Hello, 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. Overnight, the machine fried itself. We've managed to sort that out. I do apologize for the waiting. We'll get going now. With me in the room today, I have Chief Financial Officer, Neil Katz; Vice President of Product, Andrew Bateman; August Piao from Escrow.com; Mas from Loadshift. Today, this is the full year of 2025 financial results as we operate in a calendar year. I'll get going. Financial highlights: the group gross marketplace volume, which is cash to the business, was AUD 881.5 million, which is down 7.1% in FY 2024. The Freelancer GMV was up 2.3% at AUD 133.4 million. Escrow was AUD 748.1 million, down 8.6%. Group revenue was up 4.1% versus the full year 2024 at AUD 55.3 million. Freelancer revenue was up slightly at AUD 40.9 million, and Escrow.com set an all-time record of AUD 12.3 million, up 18.8%. We recorded an all-time record net profit after tax of AUD 2.2 million, which is up from a small loss of in the prior year. Escrow just completed its fifth year of consecutive profitability and is paying tax and going into its sixth year of profitability. With Loadshift, we also achieved a maiden full year profit. We also achieved an all-time record operating profit, excluding unrealized FX, of AUD 2 million, which is up 162%. Operating cash flow was positive, AUD 7.7 million, up 32% on PCP. Cash flow was AUD 0.5 million versus AUD 0.8 on PCP, but also included a net of AUD 1.5 million in buyback of Loadshift shares, which increased our shareholding to 73.4%. Cash and cash equivalents was AUD 22.9 million, down 11.9% on the half year, but flat on the year, prior year, and so forth. We achieved a significant turnaround of profitability. You know, I said previously in the last quarterly calls that my goal was to do half a million a month of operating profit consistently. We're about 2/3 of the way there. We have a little way to go, but, you know, 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 AUD 7.7 million, I said before, up 33%, and we decided to increase our stake in Loadshift. I think this year for Loadshift is gonna be a pretty transformational year, as I'll describe a bit later on. 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 on products, that are very large in terms of scale and scope, the likes of a, your Amazons, your Alibabas, and to an extent, Shopify, which is a marketplace of marketplace of products. We're trying to do that for services, 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 large value payments. Loadshift is Australia's largest heavy haulage freight marketplace. We have services that meet the needs of consumers, right up to very, very large organizations. For the core marketplace in FY 2025, we onboarded 7.32 million new users, and 666,000 new projects were added to the marketplace. The average project size continued to climb, and averaged at $413, up 19.4%. The sustained expansion in average project size reflects ongoing 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, 'cause 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 the PCP, contests have exploded to a fairly ridiculous 761 entries per contest, which is up 50%. You can see here that really since 2020, we've had a trend up in average project size, and that's across, you know, both the Freelancer and the Loadshift 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, it's bounced back now in Q1. Volume from SEM is at record levels as of writing the report, 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 meaningfully contribute to GMV. 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 businesses thanks to the Internet, or transformation, thanks to the Internet. In 1994-1995, you had the Internet go mainstream in Western economies, that led to businesses going online. For that, they got web development done, as they wanted their presences 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. We do think, as I've foreshadowed, in previous quarterly results, that this is going to be a very, very big category in the time to come. You go to 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 lifted their skills quite dramatically through using AI tooling. We think the killer combination is humans with AI. you know, certainly the freelancers are probably one of the largest- on our site, are 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 output. 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. You know, we're seeing work come in quicker, we're seeing higher quality work, and we're seeing that across the whole breadth of skills that we have available on 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. 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, you know, we don't have, you know, off-siting, et cetera. As a result, this functionality is great, not just for clients to interact with the freelancers before they make the selection, but also for freelancers to win business. That's also led to an increase in some membership 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 live 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 and counter bid spam. Because, you know, we're in the world of AI now, any form of user-generated content out there can be enhanced through AI submissions. We're really now focusing on ensuring that the bids that are coming in are true representations of a freelancer's skills and experience, and that 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 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. You start with a blank canvas, you sketch out your concepts using the whiteboard tools, you know, your traditional things like, you know, sticky notes, annotations, images, and more. With the click of the Make It Real button, we transport those wireframes into clickable interactive prototypes with no coding required. We can replace, you know, lengthy text briefs or conversations with actual visual collaboration, and it provides freelancers clarity early on, and clients clarity in terms of where their build is going. I think that's pretty cool, and there are a lot of different directions that this can head in the future. Of course, all this stuff is powered by the mainstream foundational models. We plug into, you know, OpenAI and Claude, et cetera, powering this at the back end as well. That we always keep up to date with all the latest advances in model technology. We remain to be the number one trusted platform in the world in terms of freelancing and cloud work. We're rated now 4.5 Excellent on Trustpilot from 18,000 reviews, 4.7 on Sitejabber, out of 20,000 reviews. Yet again, we've maintained 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, every BPO there, every large major tech company has operations there, that's the place that they source talent. All those BPOs don't have the breadth and the depth of talent that we have across geographies and niche skill sets. Our engagement span, technology, business services, financial services, education verticals, and we're doing some pretty exciting things where we're marshaling very large fleets of people to work in everything from AI to field services to sales to so forth. Over the course of this year, we'll probably be making a couple announcements about that. We are really focusing in FY 2026 on, you know, deep pools of repeatable work and workflows. 