AGM 2021

Jul 28, 2021

Slides

Hello, and welcome to the Friants Unlimited Annual General Meeting for 2021. My name is Matt Barry. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Friants Unlimited. I ask all mobile devices to be turned off. I don't know why I'm asking this, because I've a small number of people here actually physically or in the silent mode. Perhaps if you're on the call, if you can make sure that you're there'll be noises that can distract from the proceedings today. And given the current situation of COVID-nineteen as well as the guidelines and restrictions that were issued by the state and the federal governments on meetings and travel today, France has made a decision to hold our AGM virtually as well as physically, so it's a hybrid meeting. On the twentieth March twenty twenty, Assik issued a no action statement with respect to holding virtual meetings that provided the companies provide shareholders a reasonable opportunity to vote and participate in the AGM. We have therefore decided to hold our AGM as a hybrid meeting with a quorum of shareholders nominated by the Board to attend the AGM physically, and the remaining shareholders strongly encouraged to participate in the AGM virtually. I'm advised that a quorum of members is physically present, and I therefore declare the meeting open. The first order of business is to introduce to our my fellow directors, who are present virtually at the meeting today. Mr. Darren Williams is a Non Executive Director. Up until 2015, he was the Chief Technology Officer and an Executive of the Operating Business. Darren is a member of the Nomination and Rumination Committee and the Audit Committee. Mr. Simon Clausen is a Founding Investor and Non executive director. Simon is a member of the Nomination and Rumination Committee and the Audit Committee. Also in attendance physically is Mr. Neil Katz, our company's Secretary and Chief Financial Officer. And I would also like to welcome Sandeep Kumar, the company's auditor and other representatives of Hall Chadwick. There are two items of business on today's agenda: the Chairman's address and the formal business of the meeting, which includes voting on the resolutions outlined in the notice of meeting. Shareholders will be given an opportunity later in the meeting to ask questions and raise any relevant matters of the Board for discussion through me. So right now, I'm just going to go through a presentation. There was also yesterday a half year update, which was done online, and we had a reasonably good attendance for that. That meeting has been recorded. And for any of those that are attending virtually, if you would like to see the half year results, you can email investorfreelance dot com, and we'll send you a video recording of that. But that goes into sort of the nitty gritty over the last two quarters in quite a lot of detail. So I'm going to present a more high level overview of the business up until now. And if you'd like to have the detailed video recording sent to you of the half year results with Q and A, we can send that to you if you send us an e mail. So Freelancer as a group now consists of three businesses. We have broadly in the great horizontal areas of labor, payments and freight. So Freelancer is the largest business. It's the world's largest crowdsourcing marketplace with about 54,000,000 users around the world, two forty seven countries, regions and territories, and over about $4,500,000,000 worth of jobs have been awarded to date over the history of that marketplace. Second biggest business is Escrow.com. That's a global payments business that's done $5,000,000,000 to date U. S. Of transactions secured. This is a business that started in 1999, was funded by SoftBank, run by Fidelity, and basically is in a phenomenal position today. But it's a global payments business for buying and selling things that are complicated expensive. And we also have a freight division, which we'll talk about a little bit later on, which consists of Freelancer and Loadshift. And combined, those two businesses did 99,000,000 kilometers of freight pro form a last year in calendar year 2020. Now Freelancer is really the partner in the new world of work, solving a trillion dollar problem. 5,000,000,000 people on the planet live on $30 a day or less and need to get a better job. At the same time, there's a skill shortage. The defining characteristic of the twenty first century is the competition for intellectual capital. Globally, every woman on planet needs to have 2.1 children to maintain the population. And all throughout the world, even in Bangladesh, the replacement rate is lower. So the birth replacement rate. The fertility rate is lower than replacement rate. You've got to go to places like Sub Saharan Africa to be dramatically above. So we're not making any more people. At the same time, education as a percentage of discretionary income is dropping quite remarkably in the Western world. It's still very high in places like Korea and China, but it's low in the rest of world. So we're not making any more people at the rate we're used to, and we're not treating education as important as we should. But at the same time, we have a great emerging market in places like India, where you've got once in a lifetime influx of people into the workforce. In India, it's about 14,000,000 people a year who are skilled, young, hungry and native English speakers. And so all around the world, entrepreneurs, whether they're in small businesses, whether they're in mid sized businesses or whether they're corporate entrepreneurs, need to get things done. And we have the world's largest online workforce for getting things done and helping create the future through development of products and services through freelancer.com. This is a high level picture of our marketplace. Many of you have seen it before. The white dots are where our users are. The pink lines are where jobs are being posted. The blue lines are where jobs are being performed. But we are global in nature. Anywhere there's electricity and there's Internet, we have people. Primarily, jobs are being posted in The U. S, U. K, Canada, Australia and going to places like India, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and so forth. We have 53 regional websites. We're in 34 languages. We're in 19 currency 39 currencies. There's no other marketplace globally that has the breadth we have in terms of skills, users, languages and forth, and the ability to get things done right from something as simple as $10 right up to something in many hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. We've had over 20,000,000 jobs posted to date. We're extremely liquid. Nowhere else is liquid globally as we are. 63% of jobs get bid on within sixty seconds, with a 24 average number of bids per project. And we're also in an environment where increasingly over time, from here and for the foreseeable future, people will be increasingly working online, trying working online for the first time and experiencing the ability to the advantages of working online with people. In terms of the first half statistics, we had a phenomenal increase in web traffic, up 89 in terms of sessions to 132,000,000 in the half year on the half year before, which is in 2021 hundred and thirty six percent increase in new visitors, 4,000,000 increase in new users and so forth, and about almost 1,000,000 jobs were posted on the platform. In terms of the dynamics, about 30% of the jobs are websites, IT and software, and there's hundreds of categories underneath that. About 28% of the jobs are broadly in the fields of design, and that covers everything from architecture to interior design to music, composition, CAD models and so forth, and they're a very long tail. The average project size is around USD 200, and just over the long term, just trends up over time. And we're the lowest cost and largest cloud labor platform globally in terms of breadth of talent. Now one else has a greater breadth of talent than we do. And we're basically trying to build the Amazon space the widest range of the lost cost. It's free to post a project. It's free to try to talk to people, see samples of work and so forth. If you award a job to someone and they accept it, we charge you 3%. On the freelance side, it's free to sign up, free to talk to people, free to bid on jobs. If you're in work, we charge you 10%. So it's very, very cost effective. This is an example of a project from a site. You post into a title, description, a budget, you put it live. 68% of jobs get bids within sixty seconds, twenty four bids on average, in some circumstances hundreds of bids or more. And then you can talk to people and select someone. The other way of getting work done is through posting a contest. You put up a prize. People compete for the prize. And you can it's a very iterative process. You can say, like this. I don't like this. Change this. Change that. And you can get to a solution pretty quickly. This is an example of some packaging design was done by two for USD $2.60, and it was 186 entries. Nowhere else in the world can you get so much collaborative contribution for so little cost to get things done. And you can do this in any of the 2,000 different categories. At the moment, we get 15,000,000 entries per year going into contests from 1,500,000 participants, about 1,300,000 entries per month. 