Freelancer Ltd

ASX:FLN

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Robert Barrie, executive]

Welcome to the Freelancer Limited First Half 2022 Financial Results Presentation. My name is Matt Barrie, and I'm the Chief Executive of Freelancer Limited. With me here today, I've got Neil Katz, who's the Chief Financial Officer; Shaun McMeeken, who's the Vice President of Sales; and Hector Perez-Nieto, who is the Head of Marketing for the business. As always, you may direct questions to myself or any of the executives in the Q&A, which will happen after the update.

So moving to the results. Freelancer Limited delivered a record first half 2022 gross payment volume of $652 million, up 15.2% on pcp or USD 471 million, up 7.8%. The Freelancer GMV was $64.7 million, down 4.8% on pcp or USD 46.6 million, down 11%. Escrow GPV was $564 million, up 18.7% on pcp or $407.2 million, up 11.1%, which is a record first half -- all-time record first half GPV per escrow.

The group net revenue was $29.2 million, which is also a record first half result, up 5.1% on pcp or USD 20.9 million, down 2.1%. Freelancer revenue was $23.5 million, up 3.4% or USD 16.9 million, down 3.6% and Escrow revenue was 5.7%, up 12.8% on pcp or USD 4.1 million, down 4.2%. We had tailwind of 6.8%. On the currency in the period, approximately 74% of our group revenues in U.S. dollars, 7% in Australian dollars and we had net operating -- positive operating cash flow of $2.3 million in the first half. And ended with cash and cash equivalents of $31.7 million, which is flat on pcp.

Escrow ended the quarter with a big jump in off-balance sheet cash of 42.6% (sic) [ $42.6 million ] up $11.6 million or 38% on the previous corresponding period.

Now Freelancer Group consists of multiple businesses. We're trying to build the Amazon of services. Some of the largest companies in the worldwide market capitalization -- global marketplaces of products, we're trying to build global marketplace services. And we're in the fields of labor, Freelancer.com, which is the world's largest crowdsourcing marketplace by a number of users, 60 million in about 247 countries, regions and territories.

Escrow.com, which is the world’s largest online escrow company, we've done now as of the second quarter, USD 6 billion in payment [indiscernible] facilitates in this is very unique in the field of large value payments. And Loadshift which is Australia's largest online freight marketplace at some point we'll take that global. And all our market-leading, broad and horizontal service offerings that consumers through to large enterprises require as part of their everyday businesses.

So on to the segment. Freelancer revenue was down a little bit -- sorry, up a bit, 3.4% up on pcp, $23.5 million or down 3.6% and USD 16.9 million. The GMV was $64.7 million, down 4.8% on pcp or USD 46.6 million, down 11%.

We talked about the previous quarters in terms of paid marketing. We've got that under control in the first half. We really focused our intention in getting new predictive modeling for search and marketing. Volume was restored in the first half. And in the second half, we really focused on optimization and profitability of the campaigns. So we had increase in spend of the first half of marketing, I'll talk about a little bit later in the earnings and so forth.

But we've also been focusing on optimization. And from here, I think we've got a very solid foundation in terms of the future. So I'm glad that we've got that under control. We also reached a high average revenue per user in the channel, got some updating of this in the period. And the campaign costs, you can see that kind of went up in the first quarter and kind of came down in the second quarter as we really drove through those optimizations with the new predictive modeling and basically active management of the campaigns.

Also, we've done -- we've got some pretty good technical results on the [ sectional ] optimization in terms of customer acquisition. If you go to Google Search console all the numbers are trending in the right direction. So with the impressions you can see here that fairly strong growth just organic traffic in the quarter. So in terms of those channels in terms of customer acquisition, we've got some decent results.

We were now in the second quarter, really focusing on getting engineering resources to work on the next stage, really user generated content. A lot of work we're doing around GiveGet, which is sort of a paid acquisition channel where user refers another user, you kind of pay them $20 and then the referrer and the referee both get paid. That's kind of like the one true channel that a lot of major internet companies use to grow. But effectively, across the -- on the marketing side, Hector has been doing a good job in terms of getting that all under control and well managed.

On the supply side of the marketplace, added 1.5 million users in the second quarter totaled 3.1 million over the first half. And liquidity also has been increasing with the percentage of projects receiving their first bid in 30 seconds increasing up to 49% as of writing this report.

Our average project size increased as well, up 12% on pcp to USD 241. And this is partially from moving the targeting for the paid acquisition to a higher-value customers. And also there's a long-term trend just generally in terms of that number. It's unfortunate that hasn't shown up in Google year. I don't know what's going on, but it is in the report is on the ASX.

In terms of product and engineering, the 3 big focuses I've talked about from the beginning of the year, continue to remain for the rest of the year. Visual enhancements through UI/UX, enhancements to payments, enterprise features, matchmaking and collaboration and a lot of work is going on in the core funnel and improvements that we -- I think we'll deliver on in the second half of this year and also trust and safety as well.

We also launched a couple of new products in the marketplace. Quotations, which is the ability for freelancers directly to send an offering to a particular client for payments. Basically a quotation just as it works in the real world. This is an improvement and in addition to the current marketplace model where people post projects, we will bill them and so forth. Freelancer can now send quotations to anyone in the marketplace for follow-on work or new work and so forth, and we'll be expanding the ways in which that can happen.

It also provides a better way for handling payments and improved by down in payments because under the project model, basically, when you post a project and people bill on us and you award the project, it's really up to the client to see a series of payments or milestone payments, and that can be bit troubling for a new user, while the freelancers are very experience in terms of the nature of the payments they received, the format, which they received and so forth. So this is the additional capability for freelancer to receive work and we launched it at the beginning of this year, and we continue to improve on.

We also talked in the past about wanting to improve the performance of upgrades. We've been doing that. This is a good performance here in terms of revenue from upgrades to see here in the first half of this year that we've got a kind of a bit of a listing and that as we improve the visibility and so forth. And the ratio of projects that our Upgrades is launch that about [ 2.5% ] so that's also an improvement. We've also been working on the functionality of the Messaging system and made a number of improvements there. I'm sure new features are coming through.

And in terms of tasklists, this is a great collaborative feature so that freelancers and clients can basically load into the system basically a backlog of both future requests, bug fixes and potential items of work they want to work in the future. And the great thing about backlog is from a business perspective is that backlogs continue to grow kind of forever.

Anyone who's doing a product manager and engineering team lead will know that it can really capture all the things you want to do and all the improvements you want to make and any fix you want to make a to product over time. So there's been a quite a number of things happening in that front, and we expect that to be paying off. And you'll see that reflected, I believe, in the future, an improvement in the average project size. You'll see that lift up.

At the moment, USD 241 of capacity extracting in terms of work between 2 people. If you're in the Western economy and you have someone working for you either in the U.S., U.K. Canada, Australia [indiscernible] top member that particular person will probably cost you at least $45,000 a year. So $241 is also a tiny amount of work, and we believe we can add a 0 to that through improvements in collaborative tools and human-computer interaction and improve use of video and there's a bunch of video-related features that are currently live on the site, including right now, you can leave a bid and also leave a video on your bid.