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 opportunities we've got, that's headed up by Gerard Christopher, who has worked for us for a couple of years, on engagements such as the Hewlett-Packard engagement. Generative AI work continued throughout the year with projects, you know, across a variety of different languages, you know, 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 brand of laptop that we're repairing in Kolkata. The priority for FY 2026 is to really double down at the office, scale up the delivery volumes, scale into the North American markets. On the innovation front, over the course of FY 2025, we've announced previously that we were a joint winner of NASA's upscaled, 10-year, $475 million NOIS3 contract. That contract is a big upscaling of NOIS2, which we were also a winner of, which went from $75 million- $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, restarts and shutdowns. Task orders have started flowing recently again, and we're bidding on them, et cetera. We're doing some pretty exciting things. Everything from genome editor delivery for the NIH. We did some work for the Orion spacecraft in a compiler technology for software testing. You know, lunar South Pole navigation concept, 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 awarded shortly to model the particle distribution of explosive devices using AI and ML techniques. In addition, our government division is progressing. You know, we've got now, I think, a solid program that can be appealed to both state and national governments around the world, around helping people come off unemployment benefits and go into the workforce. We're pioneering that. We partnered 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 FY 2026, the key focus will continue to be, one, to enhance marketplace engagement, continue to improve the 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, the VP of Product, 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 AI-driven and 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 freelancers, so we act as a distribution channel. As I said before, we have a very large network of users of AI. The freelancers, you know, are very active in adopting the latest 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. We're also expanding our financial service offerings. You know, we're really streamlining 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. Hand in hand with that is we're building out quite a sophisticated capability in our ability to levy taxation. Governments from all around the world are pretty much broke, and they are looking towards platforms to at minimum, provide reporting of what 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 that in the future, this is going to be a great regulatory shield for us. We've already had some of the biggest, you know, 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. They've come to us to. This meeting is being recorded. solve it for them. 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 our platform reliability, 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 hit sustainably AUD 500,000 a month of operating profit every month on an ongoing basis and, you know, trend it up over time. You know, we've made some significant progress, you see, with our record profit this year in the FY 2025 period, and I expect to do even better this year, doubling down on that. In terms of awards, we were recognized 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 26th Gold Stevie. You know, I think it's just testament to the hard work the team is putting in. Escrow.com has a GPV of AUD 195.8 million in the fourth quarter, up 3.8% on PCP. It was slightly down in U.S. dollars. Full year, 2025 GPV came in at AUD 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 preen 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 AUD 12.3 million. As I said before, it's our fifth year of probability, of profitability into our sixth year of profitability, and we've used up a lot of tax, deferred tax assets. We're paying tax now, which is a good first world problem to have. 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. You know, as I said before, you know, punching out five years of profit and going to a sixth year of 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 transactions over the last couple of weeks. We're pretty amazed by the quality of things that we're seeing in from our broker network. Additionally, we have quite a wide range of new verticals that we're going into, and I think we're gonna have pretty significant merchant adoption in 2026. 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 Yan, who's been just promoted to Director of Operations, as well as building out our go-to-market and our activation team. We're really trying to copy here what Afterpay did. They had a very aggressive team going after 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. We really want to use that as inspiration for how we see building out our checkout product. We continue to see strong interest from digital asset marketplaces seeking trust, fraud, protection, and cross-border transactions. You know, partnerships included Dynadot and ConeXly, market leaders in domain and IPv4 transactions. We're also continuing to invest in new verticals and providing customized experiences through the flow for those verticals. We've got some great B2B electronics marketplaces and broker networks being on board. Some of these guys do very big volumes. One of them is over AUD 900 million of GMV per month that they do in entirety. We're not going to get anywhere near that number from them, but I think, you know, we could, if we execute well, get a substantial volume from these partners. You know, obviously, when you're selling things like B2B electronics, you've