshifts should be higher than freelancers at the current reason.

Thanks for your question. Any other questions from the audience?

We'll pause this again for starting a bit late. I'll ensure that next time we do this, it doesn't happen. We do have an old Cisco machine here in the conference room, and sometimes it's got to be reminded of its own, whether the cameras are working, et cetera, and so forth. But, yeah, we will endeavor to ensure that that starts on time at 9 o'clock next time. I'll leave it open for another 30 seconds if someone wants to ask a question. Normally there's a few people who are a bit shy who have their microphone on mute that take a little bit of time to get one in. But otherwise, if there is nothing coming in, I'll shut the call down. As always, you may direct questions to myself or any of the management team at any time. If you just send an email to matt at freelance.com, m-a-t-t at freelance.com, or investor at freelance.com, we'll be happy to arrange a one-on-one with any of the team. Okay, there is another question that just came in.

Yeah, from Doug. Doug, are you on audio? You're on mute. Just wanted to know how each of the divisions have done year to date.

OK, you're off mute, but I can't hear you. Maybe if you want to type your question... He did ask it in the chat as well.

How has each division performed in Jan and February compared to last year?

Yeah, so we've had a... I don't want to pre-empt a little bit. I think escrow and load shift have been the standouts in Jan and freelancers lagging a little bit, and that's traditionally, I think... what we've been kind of really focusing on, and that's continued into 2026. I do think, however, pretty soon we should have a good uplift in the freelancer numbers. We've got some very, very enhanced functionality on what I think is the core... thing to focus on right now to maximize the lift in revenue, which is that bidding matching experience. And I know that we've had conversations before about that, Doug. I'll be happy to go through in a one-on-one the sorts of things we're doing there. But there's a massive focus on us to really bridge that uncanny valley that we've got where it's very easy to post a job on Freelancer. It's very easy to get the bids in. And there's a moment where you kind of get all these bids in and you're kind of a bit confused about who's actually good, who can actually do my work, who's using an auto bidder, who's using Chachavity to write their bids. And we've got a whole suite of measures coming in to kind of bridge that gap. Because once you kind of get through that, you can find a great freelancer. You know, the work is done efficiently, it gets done cheaply, it's mind-blowing and very addictive. And we see that in the long-term retention curves. Once you kind of cross that valley, you kind of stick, but we've got to cross that valley. And that valley, the chasm has been widening a little bit over the last few years through automation, right? So what's been happening over the last few years is, you know, there's been auto bidding software. You've got people generating... chat GPT generated bids using that auto bidding software. Sometimes those bids misrepresent the skills and experience of the freelancer and create a negative effect. Firstly, sometimes the bids come in too quickly and you don't think they've actually read your brief. Secondly, you kind of go, well, these bids are too good to be true, and then you browse their profiles and you realise they're not. So we know how to solve that problem, I think, or at least make major inroads into that problem. We literally have seven things we're going at in the next two weeks. Yep. something like that, both on giving you an idea. We are going to annotate the bids with what we think of the bids, I should say, so give you a higher signal-to-noise ratio there. We've got a classifier looking for the people who are misrepresenting the skills and we're analysing them. We have LLM search. We have a pre-filtering step where we're separating the people we think are likely to be able to do the job from the people who are not likely, and we're surfacing relevant reviews, portfolios, et cetera, and so forth, very, very quickly, and and it should test very, very, very positive. And then on top of that, we've got some stuff that we wanted to get out last year and we struggled to get through the eight It tested very positive, plus 10% on the financial metrics. Up funnel, it was causing some issues. We split it to two, and we should be able to chaperone that out in the next quarter. So we could see a big lift there. But it's basically, in terms of the rankings, it's sort of the escrow low shift freelancer in terms of performance this year, same as it was last year.

Any other questions?

Oh, Douglas says, thanks, Matt. You preempted my other questions. Okay. No problem. Okay.

Well, thank you, everyone. As I said before, I'm happy to arrange one-on-ones. Please just send it in to either matt at preempts.com or investor at preempts.com, and we'll arrange for either with myself or anyone with the management team, and you're welcome at any time to come talk to us physically or online. So thank you for your time, and apologies again for the late start today.