And that's been live for the past 5 days, and that's showing a great uplift in terms of attractive new engagement for people as well as building their trust and safety between clients and employers. We also build some functionality to improve the way that freelancer can be notified about projects with the works, and there's been a big improvement in terms of the U.S. and so forth, which I believe also will lead to a big improvements to engagement over time with the product.

I'm not sure why this is not loading for me. These images, but I'll get them reloaded and get [indiscernible] you can get the screen otherwise might slip missing the slide deck. It doesn't let up. Okay. So there's a lot of improvements in the collaborative tools. There's some improvements in the upgrade lines, and we think there's going to be a lot of improvement coming in the second half of this year in terms of the core marketplace.

There has been a drag for the last number of years in the performance of the core marketplace. I'm pleased to say that in the first half of this year, we think we've got a very good handle on what the key issues have been in that. And we've started to improve quite a number of things in the core marketplace for fixed price, non-timely projects. And we think in the second half of this year, we're going to start to see the fruits of that. And I can talk about it a little bit later when we get to the Q&A, if anyone wants to do -- questions on that.

I'll just switch the slide deck for some reason, the Google Docs is not behaving very, very well in terms of performance there. In terms of the Escrow.com segment, we also have -- we had a record first half for that business. The business was also profitable in the first half. We had a positive EBITDA of $0.7 million. So that business in addition to doing well over $1 billion a year in volume in Australian dollars to doing $1 billion a year in volume for U.S. dollars.

We also earned a small profit. So that business in a very, very good shape in terms of potential future growth. There's a lot of upside, I think, that's going to come in the automotive space. We went live Blinker in the U.S. So for the very, very first time, you can go to your mobile phone. You can browse the marketplace of cars that Autotrader has for offer. You can select the car, make an offer on the car, you can do virtually at a price. You can apply some financing from a marketplace of financiers get offers from those financiers whereas competitors they no longer stuck at a dealer where there's only one provider and you're kind of getting really [ rotted ] because that's when the dealers make all their money, you get a marketplace of offers.

You can make a down payment, which goes into Escrow.com, which allows you to lower the cost. You can get your offer accepted. You can do [ trades ]. You can then do the title transfer, the insurance, everything through the app and finally get the car delivered. So this is really for the very, very first time you can effectively get all of that done at the same time through just your app, which is amazing. And we do think that we're going to shift the entire automotive sector over time.

It will take a couple of years, but we've obviously got a strong foothold with eBay Motors. We've got Autotrader U.S. now. We've closed and signed Autotrader Canada. And we have in development really hopefully in the second half of this year to go out to the Autotrader Canada. We made some improvements to the availability of Canadian dollars also in the first half for Escrow, which will facilitate Autotrader Canada to go live. It's now available through the API as well as through just the normal transaction funnel to the consumer.

We also enabled some improvements around vendor financing for domain names for Escrow.com, and we also integrated quite a number of new marketplaces, including quite a number of M&A marketplaces together with the automotive space, particularly the M&A space, we will have -- we're having some solid traction. Historically, we will have the buying and selling of virtual stores in Escrow. For example, with Shopify, you can buy and sell -- we're the only payment method for Shopify Exchange.

We're in flip of the buying and selling websites and apps. We are also in now MicroAcquire, which is a hot tech company in Silicon Valley that buying start-ups. And we also went into a number of other M&A, traditional more traditional M&A businesses over the period. In terms of -- I mentioned some wholesale marketplace, agricultural products, jewelry and wholesale and electronics in the first half, in luxury watches, we added both Watch Rapport and TimeCraft, and we also added in the service space cybersecurity firm. We also have Dr. Bing Rong join us in the first half, who is a former professor and T.J. Watson scholar from IBM in engineering and he's in charge of the products and engineering. So there's a [ grade ] team there in terms of the tower.

Now I'd like to just jump back to the Freelancer enterprise narrative. So I apologize the summaries in Google Docs is having a bit of an issue against playing my materials. So I just kind of -- hopefully, everyone's got access to the ASX feed, and I can kind of just go through the commentary I'll go to the presentation the only time. I'm not sure what's going on here. But there's quite a number of big wins that happened over the first half. And certainly, there's a lot of growth opportunity now presented to us in the second half for enterprise. The GPV for Enterprise was up 163% in U.S. dollars in the first half versus pcp. That now represents about 5.5% of GMV in the marketplace. So that's growing very, very strongly. In terms of some key items, Deloitte MyGigs, which we talked about for some time, they've been working at -- the work started on 2018 that is imminently turning on to our external for and for their consultants. They're going to start in week 1, and I believe that could even be today or tomorrow, it's literally days away, 30 select internal consultants will have access to everything, and they're going through intensive training and marketing with them and onboarding of them.

Next week, 1,000 consultants will go live. A week after, another 1,000 consultants that go live. Then a week after that, 38,000 consultants, which is the total number that currently have accounts on MyGigs for internal external. The initial focus of the training will be on internal, but the external will be available. Then from there, there's 50,000 in the initial target groups, additional 12,000 roughly will be added post that 38,000 being onboarded.

And they've also said that 30,000 more will be joining taking the total to 80,000 with the inclusion of a select number of consultants from India. So that is imminently going live and it's a difficult forecast of the impact of that, but it's been the combination of really about 4 years of work. And so we're very, very, very excited about that. And there's been a lot of work from the team to really get down to the final yards in the last couple of weeks, but that is literally in the next few days going live. And hopefully, we'll be able to get out something -- ASX feed on that when [indiscernible]. So that's a big one. Another big one is there's a global computer and printer company that everyone probably on this call would have a product in their house or their business somewhere where we've been reconfiguring how they do field services. So that when you log a call or you go and -- there's a website and you log a support ticket because you've broken your computer or you've broken your printer instead of a badge or employee technician, field service technician going out and actually repairing your computer, what actually happens is that a freelancer will go out and repair the equipment.

That has been very, very, very successful. We have been live in India for some time. We've just expanded to the fifth city and 3 more cities are underway. There's about 70 or so roughly field services personnel that are working in the greater network, repairing computers and printers.

In Indonesia, we expanded to 3 more cities, Serang, Balaraja, and Bogor in the second quarter. In Australia, we've expanded to 5 cities now that are live and active. We also just signed last week a statement of work to expand freelancers working now so let the Zoom and share by screening them. So we just expanded -- we're expanding to Brisbane as a last minute summer stop work. Beyond that, we've also signed New Zealand. So that will be going live in the second half of this year. And Malaysia, we're doing the negotiation for the scope of work to expand to Malaysia. So by the end of the year, we'll be in 5 countries in terms of that work.

We are also in a paid engineering services integration right now. It's about USD 200,000 worth of work to integrate our systems into their systems. So job work orders going directly to get directly injected into their system. That will now enable a big scale up of the volume, right? So India alone has 660,000 work orders a year. We're currently doing about 1,000 a month. The integration will allow us to add a zero to that number and really starts going from there. So that's happening now.