got all sorts of trust and safety issues. You know, 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 also 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 in secondhand electronics, Broker Forum, Tradeloop, 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 should go through shortly. We've got a premium luxury goods marketplace in advanced stages of integration, and all sorts of other marketplaces, including regulatory marketplaces that are coming on board. We've got some work also happening, ticking on in automotive. New partnerships formed in 2025, increased our visibility and reputation. Quite a number of U.S. sort of businesses. This is for WatchFacts, a luxury marketplace that we did some partnership work with, that do fine jewelry, handbags, luxury watches, et cetera. Grit Brokerage and Domains and Mobileum with real estate agents. We're starting to tiptoe into real estate, which is obviously the Holy Grail. Acquire.com, we really doubled down on our relationship there in the M&A of businesses and businesses from the digital side up to medium-sized businesses. We also just brought on Pitch Capital, which is a capital-raising platform, which has secured more than $370 million funding for startups, and now those transactions will start to go through escrow for fundraising for ventures. We also presented our top Master of Domains award. We publish 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, 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 domains over the course of FY 2025. While not a, you know, while a second cousin to.com, we are seeing a very, very big lift in volumes. It was up 189%. Was that right, Oscar? Sorry, August. It was the tripling in the volume. Yeah ... I I think, to about AUD 27 million. We are seeing a contender come in, and we're interested 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 AUD 670 million of vendor financing through Escrow.com 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 and 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. We think that as a security for lending, 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 financing 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 go-to-market team is being built out for Shopify specifically. We've got onboarding more and more merchants. It's still very early days. We're not visible because we haven't crossed the 50 merchant platform threshold yet for that, but over the course of this year, 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. 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 199%, I think it's close, 199% to AUD 27 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 Loadshift. 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 know, 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, we've got a whole framework there. We've got AI agents doing support and doing sales and doing 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 Loadshift. We 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 sales through Escrow of products. Something that's been a long time coming. With a unified front end, it 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. What that will mean is if you KYC once with any one of our platforms, you KYC it everywhere. You don't have to do it for Escrow and Freelancer and Loadshift potentially separately. You can just do it once, and it'll be done everywhere. 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 on the same technology stack. Loadshift, I think, is starting 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 posts 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 only. We are looking to broaden it out and take that global and that, you know, 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 FY 2025, our strongest operational and financial results to date. Revenue and GMV increased year-on-year and through improved ops team, marketplace efficiency, conversion, and other innovation. Revenue was up 12.4% on PCP. GMV was up 7.7% on PCP. We had an all-time record quarterly revenue consecutively in the third and fourth quarter, up 15% on PCP in the fourth quarter. 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. We're starting to see that take off. The big thing that was holding back Loadshift last year was audio and video calling. You know, the big use case difference between Freelancer and Loadshift is that the majority of the work in the heavy haulage freight business happens over the phone, and not through a, you know, a desktop website, for example. 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 to be able to interface with the app, 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 transcribed, so we can assist with project management or trust and safety purposes. In addition to all of that, you'll be able to interact in the future with the app, you know, through voice. If you're driving a vehicle, you don't, you can't interact with your handset with your hands, you'll be able to talk to your, you know, to Loadshift. Obviously, all the capabilities we make available for Loadshift will be available for Freelancer and vice versa. We're pretty excited about the future of that and being able to have a fully agentic version of Loadshift in the future and where that's gonna go. Yeah, key innovations, obviously, getting that audio and video calling out, which is out. We also made it, we polished it with several rounds of improvements, which allows you to, you know, 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. 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. 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 exciting. We've also got a number of large enterprise clients now starting to come and talk to us, wanting this technology. That ranges from companies that do equipment hire, that do auctions of automotive, and storage and so forth. We're pretty excited to see where some of those conversations go, we're engaged with some of the largest mining companies in the country. We've got some pretty solid client base here. Overall, at the group level, we had NPAT of AUD 2.2 million positive, which is an all-time record versus the small loss of last year. Additionally, we had a positive cash flow of half a million, operating cash flow of AUD 7.7 million, up 33%. We had outflows of AUD 6.9 million, primarily related to lease payments for office premises. Across offices, the costs are coming down. In fact, I think it's next weekend, we're moving into our new office in Manila. We've got some improvements. Neil 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. I