85% of contests get an entry within an hour. And it's actually about two eighty entries per contest. This is two forty, but it's actually closer to two eighty at this point in time. So the metrics are up and to the right. So this is actually quite phenomenal. If you've never tried contests before, put $10 in, get some business cards done, You'll be absolutely amazed by what you can get done for so little. And the quality. This is an example of some of the work that's been done through Freelancer. The quality is amazing. We're showing very visual things here in nature. But really, any job you can possibly think of, can post on the platform and get done from a skilled talent base that's global. And you can find any skill set you want, any language you want, any location you want. That's some pretty amazing quality of work there. We have an enterprise division, which is targeting the bigger the town. So this is Fortune 500 and equivalent organizations globally. We have new leadership under Sean McMeekin, who was the founding VP of Sales at Groupon. He took it from zero in the Australia and New Zealand region to $1,000,000,000 in turnover per annum over six years and $250,000,000 in revenue. In the first half, enterprise GMV grew about 227% in the second quarter and 213% in the first half. And new clients ramped up quite strongly, and some of the new clients actually ramped up to be in our top 10 accounts. We've got some pretty exciting things going on. Deloitte, we've built a custom platform called Deloitte MyGigs for Deloitte Consulting U. Which is designed to connect Deloitte consultants with each other globally and Deloitte consultants to the cloud. Deloitte is the largest of the big four. They've got 440,000 staff. They said to us, they can't go 10x from here. They'll be 10,000,000 employees. They've got to go to the new model. And universally, Fortune five hundred has come to the conclusion that some percentage of their workforce will come from the cloud in the future. They're not sure whether it's 5%, ten %, fifteen % or 25%, but that's the range. They're not sure if it's one year, three years, five years, ten years away, but that's the time period. COVID has accelerated everything. But they do know they're going have to transform their workforce. And this is one of the greatest transformations in the workforce, I think, in history. And Dola's a great example of that. And we've now got the go ahead to get a stage three, which is connecting consultants to the cloud. And there'll be 52,000 consultants to the world of 53,000,000 freelancers. We've got some amazing things happening with other corporates as well, but we're also doing some great things with nation states now. So the governments of Saudi Arabia and and government of Egypt are some examples. We've worked for some time with the government of Malaysia. And in fact, government of Cambodia approached us this week. But in Arabia, they're building a they have a national marketplace that they've funded so that all Saudi Arabian citizens will be able to participate in the world of work. In fact, they're creating a new labor class in Saudi Arabia. So it's not just full time jobs and casual jobs and part time jobs, it's freelance jobs that will be a new category recognized by the government. And they've approached us to help them with this. And also, as part that, help skill up and train the citizens for the world to work online and to help that talent reach jobs from companies all around the world and paying for that. And there's some pretty amazing things we're doing there in combination also with a major corporate in the region. We're also doing this with the government of Egypt. They've been paying us already to train up their workforce, get them online, get their profiles up and running and get their first jobs won through companies not just in The Middle East but around the world. So we're doing things just with large corporates and the largest corporates in the world, but also with large governments. We have another corporate engagement of note, which is pretty exciting, and there's many in the pipeline here in various stages of pilots, multi country pilots, production and early stage. Where for a global computer company, this is a computer company where probably you might have the products in your own home already, they're looking to transform the way that they do field services. And they've come to us because they need to have the scale, the scope and the reach to be able to provide technical repairs to computer and printer equipment all around the world. And so when you go and break your computer in certain regions now, and you go to their call center or you log something on their website to get your computer or printer repaired. It is one of our freelancers who's been trained, who will go out to your location and repair or replace that item. We are successfully running in Indonesia. Our pilot in India is now expanding to 18 regions, so it's going national. We have an Australian pilot, which has been in planning for a long period of time and has been slightly delayed due to the lockdowns, but basically has commenced. And we have 13 other countries we're going to after that, including The U. S. And we've already started discussions about how we're going to do The U. S. Launch. This is a very, very substantial engagement that is a very meaningful number. If we can get to the prize at the end of the rainbow in terms of the GMV contribution, it's very, very large compared to our global GMV. In the half, we also won the best comprehensive solution from the Lighthouse Research Awards. There's a lot of stuff happening with NASA. We've won multiple task orders with them. We've won task order with the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation for about US300000 worth of work for power engineering, to find more efficient ways to test hydroelectric power energy systems so that you don't have to take them offline when you do the testing. With the National Institute of Health through NASA, we have won a data science challenge for 400 and something thousand dollars for finding ways to lower child morbidity through insights and data science. We have also won another task order with the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation for river hydraulic modelling and sedimentation modelling through optimization of computational fluid dynamics, through effectively computational computer science to find more efficient ways to optimize large matrices. And in fact, this morning, we won the biggest task order yet with NASA for a software development. And we're basically going to announce that shortly in terms of the quantum and what we're doing there. And there's plenty more to come here with our relationship with NASA. But it shows you you couldn't get a more marquee organization globally than the U. S. Space Administration. And in fact, they've done such a wonderful job of embracing the future of work that they are now being used by all the government agencies, the federal government of the U. S, to help drive that through all sorts of different programs. We also have a great engagement with IBM, which I want to call out, where they've committed to spend seven digits more in terms of training freelancers to and IBM technologies to enable their customers to get freelancers to help them adopt IBM solutions. And in addition with that, certify with IBM skills. That engagement is going incredibly well. We wrote a case study on that, and that's how we won the award from Lighthouse Research in The U. S. For HR Tech for 2021. And that's the award there. And there's some more details in this deck, which I won't get into detail. So we're not just working with low end and small projects and small business and SOHO. We're all out to the very high end. And some of the largest organizations in the world is an example of a telecommunications infrastructure project. It was done for $1,500 in two weeks by Deloitte, which consisted of a 70 page report. And if you think about a 70 page report at the level that you to do for a Deloitte customer, the ability to get this done for $1,500 is unparalleled anywhere in the world. This is for Airbus, one of the two top aerospace manufacturing companies, for helping more efficiently look at their assembly line in Toulouse, where they assemble Airbus planes and helicopters. In particular, that was the helicopter line. And this is Fujitsu and combinatorial algorithms. So we've done a lot of stuff with NASA. Over 14,000 designs have been sourced from 6,000 freelancers. We've won jointly a $25,000,000 tender. I've talked about some of these task orders with one and again another one this morning. We've worked for the U. S. Department of Energy. We've worked for Novo Nordisk. And in fact, over 70% of Fortune 500s do make use of the freelancer platform, not through our enterprise program in terms of an organized strategy, but just use the site anyway, just like I would think probably 99% of organizations now use eBay. And this number will increase over time, and we're going get them into an organized program through our enterprise sales team. We've done a lot of work on mobile in the first half. That's starting to power from spades. We've redesigned the front end architecture of the website, which is really a complete rebuild over the last couple of years. And we have deployed that, and that's allowed us to replace our mobile suite with a modern two point zero version of mobile. Our first step with this was last year replacing the mobile web version of Freelancer. So if you use your phone and use your web browser and go to Freelancer, we've replaced that with the responsive version of the desktop website. This has led to a dramatic increase in revenue from mobile web. In the first half of this year, fees were up 96% year on year. This has allowed us to replace our iOS and our Android apps. Our iOS app is now a capacitor wrapped version of the responsive website. It's live. It's deployed. It's been out just for a number of weeks. Already the revenue is up 15% year on year, we do expect it to get closer to the triple digits that we've seen with mobile web. We've just heard a few things we've got to improve in terms of the