The engineering work will finish in August of this year and then the SOW will happen in the second half. And we've got a couple of sort of internal forecast on that, but the numbers should be going from the thousand up to tens of thousands and up to more over the second half. And as part of that, there's a pretty native interface that we've kind of built in terms of how that's just going to visually look for the field technicians and also to the operators.

The other things that have happened in the enterprise division is obviously the NOIS2, which is the Open Innovation 2 contract with NASA for [indiscernible] Deloitte, by the way and kind of what looks like there's been quite a bit of QA that's going to this product, particularly in the last number of months. And so it's a beautiful looking product.

In terms of NASA, we've obviously got this $25 million Open Innovation contract that we signed in 2020. That scaled up end of November of last year in terms of the announced funding to USD 175 million. There were 19 joint winners originally of the contracts, $25 million. We got about -- of the $25 million, about $13 million has been awarded. We got about $4.3 million of that as the largest company that was part of that tender.

That is now just starting to scale up to the USD 175 million back even this morning on 2 or 3 customers that was sent through. We expect from here on in, we will get both an increase in frequency of task as well as increase in size of task orders. We're starting to see that. The complexity of the work and the value of the work is going up.

Right now live, we've got our biggest change yet, which is a USD 1 million prize purse for designing of a next-generation incident response dashboard for emergency services personnel to be able to respond if there's a bombing or an earthquake or what have you. At the moment, it's very, very pen and paper orientated. So that's currently live. You can go to our website and you can answer that, if you wish.

One thing I want to point out here is that while traditionally, our marketplace has really been focused on mass market, small value jobs and that's kind of the history from 13 years ago. $200 job, so USD 241 today. And we have the consumers and small businesses, you can -- we are really the only place in the world can give super high-end work done from very, very high-end freelancers in very sophisticated areas.

So for example, this is a complete innovation change that happened in the first half of this year, which is a $400,000 price first for finding insights through data science, in child morbidity. And this was run by the National Institute of Health because NASA has now acted as a gateway for the whole of the U.S. government, and we're also finding ways now to go directly to these government departments and so forth and institutions and kind of -- and really expand on the relationships we built under the NOIS2 program, but go direct.

But in this particular case, if you look at the quality of the work, it's running effectively academic quality, publishable research papers, look finding data insights for USD 400,000 prize money and win has included a team just Club University, the IBM data science, Artificial Intelligence Elite team in San Francisco, University of Washington, Seattle and so forth. And the quality of the entry is structural equation modeling identifies causal pathways between social determinants of maternal health, biomarkers of allostatic load, and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy among racial groups.

If anyone's used any other freelancer marketplace is, I'd be very interested to know which ones you can go to and which button you can click on to find the IBM AI team and University of Washington, submitting this level of quality of work in very persisted areas at these sort of dollar values. It's really quite incredible what we're doing there.

In terms of other things that are happening in the Enterprise Division, InSource, which to generalized version of MyGigs is under development. This is basically the ability for us to go to any other Fortune 500 or equivalent global sort of clients and deploy for them infrastructure for not just hiring talent in the cloud, but also working together. So if you click the left-hand button when you post a job, you can hire someone else in your organization to do the work for you.

So for example, if you think that for the Deloitte example, someone in the New York office can hire someone in South Africa, someone in London to maybe team up and work with someone in Los Angeles. People more in the world to kind of collaborate together and it's a way to improve workforce efficiency, particularly in large enterprise. They've got lots of people around the world and we provide opportunity and access new jobs that are not going to be available in the local area because the industries that support it might be very narrow.

For example, in Australia, it might be limited to mining and service type companies, but if you kind of join MyGigs in Australia, you might be able to access media or technology jobs in the West Coast of the U.S. that otherwise aren't available to you. If you think about going to Coca-Cola going, to Ford, going to what have you. This is a way that they can unlock talent within your organization to find skills you didn't know you had.

And by the way, access Freelancer's largest marketplace -- of talent 60 million people to get jobs done at very, very efficient rates. So it's a pretty amazing thing. And I think it's really going to drive adoption and that's also being worked on, and we plan on getting that out the door in the second half at some point. We've already been [indiscernible] some of the largest companies in the world, we have got some great feedback and so forth that's underway. We also awarded a number of other tasks by NASA as I mentioned.

Again, it's going to point to the complexity of the work. One was on Shock propagation in satellite. So really, you come to Freelancer for simple work and you come to Freelancer for very, very, very sophisticated work as well and get a very, very high-quality talent. And by the way, all these innovation contest, that's how you -- one way you can build your talent pool. It's a way in which we have all the entrants into, for example, this mixed challenge that they're providing solutions to an incident response that or that can be put to a tower network now, and you can tap into that then to be able at a range of things done now that you know the quality of their work because there's [indiscernible] for that particular context.

So it really is an incredible network of talent and liquidity. In terms of a lot of things that are happening in Enterprise, you can see from the GPV growth of 163% year-on-year. There's a lot -- maybe, Shaun, I can turn it to you, maybe you mentioned some of the other names. You've working with the Enterprise and kind of what's happening in that front?

[Shaun McMeeken, executive]

Yes, sure, Matt. So as Matt mentioned, the growth in GMV, but also reflected in the revenue, the revenue is up 199% as well on pcp. But yes, that's brands that we've signed agreements with in the past. There's more brands that are coming that we're in contact with at the moment. There's strong growth.

For example, the Yara International, global chemical company out of Europe, utilizing us out of Berlin, Oslo and Singapore. We've got Adobe out of the U.S., and we've got a couple of the largest BPO companies in India, for example, Infosys and Tata. So the sales splits from the team has been going on for the first half of the year and we'll continue. The orders opening up will allow us to go and see more clients in person, which will also help our conversion rates. So we're confident that, yes, there's certainly upside with all of this activity in the market, and we predict that this upward trend into GMV will continue over the long term.

[Robert Barrie, executive]

Okay. I want to show you a few images, and I apologize before for some reason that my laptop was breaking the images and I was trying to load them up. But this is a picture of the Autotrader and Blinker integration, it's pretty neat. That you can from your phone browser marketplace with cars, select car purchase car, finance the car, complete the transaction, and you can use them everyday life. You don't have to sit at a dealer for 6 hours while they do paper work and be captive. So that's pretty revolutionary.

And I will now flip through to the freight division before we get to Q&A. And I'll just kind of show you some things we're doing there. There's going to be a lot of upside in this -- in the second half. So in terms of the freight, we've obviously got at the moment Freightlancer, which is a freelancer for freight that's just built on the enterprise stack the same stack that Deloitte MyGigs was built on and so forth.

So effectively, the procuring and service is done very similar no matter what industry you're in, in the generalized form of freelance, you post the job people bid on it, you award it, they accept it, you pay a commission of 3% as a buyer of services and 10% as a seller of services.

It's no different from the freight side. So you post your load, drivers around the world of carriers around the world will bid on that. You award it, they accept it. We charge the freight owner 3%, we charge the carrier 10%. And so we've been operating Freightlancer for some time and over the course of the last 12 months, we got onto the enterprise stack. So any improvements to the Freelancer code base happens now directly with freight.