will say in Sydney in 2027, we'll be moving offices as well, and we'll also get a reduction in our lease costs. They, that's a line item that will continue to tick down. As at 31st of December, we held AUD 22.9 million in cash and cash equivalents. It was down a bit because we did a buyback of Loadshift shares primarily. We now own 73.4% of Loadshift shares. That's fantastic. In terms of group management, we strengthened our management team with several key appointments and promotions. Andrew Bateman was promoted to VP of Product of the Group, bringing 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 and expert in regulatory affairs. He heads up our compliance team, and he's doing a great job kind of building that out 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 organizations, and he's really lifting our communications capability across the business. Tony Yan is Director of Operations for Escrow. He's overseeing partnerships, account management, the global support team under Dean and parts of payments. He's a scientist by background. Tricia Epp, who runs Innovation, was promoted to Director of Innovation for NASA. Gerard Christopher runs our India office, and we wound down the Buenos Aires office at the end of last year, on the 31st of December, which was no longer fit for function. It was supposed to be a second 24 / 7 premium 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, it was no longer fit for purpose. Particularly a number of the functions now we've managed to automate with AI or move to Manila as well at the back end. Instead, what we've done is we opened up an office in Bangalore, that's a sales office and 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 good run with Neil. He's with the business for 16 years. He took us from start-up to, you know, a listed entity. He was very instrumental in many parts of the business that are very, very complex on the financial side. You know, the 55 jurisdictions we're licensed in, Neil pretty much spearheaded most of that. You know, we took from eight licenses in 2015 when we bought it to 55. That is a very, very, very complex thing to do. In fact, I could not do that again from scratch if I tried. You know, it takes five to seven years per jurisdiction to get a license. 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, I don't know how long his dongle chain of bank account access tokens is, but we've got bank accounts in currencies all around the world, you know, that he controls and manages, and all the treasury function and so forth, the modeling and so on. In fact, Neil and I have obviously worked together not just at Freelancer, but also in my prior company, where he was chief financial officer. There's been about a 20 or so year history of this. you know, it is, you know, it's been a long track record, and I do thank Neil very much from not just the management team, but also the board 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. you know, we have been out there looking for sort of 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. we, you know, 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 till August 2026. He's also very graciously in the board meeting last night, offered to potentially stay on past that, and potentially on a part-time capability, should the new CFO wishes and so forth. You know, from all the company and myself and the board, you know, a heartfelt thank you for Neil for his services. It's a very, very long and track record full of achievement. We're out there and we're active and in the process of searching for a replacement, we'll make notifications to the market in due course when we select the final candidate. I apologize again for starting half an hour late on this call. We had some technical difficulties that I'll ensure 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 Barrie, the Chief Executive and Chairman of the business. You have Neil Katz, Chief Financial Officer. You have Andrew Bateman, and who is VP of Product. You have August Piao from Escrow and Mas from Loadshift. We'll now open it up for questions from the audience. If, Oscar, if you'd 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 NEXTDC, and also Patrick Grove, who's the founder of many businesses, you know, from iCar Asia to iProperty Group, and is Chairman of Catcha Group. Yes, they have. There's a whole spectrum of things they've done. One is we've improved how the board functions in terms of just generally, you know, how we run meetings and how we what we talk about, and the strategy, and so forth. Patrick has been pretty instrumental 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 and the strategy and, you know, even the governance. You know, we obviously had our board meeting last night, with the audit committee meeting, et cetera. Craig Scroggie led, you know, quite a number of questions, you know, of the auditors, et cetera. I think we've really lifted the capability of the board to the next level. I'm very pleased to attract, 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 centers. Pretty much anywhere there's a square meter of real estate in a city in Asia Pac, he's building data centers. 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. 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, GenAI, in full year 2025, and how you expect this to develop in full year 2026? Yeah. 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 NOIS3 program, that it should start to flow. We're starting to see task orders coming in now. We are the largest company that is a winner of NOIS3. It is a joint tender, for example. We are the largest, you know, cloud workforce capability, and that's represented in all of NASA's presentations. On the enterprise side, the focus, we think, you know, 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 can effectively scale these workflows up to very large scale. The company to look at is Scale AI. That's a company that's only a few years old, that Meta bought 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 would, you know, I would not be surprised if actually Scale AI got a bunch of freelancers from our site, to be honest, through various means. 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 labor solution. They're saying, "Okay, well, 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 labor capability with, you know, gig or cloud. 