polish, but that's there. And Android is now in fifty-fifty in production in the next couple of weeks. We're going to 100% in production. I'll report on that in the following quarters in terms of the progress. We have a managed service layer, which consists of two levels. The first is we have recruiters that will help you find the best free answer for the job. And we have a copilot service, which is project management service, where for an hourly rate, we will help you do anything you need with a project. We will listen to what you need. We'll write a spec for you. We'll break it down into tasks. We'll log it into the system. We'll hire freelancers with the recruiters, and we'll run weekly sprints for you. And there's been a 38% increase in preferred Italian earnings in the first half through these managed service programs to our top freelancers. And we have an API, which allows you to harness 50,000,000 people through a software interface. And we've built the first app, which is actually in the Play Store, and it's in the iOS store. And you can download it and you can try it for yourself. But I've always said that you could build Uber's got six or 7,000,000 drivers. Last time I looked, maybe it's about eight, nine, 10 million now. I don't know what the number is. But we've got 50,000,000, four freelancers, and we probably have more drivers than Uber does. But the interface for freelancers is not great to be picked up in a car and driven somewhere and dropped off. You won't want to post a project, enter a description, a budget, wait for people bidding, select them, etcetera. The Uber interface is very simple. In fact, it's as simple as you can possibly get. You drop a pin, you put location in, and a car will pick you up and take you somewhere. And so we thought, let's show a proof of concept. Let's build an Uber for something and just show what we can do with 50,000,000 people in our workforce and how liquid it is. So we built an Uber for photos. It's called PhotoAnywhere. You can download it today. For $35 you can type in an address and anywhere in the world, someone will go take a photograph and send it back to you, a series of photographs, five of them for $35 and send it back to you within twenty four, forty eight hours. I personally use this, and it has worked for me in Uzbekistan. It's worked for me in Timbuktu. It worked for me in Chernobyl. I've got photos back in twenty four hours. It's worked for me in New York, Gilly Islands, Bali or ever in India. It's worked for a Roman Colosseum in the middle of The UK, The Mount in Wyoming and so forth. So it's a pretty amazing demonstration of liquidity of the platform, and there's a lot of innovation that can go from here. For example, there's a company in Asia worth about $10,000,000,000 called Gojek. It's available in four countries. And simply, you type in an address, someone will go to that address, buy an item for you and bring it to you. The ability for us to build this now in a matter of weeks to months is fairly straightforward. And this is a $10,000,000,000 company that services in four regions while we would be able to service the globe using the power of our workforce. And it's a job that's accessible to anyone. Anyone with a smartphone can go to a location and buy something for you and bring it to you. So this is all powered by France Global Fleet. And France Global Fleet is also what's powering the field services example I gave you previously with a global computer company. It's the ability to access a fleet of talent anywhere in the world, track their location, task them to go to locations and do things. And it's pretty exciting. This management team. I won't get into details there. And we've won a bunch of awards and continuing awards. So that's the first of the businesses. The second of the businesses is Escrow.com, and this is a pretty phenomenal business. It's a payment system for buying and selling things that are expensive or complicated. It's solving two basic premises here. There's a lot of innovation around payments, but most of the innovation around payments is around buying and selling cups of coffee. So all the kids coming out of Stanford and Harvard, their experience is buying cups of coffee. So there's neat ways of buying cups of coffee with their phone, of tapping their phone with someone else's phone and splitting the price of a cup of coffee, a buy now, pay later for a cup of coffee, using facial recognition maybe to pay for a cup of coffee, maybe lending you money to buy a cup of coffee. But they're not thinking about buying and selling cars, boats, aeroplanes, jewelry, gemstones, diamonds, importing shipping containers from overseas, oil wells, trips up to space, etcetera. These are all either large payments or expensive or complicated payments. And there's two major problems in the payments space. The first problem is that payments above $3,000 really breaks down in the real world. Credit cards are great for about $3,000 and then $571,890 10 dollars 20 thousand dollars Some cards might handle payments that big, but for the most part, they start to break down, right? Same with PayPal. You wouldn't sell or buy a house or a car with PayPal or a plane or a boat. Maybe at a very, very low end, but not anything of substantial size. The other problem is in the untrustworthy environment, payments fail. I buy a phone on eBay, it gets sent to me. Maybe it's broken, maybe it's screen chipped, maybe it's not as described, maybe it's stolen. If I have a problem, we compete at the low end with buyer protection from PayPal and eBay and credit cards. And so I've got to fill in an insurance claim form. Was it as described? Is an insurable area? Is it within an insurable threshold? What actually happened? I fill in that form. I submit it. Six to eight weeks later, an insurance assessor might get back to me, and maybe I'll get my money back. And if it's eBay, it might get hold on a rolling reserve for six months before I actually get my funds. So it's a terrible experience. With escrow, quite simply, we hold the money until the transaction goes through. It's as simple as it is. So we're used for payments from hundreds of dollars up to $100,000,000 or potentially more. And it's all these sort of things here. And quite simply, we hold the money while the transaction goes through. It's a pretty phenomenal business. It's done USD 5,000,000,000 in payment volume. It's a profitable business. Last year, it did USD $489,000,000 in gross marketplace volume or gross payment volume. And in the first half of this year, we were up 43.7% year on year in terms of GMV. And in the second half second quarter of this year, we were up 105.5% in gross payment volume. And there's a picture of it just here in terms of GPV. Where is it? I think it's actually out of this particular deck. But it's a pretty phenomenal up and to the right graph in terms of the growth rate. And in the second quarter, it more than doubled the volume through it. There's over 2,000,000 customers, and we've got marquee platforms now starting to integrate escrow for the first time. And that's really become enabled by our API, which we've built, so you can integrate escrow as simple as PayPal. And that's been deployed and got out of beta really last year. One of our first marquee customers to integrate that was eBay Motors USA. So in The U. S, you can buy and sell cars now for the first time and pay for them. What might be remarkable to a lot of people is most car platforms globally, or car marketplaces, are actually classified sites. You can't actually pay for the car because PayPal and credit cards break down. And so the car marketplaces around the world actually don't if the car is sold. They make an assumption that the car is sold when the listing doesn't get renewed. Listing gets posted, it gets renewed, renewed, renewed. The listing goes down. They make an assumption that the car is sold, but they don't know that for sure. We're in eBay Motors. The success of that led to watches. So now buyers and sellers can use escrow to protect the transaction. For high end luxury watches, they've also launched an authentication network to completely stop fraud on the eBay watch marketplace. Traditionally up until now, people might think, Why would I buy a watch from eBay? I might be counterfeit. The way they've stopped that is through esco.com and through the authentication network. So now if you buy a high end luxury watch, the seller can no longer sell and send the watch directly to the buyer. It goes to a third party authentication network. Authenticator will look at the watch, open it up, check the parts, make sure they're genuine, clean it, put a sticker on it, give you a certificate, put it in a nice box if it doesn't come with original packaging, and send it to you. Through the entire process, the money is held with escrow.com. And then when you receive the box, you can then decide to hit the button to release the funds. We're going to go into more eBay categories. But there's a wide variety of areas within eBay we're going to touch. But also in many industry verticals. We've got a good presence in domain names and IP addresses. We're going to tip the whole automotive industry globally. We're in classic cars. We're in Hagady. We're in AutoHunter, which is basically Autotrader U. S. Are in fine art. We're in artsy. We're in Artland. We're in business sales, mergers and acquisitions through Shopify and Flippa. If you want to buy a Shopify store, you have to pay with esco.com and so forth. And so this is a global business, but it's mainly has some nexus to The U. S. And over the next couple of years, these are the industry verticals we're go into. And the Y axis is logarithmic, so these sectors get bigger and bigger and bigger as we go through IP addresses, domain