The other thing as we did in the last 12 months is that almost a year ago today, we bought Loadshift. And Loadshift is the largest freight [ barton board ] in the country. We bought that partnership with Wes Maas, who's the Founder and CEO of Maas Group, which is a multibillion-dollar listed diversified construction and industrials company. That business is pretty phenomenal because that has a lot of distribution of freight.

And fortunately, for the old Loadshift, it was monetized very well. And we bought it, it was doing $1.057 million in revenue. And even though there was hundreds of millions of loads posted on it because the -- the model there in terms of business model was a driver to pay $79 a month and get access to all the phone numbers for all freight items.

And so one movement, for example, move a crane somewhere, that could be $100,000 movement. And for $79, someone could do that for free with no further payment other than the membership fee. So obviously, that's a very poorly monetized business. The big thing is that in middle of August of this year, so coming up in about 2 weeks Loadshift and Freightlancer will be merged into 1 model, and it's going to be a commission model. And the commissions are exactly the same as Freelancer, 3% at Freightlancer, 3% on the freight-owner side and 10% on the carrier side.

So there's quite a lot of monetization there. So if you look at the graph in front of you, intensive, but the load volume that's been increasing quite strongly over a period of time. It's been a decade of history there. In the second quarter, we did a little bit over 20,000 loads. I think 83,000 loads last year that were done through the site. Each load is about 1,400 kilometers and they're about $3 per kilometer at this point in time. So each load is about AUD 4,400 comparing to an average project size on Freightlancer of USD 241. The liquidity has built up quite well is that 4.7 bids per load now.

In the quarter, we also did about 29 million kilometers of freight. So last year, we did 120 million or so kilometers of freight -- as that represents notionally around 350 million per annum. On a forward basis, from today, there'll be probably about 380 million notional $1 million worth of freight posted in the freight division, and we'll be able to start monetizing that at 13%. 13% of $380 million is $49 million.

You make some assumption there in terms of what percentage that freight will move I think you make assumption at least half that will move. So that's probably that $25 million revenue opportunity for us to monetize, which is going to start happening as of 2 weeks from now. And so I think the ability for this to really start doing all of revenue quite quickly is there. And it's really -- we don't have to have a sales team go chase loads they do execute very, very well and I'll show you an example of what they've done in the last half.

But we've got loads just there and we just need to convert them. And of course, we're providing a much higher quality, more value-added service in return to that commission because before it's a wild guess, you simply post your load and a bunch of drivers will call you up and you don't know who they are, they're better, they're not reviewed, there's no feedback on their accounts, you don't know really how these people are. After you've picked someone they still keep calling you because there's no notification 20 of the other drivers, the loads already moved. So it's quite a very basic old school experience.

The new model is just like Freelancer. So it's a much better experience for carriers. There not a load is been awarded, but I can wait for time calling someone. The whole thing is managed. There's operators who basically act as both recruiters and in some cases, project managers like copilots on the load. So the drivers are vetted. We check their IDs, which didn't happen in the past. We check their current CV, check their licenses, we get feedback, reviews and so forth. So it's a much better model for both the carriers and for freight owners.

And so there's great value in the 13% model. So there's a lot of uptick there that will have to start to happen as of August of this year. And it's really down the team to execute to see just how much of that we can extract, but I do expect a big uplift and that's going to be a big driver in terms of the top line revenue number.

I just want to show you an example of what we've actually managed to bring in and do. We've got quite a bit of expertise in the team. In the first half, and in fact, this is -- on the 28th of May, we did the largest marine movement by land in history in the Southern Hemisphere. We moved the Pride of the Murray from Victoria to Queensland. It was about 1,750 kilometers with 192 tonne payload. So that is actually quite a significant movement in terms of the expertise.

So just to show you what we do. We're not -- it's not like a little tech company, you're posting parcels on the site and parcels are moving back and forward, we can move quite sophisticated things. And this is the large transport on land marine transport in Australian history. We really in this business, Freelancer, Escrow and the freight side. We're doing a lot of stuff. We're working with NASA and Deloitte. We're working -- we're moving [ paddle streams ] across the country. We're enabling payments in Autotrader really the breadth and the scale of what we do here is huge.

[indiscernible] service in terms of what we're doing in each of these industries, and there's a lot of upside to come. And I think before we just go to Q&A, what I'd point out to everyone, just where I think the upside will be in the second half of this year, and there's quite a lot of things, I just want to go through this, before we turn it over for your questions.

In the second half of this year, Deloitte's going live. I've talked about that. Initially we have ramp up 30 consultants to 1,000 consultants, 2,000 consultants, 38,000 consultants, 50,000 consultants, 80,000 consultants that's finally happening. I know it's been a long time coming, but it's finally here, big upside there. We've got the ramp-up that's happening today in 3 countries with a computer and printer company that's expanding in jobs, that's India, Australia and Indonesia.

We're going live in the second half of New Zealand. We'll go live in the 5 countries. The integration will complete end of August, which will allow a big scale up in terms of the jobs going through the automation. And we know the numbers -- we've been given various numbers in terms of what the GPV opportunity is for whole of the repair space globally. And depending on kind of what jobs are enabled and not unable to be on the countries, there's commercial and there's consumer.

And then there are certain product ranges that we are doing repairs and they are certain products we are actually not being repairs on across 13 countries, which is roughly the number that they're talking with us in terms of the initial kind of focus. And we believe Europe will be the next countries, a couple of countries in Europe will go live after those 5.

The GPV there, I mean, I want to cast this. I mean this is a forecast, and this is not firm. There's nothing contractually signed about the actual volumes. And there's a lot of work we have to do in terms of the ramp-up there. But if you add up the volume of repairs in those countries, the 8 countries, somewhere between $50 million and $150 million of GPV.

So there's a lot of stuff there for us to go really try and it's down to us to execute and really go from -- at the moment with 1,000 jobs a month, over $1,000 a month to $1,000 -- sorry, 1,000 jobs per month. The focus is going from 1,000 to 10,000 jobs a month to 20,000, 50,000 and really just try and push that up.

But there will be a lot of work that there's a big opportunity, and that's why I wanted to bring this up and the automation will enable from end of August. There's a big ramp-up at NASA. In the first $25 million, we estimate roughly about $13 million has been awarded. We've got about $4.3 million of that. It's still at $12 million of that first $25 million. It's now $175 million. It has gone from 19 tenders to up 31 tenders, but we still -- the biggest pretty much in that group. And we do think we'll get quite enough.

And we've got a strategy of partnering with a lot of the other smaller firms because a lot of them are really small business or just family run businesses. And we've been quite successful in -- we've been winning about 2 out of 3 tasks that we've been bidding on recently, and there's a very professional government procurement team we've built out of Vancouver now that's very professional at writing these governments to the end tender applications or proposals. And we think there'll be a lot of upside from NASA in the next 12 months.

We say with the frequency and the value of these task they wouldn't increase the value of the program -- the funding of the program is 600% unless things are going right. And you can certainly see from the stuff we've awarded so far done really well. In terms of Escrow, Autotrader is live, that's starting to ramp up. We're going to be all-private-pay listings with Autotrader.