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, you know, an Arrow Electronics, and literally all the Fortune 500 are in there, and try and build them like this, you know, generic contingent labor capability. Now, the challenges we run into when we've discovered is, even though those customers pay us, you know, I think Deloitte paid us about $5 million to build their capability, you know, 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, and the other. 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 of repeatable work are and really build workflows and then automate those workflows with freelancers. 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 that with huge volumes of work. That's really the focus we're taking now moving forward with enterprise at Freelancer is, we 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, 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, and they'll be able to rip through that work better than anyone out there that's done it before. There are some examples of people who have done this with workflows, that have 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. Yeah, at the moment, you know, the contribution is fairly small and we are learning a lot. We're bidding on some big stuff for field services right now. You know, there's a big satellite installation dish capability we're bidding on. We've, yeah, we've got another partner that we started up with, field services, laptop repairs, I think over the. We've got some big things happening in field sales. You know, I've got some big expectations, for example, with the India office and kind of what they're doing. The contribution right now is fairly small. We have learned a lot with enterprise, trying a lot of different things. We've no one has really figured it out, you know, globally out there, but 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. 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. You know, 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. You know, there's some very big volumes that are out there in the global payment space at the high end. You know, we had to build our capability to be able to service that. You know, we've, you know, for example, we have a Shopify solution to go into the Shopify ecosystem. I do get asked by investors, "Well, why isn't that fully, you know, 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 / 7 support. We now have done a complete review of all our AML controls and are in the 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 structure for servicing high volumes. We're just getting our ducks in a row. You know, while that business is ticking up fairly well, you know, I do think we're gonna have some really blowout years soon with Escrow. We would need to get just all our ducks in a row in terms of capabilities and processes and systems to be able to cater to that. We're getting there, and it's getting closer and closer. With Loadshift, the good thing about Loadshift is, I mean, the freight industry that we focus on is extremely chunky. It's high-value loads. It's, you know, it's the big end of town. We are starting to see some pretty good enterprise interest coming in. We've got a couple of proposals out for multimillion-dollar integrations. That would lead to pretty significant volumes. You know, they are relatively early days in terms of progressing, but we are now at the point where we are focusing more on enterprise and 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. I do think that very soon we're gonna have a pretty robust enterprise capability. I know it's been a long time coming across these businesses, and I will be very open and honest about that. We have learnt 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 product and the operational teams and support to be able to service these organizations. I do think that we are chipping away at the problem across all three businesses. Thank you for your question. In the Loadshift business, are you able to say which country you would like to enter next, and how high do you think you could get the award? Next country will be Canada. It'll be Canada because it's very similar to the freight we do in Australia. We're well advanced in our planning for that. We also have an office in Canada able to service that region, but the next location will be Canada. How high do you think you could get the award rate? For Loadshift? Yeah. Yeah. I literally had a conversation about this this morning. Matt is smiling. I went to his desk and discussed it with him. Look, I personally think, you know, Yeah, when you have a marketplace of, you know, whether it's, you know, Freelancer or Loadshift, 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, and particularly with AI, you can do a lot. You know, transactions will close or match at a certain percentage, right? Across the labor space, you know, and you look at any of the marketplaces that are out there, I'm just talking about, you know, and I've looked at about 200 or so financials of marketplaces because we've bought about 35 businesses over the life of this company. I've looked at a lot of these things. You know, the labor matching in these marketplaces match around plus or minus, you know, they're at 30%, right? Of all the jobs getting posted, about 30% get matched and paid, 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 know, 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%, you know, 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 know, you have clients that just lose interest, you have, yeah, which makes up for the other, you know, 35%. You've got people posting jobs for time machines, you know, wanting to get things done for $0.99, you know, completely 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 post a job, and the next day they kind of, you know, get busy or whatever it may be. That, that gives you a feeling for, you know, adding a human in. The same as in Escrow. When you put an account manager in an Escrow transaction, they lift it by a 20% absolutely the conversion rate of a transaction closing because there's hand-holding. You've got to remember, Escrow plays at the complex, high-value end of deals. 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. You can usually bump by +20% if you put a human in there. On Loadshift, you know, I think, you know, we're doing, you know, somewhere between, like, 27%-31%, I think, award rate at the moment. The primary thing holding back Loadshift award rate has been the fact that most of the transactions happen by audio. They happen over the phone. We still, to this day, still hand out all the phone numbers to the drivers, because historically, when we bought the Loadshift bulletin board business, you know, it was just a bulletin board. You pay AUD 69 a month, and you kind of if someone posted a job, you saw the phone number. That business, you know, traditionally, that's how it operated. We managed to transform that successfully. Mm-hmm ... 