names, watches, fine art, used construction equipment, importexport jewelry, used vehicles, M and A, manufactured goods to real estate. We are the only multi jurisdictional online escrow company globally. We have 52 financial services licenses granted or in application. We're licensed in every state in The U. S. Bar three. And the other three, we expect to complete this year. We're literally in the final stages. We're licensed in Australia. We're licensed in Canada. And we have a license with FCA in The UK, which is also imminent. And it's an incredible business in terms of the moat around it from a regulatory perspective. There are only a very, very small number of niche escrow providers globally that might exist. This is California, for example. In the state of California, there's only really four operating businesses that currently exist today. There's Upwork, which only uses the escrow for themselves internally. There's C Trust, which is for surrogacy. Vector, which is for marijuana. And there's us. And that's for the state of California, one of the largest markets in The U. S. So we're in boats, cars, airplanes. This is an example of a screenshot from eBay Motors. This is the first car that sold through eBay Motors. It allowed transaction to happen from one coast to the other coast securely, which is usually a difficult thing to do. Do I send the money first or do they send the car first? We protect fine art, watches, antiques, jewelry. This is screenshots of the eBay integration for watches in The U. S. There's two great little videos that you can click on and download if you get access to this presentation and watch how eBay is promoting escrow to its customers. Every time we get integrated with the platform, they've got to promote escrow because the regulators insist that the consumer needs to know where their money is. We're integrating Flipa for business sales. This is a neat one that happened in the second quarter. We integrated with energy domain. In the first half, and mainly in the second quarter, we sold two forty gross acres of oil and gas and mineral rights. So people are buying and selling oil wells through escrow. And this will lead us into real estate, which is a massive market globally. Industrial equipment, importexport, service contracts. And everyone in Silicon Valley knows the business because they bought their domain name through us. Uber, Snapchat, SpaceX, Twitter, Instagram, Chrome, Gmail, Hulu, they all bought their domain names through esco.com. And there's an API, which can now integrate, which makes it super simple. We have a great management team behind this business, and there'll be more to come from that. Now to wrap up the third business we've got, which I think has been a bit of a quiet one, but now has really come into its own, is the freight division. And this is actually a phenomenal leg. Anything that's physical that is sold through escrow needs to be moved. And we make 1.3% roughly from escrow, and we make 13% from the freight. So there's a lot of synergy there. Furthermore, freight is one of the 200 categories of freelancer. Process of getting a load moved from A to B, the technology is the same as on freelancer.com. On freelancer.com, you put in a title, a description, a budget, hit submit, people bid on the project, you pick someone, they do the job for you. In the freight division, you put in the title, a description, a budget, where you want something picked up, where you want something dropped off. Drivers bid on it, you award them, they get paid, and the job gets completed. It's exactly the same technology. In fact, what we're doing right now is we're moving the whole freight division onto an enterprise version of Freelancer. It's one of the 2,000 different categories we have. And this is a phenomenal business for a bunch of different reasons. These are already existing customers. Newcrest Gold Mine in Acadia in Australia, One of the biggest gold mines in Australia, uses us and has spent over seven digits in twelve months in terms of freight through Freelancer. We've been used in the Sydney Metro. We've been used by Redpath Mining, a big Canadian mining company. Combined pro form a, the Loadshift acquisition combined with Freelancer did over 70,000 loads in 2020, up 29% year on year and almost 100,000,000 kilometers of freight. In the first half, we did 51,000,000 kilometers of freight, up 20% on PCP. You can see that COVID has accelerated things. The roads are clear. And now is the time to be moving things around the country to get things done. And so COVID has been very, very beneficial for this business. Primarily moving things like heavy machinery for construction, mining, rail and so forth, moving cars, moving pallets, shipping containers. This is an example of Newcrest. And these are actual real pictures of things we've moved for Cadia, One of the largest gold mines in Australia saving 30% because of the competitive environment for bidding. This is Redpath mining, actual pictures of what we've been moving. This is EMS, actual pictures of what we've been moving. So it's an incredible business. We are by far the largest freight marketplace in Australia now. The aim is to take this global, and the aim is to monetize the 100,000,000 kilometers of freight per annum with basically a commission based model. I will say that on the average weekday now, more freight is posted in our freight division than the distance from the earth to the moon. The distance from the earth to the moon is 384,000 kilometers, and on the average day now, it's about 450,000 kilometers per day being posted. So there's a lot of freight that's getting moved with this particular business. And that freight needs to be paid for. It needs to be and so escrow and freight lines that go hand in hand. And in fact, the sales teams are actually going to enterprise customers independently and actually discovering they're talking to the same customers. So the payments business is going into the auction marketplaces and talking to them, and then finding out the freight division is also talking to them about moving things. So very, very complementary And the technology stack is exactly the same as the freelancer technology stack, just with a bit of front end tweaking. So it's a pretty amazing business, and there's actually more slides in the half year deck if you'd like to look at them. So just some final wrap up in terms of half year results. So the first half year group net revenue was $27,800,000 So in Aussie dollars, it was down 5.7%, but it was an all time record in U. S. Dollars and up 11% or 10.8% to $21,500,000 France and France was down about 11.5% in Aussie dollars, but up 4% in U. S. Dollars. Escrow had a record. It was $5,100,000 up 33.7% or 3.9 up 56.9%. The GPV had a big jump up. It was $566,000,000 up 35.9% or USD $437,000,000, up 59.2%. So free answer was effectively flat at USD 68,000,000, or an all time record in U. S. Dollars at 14% up to 52,000,000. In the first half, escrow was up 48% to EUR475 million or 73% to EUR366.7 million. And in the second quarter, escrow knocked the lights out with and 70,500,000.0, up 75% on PCP or GBP 208,500,000.0, up 105.5% on PCP. And in fact, ex China, it was even faster. Was up 113% in the quarter. So we're on track for over $1,000,000 to go through our bank accounts for the first time in the group this calendar year. Currency did hit us this half pretty hard. It was negative 17.4%. Seventy two % of our revenue is in Australian dollars and 4% sorry, in U. S. Dollars and 4% is in Australian dollars. So it was really a translation for the accounts because our business primarily services U. S. Customers. Gross margins were consistently high at 83%. Operating EBITDA was effectively flat at negative $2,000,000 and operating NPAT, likewise, negative flat at $1,600,000 or breakeven. We had positive operating cash flow, so more cash coming into the business at $2,700,000 It was down a bit on the first half of last year, which had a monster half of $6,200,000 And cash and cash equivalents were still strong at $31,800,000 It's down $2,500,000 but $4,000,000 was spent on acquiring the load shift business. And here we are. There's some details on load shift. I won't go into the detail, but effectively, about $300,000,000 worth of freight goes to that business every year. And the goal now is to try and monetize that. And the great thing is it's just like Freelancer in terms of the technology, but the average project size is not USD 200, it's USD 4,000. So these are very, very chunky projects, and there's a lot of volume that goes to this business. And we hit a few records in the first half. At the very end of the last quarter, we hit 520,000 kilometers of freight in a day on the June 20, and we hit over 10,000,000 kilometers of freight in a month. And this is what the GPV looks like. So a big uptick this year in terms of GPV. We've got some work to do on the revenue, but with the jaws operating leverage ready to really move, a little jump in revenue here is going to mean a lot to the bottom line. This is what the cash flow profile looks like. We have positive operating cash flow and we spend a little bit to buy our business. This is what the GMV looks like for Freelancer. We had the best quarter in first quarter of this year we've had since IPO in terms of the growth year on year. And the second quarter eased off a little bit as we cycled the second quarter of twenty twenty global lockdowns where 94% of the world's workforce was subject to stay at home provisions. But we expect this to grow from here as we're doing a whole bunch of things around collaboration and so on. This is the graph I was looking for previously for escrow. This shows you just what a phenomenal quarter and the phenomenal last twelve months have been for the escrow business. This