We're rolling out through California as we speak. So that there's some upside there. This is a new thing, obviously, but never had payments before. You'll be surprised to know that the most kind of classified sites in the world -- exactly that classified sites, don't know if the car is sold, the listing doesn't get renewed, they don't know who bought the car, they know very little. In many circumstances, they will just hand up phone numbers, and they have no clue who bought the car, that for of surveys and so forth, but they don't really know.

There's a lot of things you can do once you collect the payments, right? You can increase your liquidity because you just sell the car across border, that happens a lot in the U.S.. In state sales, you can collect feedback on the buyer and the seller is not reputable. You can upsell. You can sell snow tires. You get self-financing. You can sell a range of things. And we are going to start offering shortly financing through Escrow, not just in automotive, but there are other asset classes where we are, I think, very close to making an announcement where we provide financing.

There's a big opportunity in freight, as I said just a second ago, monetizing that $380 million worth of freight opportunity at 13%. We don't know how much we're going to be able to monetize, but we're very bullish in terms of what we think we can do internally on that. As I said before, is that $49 million that you included everything. If you make an assumption, only half the stock moves, there's maybe $25 million revenue opportunity. That should split our cash pretty quickly, right?

There's been a drag on the core marketplace for some time. We know now we think we go for felt what it is, and we've started rectifying it. It's been a multiyear thing. It's been a bit of a serious issue that's kind of -- and it's been a little bit hard for us to diagnose, but I think we now have good handle what it is. And we have a war room that we've created by week, we're kind of working through that. So there's I think a big improvement that's going to turn around in the core marketplace. And I know there's been a few questions investor have over there in the past calls.

And there's quite a lot of collaborative tools and features I talked about half visit quotes as a great video and easy ability of self-service and so forth. There's a lot of good things that are happening in the core commercial consumer marketplace as well. So there's a lot of upside here.

So without further ado, what I will do is I'll turn over to a Q&A. You can ask a question. As I said at the beginning, you can address it to myself or any of the other executives we have here. And just to iterate I've got Neil Katz the Chief Financial Officer. I've got Shaun McMeeken is the VP of Sales. I've got Hector Perez-Nieto on the call, who is in-charge recharge of Marketing. I also have Andrew Boyton driving the laptop from engineering, so I'll ask him a question. And so we'll open it up now. And Jackson is also on the call, well from Escrow. So I'll open it up now for Q&A. Please send in your questions, and we'll get Andrew to read them out. So over to you.

[Robert Barrie, executive]

Any questions? Okay. Right to everyone. Can you comment on how Freelancer is performing relative to its competitors? Is the pipe growing?

Look, the space in its very, very early days. If you look at how many users we've got on our website, 60 million registered users and we're the largest. Our closest competitors are in the millions of users. I haven't checked their actual user counts, but one of our closest competitors got to 20 million users. They made a decision that they wanted to really focus on sort of high-end jobs and U.S. jobs.

And so they kind of went from 20 million to 2 million, and I don't know where they are now, maybe the back up to 10 million, maybe the back up to 20 million but certainly wouldn't be in the 100 million user range. And then another competitor of ours, which is a big one in the U.S. listed look big online that's about 830,000 service providers.

And if you can make an assumption, maybe they added 10x since they maybe it's 8 million, I don't know, but it certainly wouldn't be 100 million service providers. And bunch of the freelancers are kind of have account in multiple sites. So if you add the total number of online workers globally on all the sites, I think you would struggle to be more than 100 million users.

Now if you think about could make use of freelance services, there's about 5 billion people in the Internet, 5 billion people also in the world from $30 a day less, so need a better job. And if you're not part of that 5 million need a better job, you probably need some on to help your part of everyday life, whether it's at a consumer level or the high level.

So first comment I want to say is that the whole space is gigantic and the play will be growing dramatically over the next number of years. It is a lot more complex to deliver a service than a product. A product is very simple. We sell a book. The book is not sentient. You get the book you know, it's -- the pages are all there, [indiscernible] books that often. You know exactly what you're getting.

We have a service, it's a very dynamic thing. Everyone has a profit motive. Everyone is trying to maximize their profit as objectives. You change a rule or make a change and the marketplace you have all sorts of weird things that happen in terms of unintended consequences. All honestly, I think we've lagged a bit in terms of our share of the pie. A lot of that has been the core consumer marketplace. And I talked about some of the own goals I have kicked in terms of product.

I think on top of now what has been a core issue in fixed-price desktop projects, which has been something that has been a bit of a maybe gig for us for some time. And we think we are well on top of what the issues are and now we have a plan to solve them. So I want to turn that around. We did have very strong revenue growth in the core consumer marketplace in the early days.

We have a [ 50.0 ] compound average revenue growth in the very early days before that triple digit at costs of a low base. So I think we have some work to do there right, in terms of really turning things around, but I will say one thing. We have done a lot this business on very little operating capital. We started off and we raised $1.5 million to buy a marketplace back in 2009. We didn't raise a 6% of operating capital. And we just focus on revenue growth. We focus on execution. We didn't executed very well back then and we took public and we had a very successful IPO in the day. And we were the first company to go public in the space. We're the first company to reach $1 billion in market capitalization, all those top activity. Now it's actually quite ridiculous the valuation is at right now.

But I have very much the confidence that we can execute and get things back again to -- that's the level of growth. I really do think we've got a good handle now what's going on. We've got tremendous performance outside of that in the Enterprise division, which is in the triple-digit range. We've got some great performance, as we've shown with the Escrow division over the last 18 months.

The freight division is going to not -- deploy the stocks of everyone. I think there's really going to be [indiscernible] revenue there that I think is being attributed with 0 value by investors in the market right now. In fact, I think there's probably 0 value on quite a number of parts of the business right now where the share price is. But I think we just need to execute, demonstrate that, and I think we're on the cusp of doing that across multiple parts of the business. But in terms of the core consumer marketplace, we've got some work to do. We think we know what the issues are, and we just want to work on it, right?

And the only thing that will generate a ultimately positive result in the market is execution and delivery of financials brand. All that is in my opinion, that was revenue, revenue, revenue. That's all that matters. And I think we're really close to getting there.

[ James ], you know that Escrow [indiscernible] EBITDA base, how much further investment is required to [ scale the business ]? Or would you expect to consistently profit at this point? Great question. I want to run all businesses at profitability, EBITDA profitability, right? All of them. The Freight business, I will note as of July, will be cash flow positive. So that division will be cash flow positive. And so I do want to get to a fully profitable basis across the entire group to keep it profitable.