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, you know, not licensed properly, not insured properly. We cleaned all of that up. We now have feedback, we have reviews, we have a whole compliance function that we provide as a layer on top. We provided more enhanced functionality, et cetera, and so forth. 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 Public Switched Telephone Network. 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 your side, we now connect. Very shortly, we've literally got it in testing, we'll be connecting to the phone network. It'll 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 will be a big leg up in the award rate, just simply because we've just been easy as it goes in terms of, you know, transforming the business model from a bulletin board model primarily to a marketplace model. I personally think that the award rate on Loadshift should be higher than on Freelancer, simply because if you've got an excavator and you're posting a load to move it from, you know, Kalgoorlie to, you know, Whoop Whoop, you have the excavator, or you are looking at a price check because you want to buy it. They're basically the two scenarios. I personally believe that the ultimate peak award rate of Loadshift should be around 85%. I think there's a significant way to go in terms of where we can lift that. It should be significantly, though, from where it is now. We've been just very gentle. We obviously took it from 0% to somewhere between 27% and 31%. The next leg up will happen with the PSTN 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 we through the audio and so forth that we've deployed. I think we've got a big leg up there, just even on existing volumes we have right now, there's significant potential for very, very large revenue growth just on the volumes we have, you know, through lifting that award rate. It is actually a great question. You know, there is a debate kind of how high we think we can get it to. you know, I think that, you know, if you can, you know, if you're posting a load and you wanna move something, that 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. As opposed to on Freelancer, you know, some people wake up in the morning, and they want to be an entrepreneur, and they post a job and then realize how hard it is to actually start a business, and they kind of flake out. I personally think the award rate on Loadshift should be higher than Freelancer, and it currently isn't. Thanks for your question. Sure. Any other questions from the audience? Well, apologies 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 a bit of a mind of its own, whether the cameras are working, et cetera, and so forth. Yeah, we will endeavor to ensure that starts on time at nine o'clock next time. I'll leave it open for another 30 seconds if someone's asked a question. Normally, there's a few people who are a bit shy who or have got their microphone on mute, that take a little bit of time to get one in. 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@Freelancer.com, m-a-t-t@Freelancer.com or investor@Freelancer.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. Oh, Doug, go ahead. Doug, are you on audio? You're on mute. Matt, just want to know how each of the divisions have done year- to- date. Okay. You're off mute, so I can't hear you. Maybe if you want to type your question. He did ask it in the chat as well. Okay. How has each division performed in January and February compared to last year? Yeah. We've had a. I don't want to preempt a little bit. I think Escrow and Loadshift have been the standouts in January, and Freelancer is 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 enhanced functionality on, I think 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 on a one-on-one, the sorts of things we're doing there. There's a massive focus on us to really bridge that uncanny valley that we've got, where, you know, it's very easy to post a job on Freelancer. It's very easy to get the bids in. 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 ChatGPT to write their bids? We've got some a whole suite of measures coming in to kind of bridge that gap. 'Cause once you kind of get through that and you 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 see it 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. That valley, the chasm has been widening a little bit over the last few years through automation, right? What's been happening over the last few years is, you know, there's been auto-bidding software. You've got people generating ChatGPT-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 realize they're not. We know how to solve that problem, I think, at least make major inroads into that problem. We literally have seven things we're going out in the next two weeks. Yep. Something like that. Both on, give you an idea, we are going to annotate the bids with what we think of the bids, should say, so give you a higher signal-to-noise ratio there. We've got a classifier looking for the people misrepresenting the skills, and we're penalizing 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, portfolio items, et cetera, and so forth, very, very quickly. In all the testing we've done, it's a, it's a huge step forward, and it should test very, very, very positive. Then on top of that, we've got some stuff that we wanted to get out last year, and we struggled to get it through the A/B testing, through, I think, four different attempts, but really smoothing out the whole sign-up experience, you know, email verification, phone verification, what have you. Down funnel, it tested very positive, +10% on the financial metrics. Up funnel, it was causing some issues. We've split it into two, and we should be able to chaperone that out in the next quarter. We could see a big lift there. You know, it's basically in terms of the rankings, Escrow, Loadshift, Freelancer, in terms of performance this year, same as we did last year. Any other questions? Douglas says, "Thanks, Matt. You preempted my other questions. Okay. No problem. Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. As I said before, happy to arrange one-on-ones. Please just send it in to either matt@freelancer.com or investor@freelancer.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. Thank you for your time, and apologies again for the late start today.