is a twenty year history of quarterly growth in GPV. So £208,500,000 in the second quarter. And pretty soon, well, we'll be doing $1,000,000,000 a year U. S. Through our bank accounts with escrow. This is the P and L statement. We're really poised for some leverage here and the fact that the EBITDA, the EBIT NPAT is effectively at breakeven. So it doesn't take much in incremental revenue from here to really drive the profitability. You can see here the employee expenses went up 13% in the first half. That was in line with the headcount, which is roughly about 1213%. Administrative expenses were down 8%. Marketing related costs were down 36% through a new predictive model for advertising targeting with Freelancer, which allows us to get a return on investment much more efficiently on the ads. We deployed that model in the second quarter. We did actually have very tight constraints in that model. So we did actually cut the advertising spend quite a lot and in fact probably overshot. We will be ramping that spend up again in the third quarter, and that will be driving the revenue as well positively in the third quarter. But the great thing is we have a model now which is much more efficient at predicting return on investment for every dollar we spend in the paid channels. It's important to note that 66% roughly of all projects on the freelancer are from repeat customers. About 33% are from new customers. And of those new customers, about 30% are paid marketing as opposed to organic marketing or free marketing from things like SEO. We had a little bit of uplift in occupancy costs. That's really quite immaterial in the big scheme of things. That was really from the Sydney office that we moved to in March of last year, which is we're fully kind of seeing that through now. And then there was a big drop in tiny drop in share based payments expenses. So it doesn't take much in terms of revenue from here to really drop down to the bottom line. As you can see, there's not very much spend on marketing. There's no CapEx. It's basically on headcount and any incremental gain in revenue, unless it's soaked up by headcount, it's going to accidentally produce strong results in the bottom line. So that four sixty five staff from the company at this point in time. This is a snapshot of the balance sheet. In addition to the 31,800,000 we've recorded here, there's another £41,000,000 of cash off balance sheet and trust in the escrow accounts. And there's not much to this point about that. Ended with about 55,000,000 users in the group, 20,000,000 jobs. And I think we're a pretty unique company, not just on the assets but globally. So that was a fairly long presentation. I apologize for that. But if you'd like to learn more about more recently what's been happening in the business, you can email investorfreance dot com. And we do have a recording of yesterday's half year results that has the Q and A in it as well. And you get a copy of that if you'd like. And also, we're always available to do one on ones with investors if you email the same address and request a meeting. I will now turn to the formal business of the meeting. As the notice of meeting is being sent to all shareholders, unless there are any objections, I will take it as read. You may, I believe, leave a message in the chat if you're online. So I'll wait for a second for objections, and I'll just look at the operator to see if there's anything coming through in the chat. Chris? Nothing? All shadows, by the way, have to show you a video if you have to vote, apparently. That's just been advised by me. So if you do plan on voting, please turn your video camera on at this point. Thank you. Let this record show there are no objections. The first item of Form Business Agenda is to receive and consider the annual financial report of France Limited in the directors report, remuneration report and independent auditor's report for the year ended 12/31/2020. I advise that Sandip Kumar from the company's auditor Hall Chadwick is also present today and is available to answer any questions relevant to the conduct of the audit, the preparation content of the audit report and the accounting policies adopted by the company and independence of the auditor. Ladies and gentlemen, I'll take the annual financial report and the directors' report, remuneration report and the independent auditor's report having been received. You'll be aware that we have distributed the annual report electronically and have offered proxy voting online. I will now invite members to raise any additional matters to the Board or the auditors which relate to those reports or activities of the Franca Group in general. Would any member physically present asking a question, please turn on your video camera, stand well, not to stand, you can sit, and state their name before proceeding with a question. Please wait until you're provided with the forum before asking your question. So would any member attending virtually please use the chat functionally on your screen to flag your intent to ask a question, and then the operator will then let us know that your question wants to be asked and also tell you what order they'll be answered in. So now I'm opening it up for questions to Sandeep Kumar from the company's auditor, Paul Chadwick. Sandeep there, hello. So wait a minute. If anyone wants to ask a question, you can you can ping something in the chat, turn your camera on, and we'll turn it over to you. Okay. Anything in the chat? Chris, sorry? Okay. No. There's Okay. So there's a general question, which I'll take for later from Alex, which I'll get to at the end. Okay. So we're up to the first resolution for the voting, that the remuneration report of the company for the financial year ended 12/31/2020, as contained in the directors' report, be adopted. Please note that the vote on this resolution is an ordinary resolution and it is advisory only. The company each year reviews its remuneration policies and approach and strives to pay its employees fairly and competitively and with a view to reasonable expectations of the investment community. Before asking members to move and second the motion, I would like to give members an opportunity to raise any questions related to this resolution as is now before the meeting. So anyone physically, could you please stand, wait for the microphone, say your name, etcetera, which is going to be unlikely because there's a small number of people here. Would any person virtually please turn your camera on and use the chat functionality on your screen to flag your intent to ask a question? And I'll then take your question in the order flagged. So I'll wait a few minutes if anyone wants to turn your camera on and ask any questions. Nothing, Chris? No questions? Could I please ask a member, physically present, to move a motion that Remirisen reported the company for the financial year ended December 2020 as contained and the directors report be adopted? There. Adam Burns. Would another member care to second that motion? I advise we receive 26,581,090 proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 234,452 proxy votes against the resolution, 100,880 undirected proxy votes were converted by me as Chairman, two million three hundred and nineteen thousand and thirty nine votes that cannot be voted as they are excluded, and 160,377,500 abstained votes. Those undirected proxies, which I can vote for, will be voted for in favor of the resolution. I would now like to put the motion to the meeting. Would all those members who are in favour of the motion please raise their hand? I think you can also turn your video camera on and raise your hand as well if you want. All those members raise your hand if you're in favour. Okay. Would all those members who are against the motion please raise their hands? Okay. I declare the motion carried. Moving on to Resolution two, that Mr. Simon Clausen, who is required to retire under the company's constitution and who, being eligible, offers himself a reelection, is reelected as director of the company. The resolution is an ordinary resolution. Mr. Clausen's credentials are outlined at the meeting. I also advise that Mr. Cawson's fellow directors strongly support his reelection. Does any shareholder have a question related to this resolution? If you want to ask a question about Simon's reelection, you may do so by turning on your camera and putting something in the chat. Chris? No? Would a member care to move a motion that Mr. Clausen's reelection, occur as a director? Thank you. Mr. Katz, would another member care to second the motion? Mr. Burns? I've advised received one hundred and seventy four million six and eighty two thousand seven hundred and forty four proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 13,793,148 proxy votes against the resolution, 1,136,419 undirected proxy votes which may be voted by me as Chairman and six fifty abstained votes. I will now put the motion to the meeting. Would all members who are in favor of the motion please raise their hand? All members who are against the motion please raise their hand? Turn the camera on. I declare the motion carried and congratulate Mr. Clausen on his reelection as Director of the company. The next item on the agenda is Resolution three that pursuant to and in accordance with the Listing Rule 7.2 Exception 13 and for all other purposes, shareholders approve the company's long term incentive plan and the grant of share rights and issue of underlying securities pursuant to the plan on the terms and conditions set out in the explanatory memorandum at company notice of meeting. The resolution is an ordinary resolution. I'm also advised of the directors, with Mr. Matt Barry abstaining, now rec recommend that shareholders vote in favor of resolution three. Does any shareholder