And over the years, we've kind of scaled in and out. Some months being probable. Some months have been not profitable, and I've reported. Maybe this month Escrow has been, may be that month Freelancer has been. But I do want to get to this point that it's a profitable or permanently profitable and try to reinvest everything into growth, but keep a profit and build a sustained profit over time, a small sustained profit and keep that growing, right? Now I will note that we have very little in the way of CapEx in this business, almost 0 CapEx in this business. It's all OpEx. I mean OpEx basically goes into headcount, marketing and rent. Now in the first half, I will mention just on an EBITDA basis, we had negative $4 million in EBITDA in the first half. That was due to a 30% increase in marketing as we kind of really try to get that model executing. We did pay that back by the end of the second half -- second quarter. So the marketing costs are now on a monthly basis, approximately what they were in the first half of 2021. So there was a big boost that happened because we're really trying to get Google to respond to us. We talked about in previous quarters. We've got responding. We've got [indiscernible] on the program. And we've now got a very good handle kind of operationally kind of where that is that we have. We have trimmed that back. So the marketing costs have come back. And we've also -- on the headcount cost, we did build our head count a little bit in anticipation of big revenue growth. That revenue growth -- turned a little bit of revenue growth in the first half, but it was only a premature. We kind of went a little bit back in certain areas. We went halfway back between where we were in the first half numbers for this year and the first half numbers of 2021 kind of halfway back in terms of [indiscernible] back. There's also been a bit of cost inflation in tech that's happened particularly over the last 18 months. The tech market has been a bit crazy, engineers and so forth. I think there's a bit of a reality that is creeping in now because of what's been happening in the U.S. and so forth and in crypto and so on. So I ask you a question. Look, it's really how it was a piece of string in terms of what we want to invest in the Escrow business. There's been quite a number of discussions with various investors that potentially want to make an investment into the Escrow business. There's actually been some [indiscernible] and so forth. We haven't taken any of them. We're not imminently going to take any of them. But there is motionality, as I mentioned before, about that has opened up in terms of our ability to take money into that business is obviously quite a unique asset.

There's a lot of innovation that's happening in payments, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Facebook Pay, PayPal, Venmo, Afterpay, Zelle, but it's all in the low-value transaction size. So Apple Pay's average transaction size is USD 23. PayPal is USD 60 to USD 64 [indiscernible] same. Credit cards around USD 57. [indiscernible] double. Afterpays are USD 108 roughly. So it's all in that low-end transaction size. Now all that red ocean, where they're all fighting it out, Samsung versus Apple versus Google versus whatever PayPal versus Afterpay. They're all builds on cards. They're all either built on a credit card or they're build on debit card. Those digital wallets.

That entire space by value is only 3% of U.S. card volume. And the whole of U.S. card volume by value is only 8% of U.S. domestic payments. So the less stuff you see in the news about PayPal, Afterpay that's 3% of 8% by value of the entire U.S. market. We effectively have a very, very strong regulatory position [indiscernible] in a way the credit in terms of large value payments to online Escrow. I mean simply no one else has registered or managed to obtain a multi-jurisdictional online Escrow footprint like we have outside of real estate.

So in terms of large value payments, $10,000, $100,000, $1 million, $10 million, we've really got up blue ocean in front of us. And so what we need to do here to execute from here is 2 things. One is we've got to build out the sales organization, right, which is basically go into a series of verticals and I've got them listed here, which I'll just show you. And we've got some good footholds in these verticals. We've got -- the verticals are basically -- it's got a good presence in online. And I've talked about that before, where [ runs ] really bought a domain name to us, whether it's Twitter or Uber or SpaceX or what have you. We're building out -- you got -- including strong footholds in automotive, strong footholds in M&A. And really these segments, which go up logarithmically in terms of the size.

So ultimately, real estate in the U.S. is a $10 trillion a year market domestically. We really just did to go out there and just transform these platforms and merchants that sell these assets from no payments to the most part of payments. You can't go to Zillow and pay for a house. You can't go to virtually all the marketplace in the world for cars and pay for a car, right?

And we're transforming these platforms from no payments to payments, right? At the very low end, yes, you can pay it with credit cards and everything else where you have low-end watches, for example. But the high-end watches, $50,000, $100,000, $150,000, if you go to Amazon.com right now today, and you go type in watches and then you apply the filters in Amazon, the highest filter for Amazon is $200, it's $199. That's the highest filter. They don't want to sell Rolexes in their marketplace because of fraud and all counterfeits, more problems they've got, right? We solve that, and that's why the eBay watches came to us to basically secure payments.

Insurance didn't work, right? Escrow is the solution. So there is a question of how much you want to invest. It is a profitable business. I would like to obviously grow as fast as I can by raising money from the best place possible, which is selling something useful to customers. But we do have options on the table if we wanted to, to raise money. And we've had some term sheets put in front of us to do so. And those term sheets have got up to USD 50 million in terms of the quantum. And again, as I mentioned, we're not imminently going to take any of those and we're not actively considering taking any of those. But the great thing about this business is, it is a business that is unique in its positioning. It's doing $1 billion a year in volume roughly in U.S. dollars, more than that in Australian dollars and is profitable, and we will continue to consider options there, but we're in no hurry or rush to do so.

A quick question from [indiscernible]. What happen to Fantero and freemarket.com? Those businesses are still live on their respective domains and they're operating. We have no -- not a great investment in terms of products or engineering into those businesses. They're basically is live and operating. Fantero is basically a digital content marketplace, which allows freelances to sell logos and stock templates and other things, which may be left over, for example, from work or they might do in their spare time or what have you or other freelancers might want to use or incorporate. We think in the future that there's a big potential here. But right now, it's a very small investment.

Again, with Freemarket, it's a marketplace for buying and selling domain names and so forth. We do think that over time that there will be opportunity for us to extend that into other asset classes and what have you. But really, the bulk of the focus right now is as I kind of talked about in the results where we're putting our product engineering time. We have limited resources, and we're really focusing most of them where we think we've got the most opportunity.

Ethan Chan has got a question. There are quite a few reviews on the web from Freelancer.com platform users complaining about fake listings or bids, how big an issue is this as users are global? Do you ensure sign-ups are real users? And thank you. Okay. So okay. So on the fake listing issue. So what's happening there is during COVID, in particular, there was a big uplift in scammers trying to explore money online from people. And this is not something that is unique to Freelancer. This is something that's endemic across not just the freelance services space, but across basically the whole of the online space, whether your eBay or whether your Amazon, there have been issues that have been kind of growing in the online space, particularly during COVID.

What's that -- the scam on the fake listing side is basically, people posting a project saying that they are a large company, like a deco or what have you. They're not, obviously. They're saying they've got a lot of work, typically unskilled work, data entry or copy writing or a very low-end copy writing. In order for the -- and in order for the freelancer to win the job, they say to them that you've got pay $7 as a job placement fee or an IP agreement fee or what have you. And by the way, here's my telegram phone number or my WhatsApp link and click on that to make me the payment or making the payment in bitcoin or whatever it may be. And of course, it just turns out to be a scam. They [ report ] the freelancer and steel the money.

We have really cracked down on this in a big way. And in particular now, you can't award a project on Freelancer unless you go through the card process, which means you've got to put some -- to pay the project fee and put up a [ milestone in ] payment. And that really drop the hammer in a big way on this. It's been very, very effective. If you follow the gross project numbers on the site, there was quite a number of projects that were removed from the marketplace that were scamming and we've made some really, really good progress there. But this is endemic across the entire space. So you cannot award a project anymore unless you pay, and that's really stopped freelancers from getting awarded projects from scammers. They can still try and trick them prior to award, and we've been cracking down that on a big way. One -- but we've really made a lot of improvements.

We really now -- you've got to verify your phone number to post the projects, you've got to verify your e-mail address. And we think through things like use of video and so forth, we really weighed out a lot of the scammers that continue to operate and [indiscernible] these marketplaces in online. On top of that, on the freelancer side, people complain about fake bids. There's not really fake bids on the freelancer side. What actually is happening is the freelancers are using tools to assist them in winning jobs, right? It's a very competitive marketplace to me in a job, right? There's about 40 -- I think 41, 42 average bids for job at the moment they come in. So it's highly competitive.

And what the freelancers do [ is just like ] eBay, where you might be -- if you purchase something on eBay, the time is running out in eBay. At the very end, you might get sniped on an auction. And so people downloading sniper tools to get at the very end of the auction to win the bid on buying a product. In the services space, it is a bit different. The other way around in the services space is about how can you quickly get in front of the client and the faster you get in front of them that can you build that relationship and trying as fast as you can to try to beat all the other bidders they're in.

It's not like walking to a marketplace and an emerging market, you walked into a bazaar in India where or you walked into somewhere in Indonesia or what have you, right. Everyone kind of runs up to you thinking of you're a tourist and says, what do you want to buy? Do you want to buy watches, handbags, do you want to buy shoes, do you want to buy whatever T-shirts? And then at the end of [indiscernible] and they're trying to get in front of you as fast as possible now. Obviously, the freelancers are trying to do that because again, there's a proper motive there in terms of them getting in front of people very, very quickly.

It's a bit complex to solve because the freelancers that are the most egregious uses of bots and tools to bid on your project quickly. They're also the power users. They are actually good freelancers. They're the ones that are paying for all the bids. It's not free accounts with only 8 bids on sign-up. They have to wait for a month to be replenished that are really using these tools. It's the power users that are using these tools. So they're actually when you talk to them, start chatting with them. You'll realize that they're actually great freelancers, but it is not a great experience that start coming in super quickly. And in particular, so quick that it's obvious to have read the brief and so forth. And so we are actually making improvements there. In fact, there's stuff coming out today to really try and delay that.

You got be really careful there because on one hand, it can be a bad experience for some users because [indiscernible] my brief. And you've got to wait 5 minutes before the good brief, the good bidding comes in where people have read the project, that run a quality brief. And over time, what you'll see in terms of the bids, you can see this yourself. You post a project, within seconds, you'll get the bot bids coming in. After that in a minute or 2, you get copy pasters. They're the guys who are manually cutting and pasting into the bid form. And after about 5 minutes, what you get is you get the better quality bids coming in.

And then ultimately, over a period of time, the high quality freelancers are at the top. They've added the bid be very high quality and it actually looks great. But that's an initial moment we can really break the magic of the marketplace. If you got be careful because those people that come in quickly for some people, they -- for some people like, I'm really frustrated getting a job done. Oh, wow, some are bidding my job. Oh, wow, okay, I can talk to them [indiscernible] to them. Oh, this is incredible. If you post your job and then we've done a lot of research on this [indiscernible] this, every second that someone decides to not engage with the website and the bids don't come in, for example, the drive engagement. They can just log off and go away.

And the chronic problem here is a brand-new user who's never used the site before post the job, nothing happens for a minute, they log off. They can get busy tomorrow and forget to come back to the website. They come back on Wednesday or Thursday or whatever. By that stage, the freelancers go so competitive -- this client is not responsive. [indiscernible] working for them because they're [ responsible. ] They move on to new jobs [indiscernible] new jobs they've been posted on the site. They're often the new jobs, right? They're -- not the old jobs, right, where the clients taking 3 days to get back to you. So liquidity does have a big beneficial impact. In fact, it's kind of an interesting thing that's going on right now internally about how we [indiscernible] team are saying liquidity is great. [indiscernible] liquidity is great. You got to be careful about damage of liquidity. Then you've got the -- then you got the product guys, product managers saying, no, we've got to [ have ] a better experience and you kind of -- we're trying to figure out the [ happy medium ]. We think we know what kind of products you're going to take here. But you've got to be careful. In the past, we've tried to be very gentle about penalizing people. And we've come and we've have gone, okay, let's have an algorithm that goes through [indiscernible] put in the queue. You got a human operator look at this and then make a very careful decision on whether the time out some of the 60 seconds and timing out for [indiscernible] minutes and timing out for [ 16 ] minutes and really doing a [indiscernible] back off. These power users who are the most egregious people are using these bots and assisted bidding tools.

They get very frustrated because they need to be able to pay for all the staff. They've got working for them and they used to winning a lots of jobs and doing 50 projects a month, whatever it may be. And they will downgrade their membership plans and the membership plans determine how much bidding did you get. So you [indiscernible] solve the problem, but there's a mix of things. What I will say that review is -- I want to point this out is when you actually review, you can do a search of lots of things in the -- a lot of the things in the Internet.

If you go in Google and type in freelancer.com and our major competitors, you go to Twitter, and you type in [indiscernible] major competitors, you've got a YouTube. We have more videos, we have more tweaks about us. We have more listings in Google. We have better reviews than our competitors. For example, here, this is just a Trustpilot. We have 10,700 reviews and Trustpilot 4.5 rating. If you go and type in a competitor, for example, of us into Trustpilot, they've got 8,400 reviews and they're 4.4. If you go and type in another competitor into Trustpilot [indiscernible] Likewise, if you go to Sitejabber, that's another review site, you'll see a very similar thing, and I'll just [indiscernible]. So we actually have pretty good reviews out there on the Internet. But it is a good point [indiscernible] about spam. I mean part of the reason why there is spam kind of inherently in these marketplaces, you can see that 12,600 reviews on [indiscernible] our competitors. And you can see this, if you go onto YouTube and you type in [indiscernible] competitors into YouTube, type in the Twitter, et cetera [indiscernible] et cetera. So -- but inherently, what happens there is because it's free to post a project and it's free to bid, and we do that to really make it easy for new users to get going. You do have spam. And you can stop [indiscernible] a listing fee, for example, $5 to post a project or you can really start heavily monetizing the bids, but we really think that we've got a good model in terms of getting people going. But thank you for the question. That's a long answer.

Next question was, with the tech downturn are happening globally, do you think Freelancer will need to downside overheads of the [indiscernible] growth. So we have actually cut down a bit of costs in the first half and we -- as part of a good practice, we are doing a review of all our costs and unsubscribing to things that we are about to subscribe to and so forth that we don't use. Just over time, you will find things that your designers will come along, and they'll subscribe to Envision. And then, Figma will come out and they will stop using Envision and [indiscernible] the Figma and that nobody [indiscernible] review of that, et cetera.

So we've really -- we have done a cost review in the second quarter of this year, and we have brought back the costs quite a lot. And we've really got a target to get to sustained [indiscernible] from end of the third quarter. So from there on, we should be, I believe, -- there's a strong ability for us to profitable and then we can start really investing back in growth. And the primary spend will put growth -- any spend into will be headcount. So that's really where we're going to focus, headcount marketing, obviously.