have a question regarding this resolution? Anything, Chris? No questions? Would a member care to move the motion along with the lent long term incentive plan? Miss Katz. Would another member care to second that motion? Mister Burns. I advised that we received 174,682,744 proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 13,793,148 proxy votes against the resolution, and one million hundred and thirty one million one hundred thirty thousand four hundred nineteen undirected proxy votes to be voted by me as chairman and six fifty abstained votes. I'll now put the motion to the meeting. Would all the members who are in favor of the motion please raise their hand? Would all the members who are against the motion please raise their hand and turn the camera on so I can see you, or should I go do that? I declare the motion carried. The next item on the agenda is resolution four, the pursuant to Section 136.2 of the Corporations Act, the constitution of the company be amended and set out in the amended constitution with the amendments marked up and tabled at the general meeting convened those notice of meeting. This resolution is a special resolution. I've been advised that directors unanimously recommend that shareholders vote in favor of Resolution four. Does any shareholder have a question regarding this resolution, please turn your camera on and put everything in the chat. No questions? Would a member care to move the motion to amend the Thank you, Mr. Burns. Would another member care to second the motion? Mr. Katz. I'm advised we received 174,682,744 proxy votes in favor of the resolution, 13,793,148 proxy votes against the resolution, 1,136,498 undirected proxy votes, which may be voted by Mr. Chairman, and six fifty abstained votes. I've now put the motion to the meeting. Would all members who are in favor of the motion please raise their hand? Okay. Would all members who are against the motion please raise their hand and turn the camera on? Declare the motion carried. We now move to Q and A, and you may direct your questions on any topic to any of the directors. I also have Adam Burns here and Neil Katz and Jackson Elsgood, who's the General Manager of eschar.com and Tom Kavanaugh, who's the CEO of Freelancers. So I presume you can ask anyone. I'm sure we can find a way to splice them into the meeting. We had a first question, Chris, already from Alex, which was what? How before you it How big does escrow need to be before you'll spin it off? The answer to that question is, at some point, escrow will be a public company and will be standing its own two feet. Now the question is, at what point in time may that occur? And how big does escrow need to be for that to occur? The great thing is that escrow is getting to scale and is growing extremely rapidly. The GPV in the second quarter is up 105% year on year. And we are getting this year I mean, I won't give a forecast in terms of revenue, but if you look next year at the size and the scale that the escrow business is potentially going to be, it's probably going to be the size and the scale that Freelancer was and the growth rates that Freelancer was, if not faster, when France were IPO ed. So at the time of the IPO, France was doing about AUD 18,000,000 in revenue on a forward basis. It IPO ed in November, so it towards the end of the year. So only had about six weeks before the end of the year and about 80% year on year revenue growth rate. If you look at the escrow business, it's going be about the same size and shape in about twelve months from now. And from that perspective, I think the window is opening very soon in terms of thinking about the optionality of that business in terms of its future structure, where it's domiciled, how it's domiciled and when you might take it public, whether you might do a pre IPO round, whether you might keep it private for a few more years, which market you might head to and so forth. We've certainly received a fair bit of inbound discussion about this. There's a lot of interest in this business. I personally think this is going to be a phenomenal business in the longer term. It is unique in its nature. It is a has a very, very large regulatory moat around it. It is unique in its offering in terms of it can handle large transactions, which other payment systems don't can't do, and complex transactions. It allows, for the first time, people to buy and sell things like houses online, cars online, oil wells online, jewelry, import and export of shipping containers as opposed to letters of credit and so forth. And so this is going to be unicorn unquestionably. It's going to be, I think, much bigger than a billion dollar business in time. And so I think the window to where we can start thinking about these things is now. And certainly there's lot of investors approaching us wanting to have discussions about this. There's a question of ultimately which market it will end up on. I think for me, there are three different markets it could potentially end up on as a listed business. The easiest to list and the closest market would be the Australian market. And I think the window of opportunity for it to get to the Australian market, if we were to consider that route, basically, it's open to consideration now. And towards the end of next year, would look exactly like France looked terms of the scale of the business, or very roughly similar. Post that, we could consider The UK stock market because that's where you've got Worldpay, Adyen, Global Collect, etcetera, A number of payments businesses is a bit of a home for payments businesses. Then ultimately, you've got The U. S. Markets where you'd probably want to be doing £100,000,000 in revenue before thinking of going there, although there are many exceptions. But that is a market where you might want to think about staying private a little bit longer before you go there. Now there's thinking around all those three markets. That thinking has commenced already. We have investors who are pitching us things at this point for different routes, including keeping it private for a bit longer. And we're thinking about these things at this point. There's been no decisions made. It's just the optionality is there. I think the benchmark you can think about is, towards the end of next year, it kind of looks roughly, in terms of parameters, a bit like France looks. So you can kind of draw back to thinking about that. But also, it's in a really hot market. It's also very unique, and it has a massive moat. And the markets now are significantly hotter, I would say, than they were in 2013. '20 '13 was when technology was eating the world and they were hot, but now they're in overdrive. So there are higher valuations being paid. There are higher multiples in the stock markets. There are bigger deals being done in the venture space. There are bigger valuations being paid in the venture space. And so it's a more attractive situation today than it was in 2013 from a company's perspective. Any further questions? Yes. So the question about cash balances, which I'll probably pass off to Neil Katz from Alex, which is about France's user obligations are often higher than the cash balances. Why is that the case? And effectively, are we using sometimes negative working capital to fund the business? A microphone so you can answer the question? Yes, we do sometimes use negative working capital. We've been running this business for so long. We know the cash flow trends and we know the way our user obligations work in terms of the timing of when payouts are required. And some of our user obligations, even though they all reflect us as current liabilities, we know that there's a percentage of those that are sort of more longer term in nature. So the cash flows are quite predictable from our perspective and feel pretty comfortable at the levels that we run that ratio of Visa balances to cash. So we expect to go to profitability quite soon, hopefully. We're at that breakeven close to breakeven point. And as Matt says, it's not going to take very long for replenish those cash balances quite quickly in the near term. Yes. So freelance.com is a business, correct me I'm wrong, Neil, it was profitable in Q2 of last year, Q3 of last year and Q4 of last year. Is that right? Yes. And it was negative in this half. It's a freelancer business. Escrow was profitable in third quarter of last year, fourth quarter of last year, first quarter of this year and second quarter of this year. Yes. Well, if you look at our segment reporting and our half year report, the Esco division was actually very profitable in the first half of the year. The freelancer made a loss, but we're quite confident that we're able to get that close to breakeven and profitable in the near term. It's not going to take that much. Just a small increase in revenue will turn it around quite quickly. I will say there was a question about quarantine balances. The escrow business does quarantine user obligations. They're actually in trust or in escrow around the place. That's a regulated environment. In California, our free answer payments are in the escrow environment, in a regulated environment, which are quarantined. But yes, there's another $41,000,000 of quarantined cash off balance sheet. Chris? Okay. I'll open it for a little bit longer for further questions. Sometimes people are a bit shy before they ask a question. But we've got everyone here. And if you want to ask a question, you can. Or if you want to do it privately, can email investorfreeance dot com and speak to any of us privately, including the management team. I know some investors like to do that, whether it's talk to Jackson about escrow or Tom about freight or Sean about enterprise. I forgot to mention Sean McMicken's on the call. We can talk to him about enterprise