So that's what we're going to do is we're going to get it profitable in the third quarter. So the target, by the end of the third quarter, get profitable. There should be a big revenue uptick coming in, I believe, in the next 12 months from all the things I've talked about across enterprise or consumer, Escrow and the freight division, and then we will reinvest once we are profitable into growth. Question from [indiscernible]. Most news commentary on Freelancer is on [indiscernible] Escrow is growing stronger, and Freelancer could be exciting and disruptive. What's the plan to tell the story better to potential investors. For example, should we be a dedicated [indiscernible] freelancertechnology.com. It's a good comment. There is a lot of news that's going out there about all businesses. I mean if you go search in Google, there is news, but you've got to go find it. We do try and put as much as we can on the ASX fee. We have a real problem with the ASX and getting anything out. The compliance manager that we've been assigned simply will not let us post very much at all to the [ feed ].

I don't know why he does this. You got -- you can [indiscernible] Afterpay and they'll post something about frequent [ fly points ] being eligible or what have you. But Neil and I have [indiscernible] second. We have a real [indiscernible] trying to get anything on the ASX fee. They wouldn't let us publish the original announcement about winning the NASA tender. They wouldn't let us publish about eBay. They wouldn't let us publish about Autotrader. Every single thing we're trying to get out, it's literally a phone call, we argue with them. And I don't know why they do this is the responsibility of directors and officers of the company to make sure that the market is fairly informed. I don't know why they're putting themselves in a position of liability to not let us put stuff out. But Neil, maybe you can comment on this because you have one that does this frequently.

[Neil Katz, executive]

Yes. Look, I'm going to debate every time we put [indiscernible] announcements. And there have been a few where we got to modify them. I mean, ultimately, we have got -- we have got the announcements out that we needed to. But the frustration that we experienced sort of doesn't encourage us to sort of put out more because of this problem we have over time.

[Robert Barrie, executive]

Now we do have a conversation -- we're doing [indiscernible] that's kind of working with us and actually I think we're on the call as well today. There was a discussion today about how we improve this. It's a bit easier getting stuff out to the OTC [ feat ] in the U.S., although there's going to be visibility issue. We're just trying to rectify there about [indiscernible] on sort of the major -- these new sites. But it is something that I do hear you loud and clear, I had a lot of feedback from investors. I've seen them in the share trading reforms complaining that news, et cetera. And we are really trying to figure out how we rectify that and really do improve the news flow.

Again, there's a whole [indiscernible] disclosure thing. We want to make sure that anything that is material does go up on the ASX fee and everyone does see it. But we do literally have a 0.5 hour to 1.5 hours to [indiscernible] in the phone calls back [indiscernible] trying to get things out. So sometimes -- and in one circumstance actually, we put a formal complaint in because the market was uninformed about something for a period of time [ in trading ] because I [indiscernible] is an issue.

Okay. Next question from [indiscernible]. Does the group have any formal intellectual property protections? Yes, we do. We don't have much in terms of the patent portfolio. But we've got quite a number of marks around the world. We recently just [indiscernible] that because in the U.S. -- because what they did was, they split their mobile phone app, for example, into 2 apps, 1 for clients, 1 for freelancers. And quite cunningly and I think probably in an attempt to damage our trademark, they call 1 of the apps, Freelancer. So their client app was called Upwork, and their freelancer app was called Freelancers. So we actually suit them over that. We just settled and they've just agreed to over the next period of time, change that name.

So we do have -- we do strongly defend our marks. We do have global marks. Our Freelancer mark is incontestable in the U.S. We've had [ itself ] for so long and so forth. But we don't have much in the intellectual property protection in terms of patents because most of the stuff we do would be around business method. And as a result, it would be unpatentable in many jurisdictions. It's very hard now in the U.S. to [indiscernible] website style stuff. In Australia, you can't do it and someone -- so we've got, obviously, trade secrets. But we do protect our marks and we do go there, and we do, strongly protect them. And for example, it's not -- I don't launch lawsuits against companies, but this was -- I thought quite agree, just we did launch [indiscernible] settled. No monetary payment, but that stops. I mean it depends on monetary payment with the stop using [indiscernible] Next question.

[Unknown Executive]

[indiscernible] margins, if any, do we make from car financing?

[Robert Barrie, executive]

Okay. We don't currently make any margin from the current implementation for car financing, but we will start to make a margin from financing, which we're in very big discussions with a finance provider. We had a relationship for some time that already does provide finance for our freight business. We're now talking to them in quite a lot of detail about asset financing. We have a proposal in front of them. They're talking to their financiers, and we will, at some point, I believe, potentially quite soon, potentially even before the end of the year be able to offer asset financing in certain classes.

We don't know exactly where the margins will be on that. We think that will be very large over time. We think they will be larger than the actual payment. The payment is about 100 basis points at the moment. So it's quite cost effective and cheap to use Escrow.com, much cheaper than PayPal, for example, in many circumstances. We think financing can really leverage that margin quite a lot by multiple -- more than multiple, more than the basis points, a couple of hundred basis points, we believe. We don't know exactly where it's going to end up. We believe over time, we'll get better and better and better as can demonstrate that and built a track record to allow us to get a wholesale facility to offer financing at a much lower costing -- cost for us.

So we'll see and we'll keep -- we'll inform you over time as that becomes available. Currently, we're not making any money on the financing that it's more of a proof that we can provide that. We're making money from the payment, the actual transaction itself, and we've facilitated a marketplace of financiers to be available through [indiscernible] Escrow payments and also the longer the down payment through that down payment being held [ by Escrow ] as well. So it's something coming. It's a great question. it's something coming, and we'll let you know more as we understand more about it. And we have the offering expanded more. And certainly, as we go to more automotive providers and so forth, there may be an opportunity in the future.

And I think that certainly will be an opportunity in the future to make more margin from finance as well as the transaction.

[Unknown Executive]

So obviously, in the short term, the more we can integrate with financing providers that make it easier for consumers to get the finance, the transaction level increase and...

[Robert Barrie, executive]

Yes, we [indiscernible] expansion. In some of these asset classes, there's no financing providers that are available today at all. And so the whole sector is going to grow. But I also think that just the model as well, like the ability to select the car [indiscernible] finance, transact and just do it all through your phone without having to go to a dealer, without having to go to someone's house and make the payment in cash. I think that's going to grow the market.

And I do think if you just think about it intuitively, I mean they said [indiscernible] that people never buy a car online. That's the first place you look to buy a car but can't transact. Give it 5 years, 10 years, maybe 2 years, right, maybe even 2 years away, the dominant way you maybe buy a car will [indiscernible] and you want to get down [indiscernible] anymore, you just get your phone, and you buy the car and you get a much better offers, much more -- or it's much more convenient, car gets delivered to you. And you want to come to someone's house [indiscernible] around the dealers. That's great question. [indiscernible] answer the question [indiscernible] the management.

If you don't have to ask the questions today or if you want to follow up, email me directly at [e-mail]. Neil and I can arrange a one-on-one if you [indiscernible] one-on-one with us. We are happy do that. Okay. 10 more seconds. The chance to get a question.

Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. That was the first half of 2022 financial results, and I look forward to speaking to you in a quarter from now. Thank you.