sales or Neil about financials, or Adam about product. Any other questions from anyone? Ray asked, Any comment about the significant drop in share price in the last few days? The share price has a mind of its own. If I kind of knew how it worked, it would be great. Sometimes things are going well and it goes down. Sometimes things are going not so well and it goes up. It's a tightly held stock. It's about 23% free float. The practical level of free float is probably a bit less than that because there's some long term investors there that have been accumulating shares for some time. And so very little news can move the share price up or down a lot. I've seen before the share price move up by 50% in two days, right? On the back of a fairly positive, but a fairly small announcement. So it can get knocked around up or down. So it is a volatile stock. I think in the long term, it's going to play in our favor, right? Because in the long term, if you think about the business at a very high level so last year, we did £892,000,000 through the bank accounts. This year, it should be over 1,000,000,000. And we're breaking profitability. And we're in broad areas of payments, freight and labor. We have marquee businesses with all three. Freoncer, we're the largest online workforce globally for freelance talent. Strategic. For escrow, it basically is the only online multi jurisdictional escrow company globally that allows payments above a few thousand dollars, and it's going to your EBAs and your Shopify and so forth around the world. And in terms of freight, Tom now runs the largest Australian freight marketplace by a long way. More freight on the average day is posted in these marketplaces than the distance from the earth to the moon. This is a pretty amazing business with three real gems of assets. And I didn't talk about Freelancer in terms of the corporate side of that, but at some point, that will be a public company as well. And I think it's going to have even faster revenue growth than escrow, right? So this is going to really knock the lights out because we've got the distribution already. We've got the jobs already. The loads are already being posted. There's $300,000,000 of loads being posted every year on the platform. And so if you think about the share price, well, what's going to happen in the natural evolution of the group? So the group at some point will get index inclusion. At some point, it will go probably most likely into ASX three hundred first. At that point, every fund manager in the country will have to own the stock. And the tightly held business in terms of the shares means that it's going to be very, very hard for every fund manager to get set, right? And at that point, when finally there's realisation around the true potential of this business and that it becomes, I think, in my mind, properly valued, there's going be a scramble for the stock. And I think that's when you're going to see the tightly held nature of the stock really take off. The other thing that's going to happen as well in the short term is we've just become traded in The U. S. On OTC best markets. So we're under the best category of OTC best markets, which is QX. That's the top tier. That's where Fortescue is. And there's bunch of other companies that have just recently gone OTC. And there's Adriatic Metals, which is a bit of a market darling at the moment in the precious metals space. They've just gone OTCQX. And the next step from there is DTC, which is basically electronic trading. At the moment, even though we're tradable in The U. S. On ticker FLNCF, we're not actually visible on platforms like Interactive Brokers. And we will become visible as soon as DTC goes through, which is a bit of an archaic process, but it should happen in the next couple of months. And at that point, for the very first time, we'll actually appear on The U. S. Share trading platforms. So our customers and our shareholders and potential investors will be able to purchase the stock without having to get an ASX share trading account. And it's a lot easier in countries like India to trade U. S. Stocks on The U. S. OTCQX than it is in Australian listed stocks. So we have a lot of customers, 53,000,000, 50 four million customers, and a whole bunch of them I know want to buy shares and freelancers. And at the moment they can't, because they can't get an ASX share trading account opened. But the minute we go DTC, they will be available in those regions. So I think we're going get some support from our customer base. So I think, again, it's going to play in our favor at that point. Any other questions? Okay. Okay. I'll read it out so people can hear it. So Alex asked again, which payment gateway, domain names, watches, cars, etcetera, within escrow are you most excited about in the next five to ten years? And what's okay, so let's ask that question first. I'll pass this over to Jackson to answer that one. Which category of escrow are you most excited about? Thanks, Matt. So the first part to say is that the size of transactions online is growing year on year. So those top end of transactions in 02/2005, no one would even think about buying a a car online. Now the place that people start looking for their next car is is online, and I'm excited to see where that trend goes in the next ten years. So we're right now transacting oil fields online. The sky is the limit. I'm very excited to see what will happen with our our partnership with the energy domain and as we expand into into oil and gas. And of course, that naturally lends itself into discussions around real estate, which, again, is going to be a very big vertical for us in the future. Yes. And I'm if you ask the question for myself, I think automotive is pretty exciting for me. We're in eBay Motors. We're in Classic Cars. We're in Haggedy. We're in AutoHunter. We're in where else are we in, Jackson? You're in the thick of it. Yes. Best car finder. Look, the point about the automotive market is every every customer is looking for a safe transaction. The sellers are looking for for a safe place to sell. Buyers are looking for their dream car, and they they definitely don't wanna run into a scam. So Escrow is a great fit for for automotive marketplaces. And and, frankly, as we're seeing more and more adoption, the pace just picks up month on month for both the inbound and for our sales team. Yes. So a great question. There was a follow-up question, which think was, what's the main thing no, on, before that. What is the most important thing you can do to enhance Escrow.com's moat? So maybe I'll answer it from my perspective, and then maybe Jackson, you can answer it from your perspective. The first thing I'll say is I think there's a massive regulatory moat. If I wanted to start this business again, and I could take the best people in the company, I could take Jackson and Neil and Adam and so forth and Sean and so forth, and let's really start this whole business all over again, I couldn't do it. I mean this is a business that only exists because it was started by Fidelity. SoftBank put USD 30,000,000 into it. It had two fifty staff back in 1999. They actually IPO ed it as a business unit of Fidelity, with some other business units, it started back in 02/2001 approximately. And it's been going for twenty years. To operate in The U. S, there's 50 states. It's state by state licensing. Four territories don't four states don't require it, six territories. 52 licenses need to operate in The U. S. These states, to get licensed state by state by state, takes years to get engaged with them. In some circumstances, five years. You need to be bonded in each state with multi million dollar bonds. They've got different rules. In California, you've got to have an escrow manager that's licenced sitting in an office. He hits a button every week to let payments go out, or every day. In Washington, you have to have a separate trust account. In Arizona, you've got to offer interest to the customer, even though the other states expressly forbid taking and offering interest. It's all very complicated. The rules are all conflicting. It is extremely cumbersome. On average, we're audited every two years by a regulator. We're not just regulated in The U. S, but in Canada, Australia and soon to be The UK, imminently The UK. So we're perpetually in audit. And the funds hit off balance sheet in trust. So this is a very, very difficult business to get going and exists because of the regulatory environment Fidelity makes it so hard because of the regulatory environment. And because Fidelity ran it for a decade and put a lot of money into it with SoftBank, etcetera, is the only reason it exists. And so that moat is huge. The more we get regulated around the world, licensed around the world, the bigger the moat. Regulators around the world are forming a view that marketplaces can no longer take payments and put them on the balance sheet. In Europe, under the Payment Services Directive two, this is the case. In California, the Department of Business Oversight, which has now been renamed I keep getting this wrong, I got it wrong this morning, Jackson. It's DFPI, of Financial Protection and Innovation. Correct. Innovation did it right. They've formed a view that if you hold money for the provision of a service, it's escrow. They wrote a letter to Airbnb and said cease and desist. They wrote a letter to Fiverr and said cease and desist. They wrote a letter to ninety nine Designs and said cease and desist. They wrote a letter to Design Crowd and said cease and desist. They wrote a letter to Freelancer and said cease and desist. We said, well, it's okay. We actually have to know it for escrow. We'll put it through escrow. So we put our California payments through escrow, right? But Airbnb had the financial resources to go and try and get regulated in every single state, and they went and spent that. Millions and millions and millions of dollars took them a very, very, very long time. Or they could go along and talk to Jackson and pay 50 basis points, 60 basis points. What would you offer Airbnb? Something like that probably? I'll let you know as soon as I talk So my perspective, increasingly regulators are forming a view that you're going to have to go towards an escrow business and actually insisting on it. And I think that regulatory mode is huge. Now Jackson, you probably have plenty of other modes you can think of. Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing to say is that escrow.com right now, today is the most licensed online escrow company in the world. So that that regulatory moat in terms of acquisition of licenses, is well formed. We can always extend that. And and the question is, well, how would we extend it? The answer is through volume and through category specialization. So additional categories require certain additional licenses. We're always open to acquiring those and developing out the deepness of of our relationships with with regulators. So I'm always always open to hearing about new license classes that we can enter, but primarily the answer to that is is volume. The more volume we are doing in each one of these states and each one of these territories, the more well known we are to those regulators and the easier it is for us to be on the right side of those regulations. So as we grow and mature as a business, I expect to enter additional license classes and deepen our relationships with all of our regulators. I also think with Builder Motors, we get integrated in places like eBay Motors and so forth. Like, why would you integrate a second payment system if it existed? And they don't exist. So don't even know of an escrow business with two licenses. Do you, Jackson? None have jumped to mind. Primarily, most escrow businesses are geographically located in just one state. So multi jurisdictional is is extremely rare. Okay. The next question is probably for Adam, which you can get the microphone, is what's the main thing restricting Freance.com's growth? Just passing the microphone to Adam Apologies. In terms of revenue growth, the number one drag right now on freelancer is the memberships. And I believe we've given a bit of talk in the commentary, but I'm happy to kind of cover that now. The primary reason behind this drag is we basically made a big effort in the beginning of the year and and late last year and and throughout last year actually to reduce the amount of spammy bids in the marketplace. And you speak to our customers, you know, their number one, I believe it's at least in the top three complaints is that our bids are, you know, a little bit spammy. There's a bunch of reasons for that. You know, we do offer a lot of well, we did. We do offer a lot of bids on high end plans to free and, you know, an effective bidding strategy in some cases is just copy and paste. Anyway, so we we made a concerted effort to to to eliminate that spam or at least, you know, reduce it. And, unfortunately, one of the like I sort of alluded to earlier, one of the big benefits of our high end plans and, you know, mid tier and high end plans is basically the amount of bids on offer. So, you know, by by by reducing the in store. Crane penalties for spamming, we we actually inadvertently devalued the primary benefit that our top end the mid and top end plans, you know, offer. Now I still believe this is a positive a positive, net impact on the the the marketplace despite, you know, the the aforementioned revenue loss. You know, it really did clean clean the bits and address a major customer complaint. And so the strategy moving forward is basically three pronged. The first of these prongs is to or to deprecate the lowest level plan, the intro plan. That plan costs a dollar a month and frankly does not deliver a lot of value to our customers. So we're going to deprecate that and move those users onto basic, which is $5 a month. We'll make a bit of extra from that. But on top of that, I think we'll deliver a lot more value to to the freelancers. The second prong in in in in this approach is just to add a lot more benefits to these mid and high end plans that are not just bids. And we've already released one of these, which is the bid insights feature, which provides, you know, freelancers doing volume bidding with a lot more analytics into, you know, their bids, how much the employers, you know, rate rate their bids, do they rate them highly, poorly, how you know, do employers look at their bid? All of these kind of stuff apps like this, which, for instance, value quite a lot. And we we did see some membership up sorry, some revenue up uplift on this, but there's still obviously a lot more work to be done to diversify the benefits of these these plans and create a lot more value in them that that it's not just bids. And then the final prong in this strategy is obviously to release, you know, new plans and new new new new lines of business. And the big one there is we actually have an existing plan called corporate, and we're going to expand that fairly dramatically with a new set of features. And we'll talk more about that in the future. But that should lead to some significant revenue growth. And there's more discussion around that video from the half year results from yesterday. So if you'd a copy of that, just please email investorfrance dot com. We'll send you a copy of that from yesterday, there's a lot of discussion about them in the Q and A. Any other questions? I think there's a question from Ray about prospect of dividends or is the strategy development spin offs. We're not thinking about dividends at this point in time. Although, as I said before, I mean, you've got breakeven profitability and you've got big numbers going through the bank accounts, 1,000,000,000 a year plus going through the bank accounts, and the revenue number where the revenue number is, any incremental jump in that revenue number has to be soaked up somewhere. Otherwise it accidentally makes profits. And there's no CapEx in this business. It's only OpEx. And the OpEx is headcount. And you can see the headcount numbers is up 13% in the half on the year. And that was a 13% increase in headcount to four sixty five staff. There was a decrease in marketing expenditure with the new predictive model. That will increase a little bit in the third quarter and the second half. But you can see that if that revenue number goes up by an extra £20,000,000 where is that £20,000,000 going to go? You might increase the marketing, marketing, trying a few new things. You might increase the headcount by a certain amount, but you're not going to double the headcount, right? And so it's got to go somewhere. One thing we've done well at this business is we don't dilute the shareholders. So we don't do excessive capital raisings, capital raise after capital raise after capital raise. We have done raised some money pre IPO to buy a business, never raised any operating capital, and took I think it was Simon, I can't remember exactly what number was. It's 2.5 or 1.5. Can't remember what the number was. But we raised about that quantum to buy our website, and that was it. And then we took it public. And then it opened on the market in the hundreds of well, on the first day, over USD 1,000,000,000, in the hundreds of millions, it's been since. And there was no other money raised prior to IPO. And post IPO, we there was a little bit of the smallest amount of money raised at the IPO. And then there was one other capital raise, which was to buy escrow. And we ended up paying USD 7,100,000.0 for escrow. And that's going to turn into a in my belief, it's going turn into at least a billion dollar business. So we don't dilute the shells unnecessarily. We value for shells. So at some point, there's going to be excess profits. We're going figure out what we have do with them. But for it's basically dueling the three businesses we have now. And I think we've got them in a good position now where all three can really stand on their own two feet and become big businesses. And so that's what the focus is now, is operation. Next question is, do you still love running the business? Do you still love running it in ten years' time? If the shareholders will let me, yes, I'll stay running it in ten years' time. I love the business. I was up at one a. M. This morning talking to investors overseas between one a. M. And two a. M. Spoke to some investors today, actually for too long. Had my phone somewhere for two and half hours, and Adam and Neil were saying we're going hurry up on to the AGM. But I love what I do. Spend all my time working on this. I don't really have much of a life outside of Freelancer. And I think it's exciting. And I think there's a long way to go. And for me, I want to build this into a very, very, very large company. That's the challenge. Extreme ly large company. And do some amazing things and transform not just the world of work, but the world of international trade and the world of freight. And I think the businesses are pretty amazing in how they fit together. And we're kind of building the next Amazon on a shoestring budget. We've got a long way get to Amazon level, but we're giving it our best shot. Any other final questions before we wrap up for today? Okay, thank you. So thank you, everyone. So again, if want the transcript of yesterday's half year results, you've got a video of that, please email investor dot com, investorreference dot com. You can also email us for one on ones. Otherwise, I look forward to talking to you in the future. And thank you for joining the first half of twenty twenty one financial results presentation.