Matt Barrie: Group gross profit declined 16% to AUD 9.6 million. Lower cost offset more than half the decline in gross profit. EBITDA was +AUD 0.7 million. The group recorded an operating profit of a slight positive compared with a slight loss in H1 2026, and a positive net profit before tax. Cash was AUD 16.5 million as of the end of the quarter, and the group remains debt-free. We achieved an all-time record quarter for Loadshift, and Loadshift is also profitable at this point.
Matt Barrie: On a run rate, that is in the seven digits. escrow.com grew GMV 18.6% or 28% in US dollar terms, with a rising new star category being wholesale electronics, which is now 12.8% of GMV. That looks like it will continue and end up being our second biggest category. Freelancer revenue declined 26%. I will talk about in the segment performance. This continuation of the last quarter has issues, and we are working through those issues as we speak. I will address them in a second. There are some positive signs on that section.
Matt Barrie: Skipping down to the group, the segment performance. As I mentioned, the GMV declined 27.6%, which is about 21.7% in US dollar terms, and revenue declined to about AUD 6.8 million, about 20.5%. This was a continuation of what happened in H1, a slight slowing. Look, it hasn't been a great quarter for Freelancer, or it hasn't been a great year for Freelancer. We've been knocked around by really 3 to 4 issues that have been related that we are slowly getting grips on each of them.
Matt Barrie: The first issue I wanted probably to highlight is the second issue here, which is really on platform stability and organic search. For the course of 2024, 2025, 2026, we've seen ever-increasing search traffic, primarily from AI scrapers, that has increased about 1,300% over the period. That caused, particularly in end of 2025, going into 2026, quite a number of stability issues, and we know that the customer acquisition of the business is very sensitive to bugs and platform stability.
Matt Barrie: I'm pleased to report that we have largely solved the platform stability issues in the last quarter. Uptime has been very good. At the same time, the de-indexing that we suffered as a result of both this as well as remediation efforts to stop the scraping has rebounded. Google is now indexing about 5 million of our pages, up from 1.2 million at the start of the quarter. The traffic quality is not as good as it was before. But this does continue to rise, and we are one of the most heavily linked-to sites on the Internet.
Matt Barrie: So, fingers crossed, if we continue the remediation work that we're doing. We're also enhancing our logged-out surface. This will continue to rise. We're also, as I'll explain a little bit later on, expanding into quite a number of new, highly targeted, high value, sophisticated, and very interesting verticals, and that's also increasing our SEO surface. So that issue I think has been stabilized, addressed, and remediated.
Matt Barrie: The second big issue I should probably talk about is payments. As I flagged in the first quarter of this year, we had a fairly disastrous migration on one of our credit card gateways. Which basically, with the migration that one of the gateways asked us to do, that resulted in a number of our merchant IDs being consolidated, where some of those merchant IDs had paying existing customers and didn't migrate across properly. We were actually unaware that this migration was actually going on.
Matt Barrie: As I mentioned in the last quarter, as soon as we got wind of it, we jumped on it and we've been working very aggressively with the payments team to peel off various flows from those gateways. I will say that when you look at our main US credit card gateway, the business of Freelancer looks very healthy. There's a certain amount of initial payments coming in and there's a growing recurring payment volume coming from that gateway. It looks like a very healthy business. Customers are returning, and the customers are spending more.
Matt Barrie: This particular gateway looks fairly catastrophic, that I'm talking about here. We've since pulled off pretty much the vast majority of the volume from that gateway, and we're deploying new payment gateways, new merchant IDs, new alternative payment methods. For example, in the quarter, we've launched Google Pay towards the end of the quarter. That's currently in the final stages of the A/B test and looking reasonably positive.
Matt Barrie: We will, really as our top priority from here, be focusing on flow by flow by flow, really getting these payments to look like a main US credit card gateway, which I do say looks very healthy and actually would show a growing business in Freelancer. This is something we have really got to put our heads down and work pretty hard on. As we speak, we are in the process of commissioning Indian payments. We have a fresh merchant ID for our UK payments, which we are in the final stages of a migration of APIs across to before we will go live with that.
Matt Barrie: We have other flows currently in the works. We are in the middle of this. We do think we have got a strong handle on what went wrong here, and we are in the midst of rectifying all of this. I think we have got some stability in the payments, and certainly with the new payment methods that are being deployed, we see some growth. This I think is well underway and we just have to put our heads together and continue working on that. The last major issue is in terms of platform integrity controls.
Matt Barrie: We tightened up the authentication of the site with two-factor authentication over the course of the latter of 2025. With increasing authentication, you obviously have friction issues. We have been progressively tweaking that friction away. I think we have optimized it to the best we can have done. We have lifted quite significantly the security of the platform in the process of doing so. But this, combined with all the other things, did lead to some churn, which we are now trying to fight to bring back. I am not happy about this.
Matt Barrie: It has not been a great really 12 months. I do think we have got some stability. I think there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I will again point out that when we look at our main credit card gateway for the US, it does look very healthy. Customers are returning, and it is in a position of growth, and we just need to get that working across all flows and just continue to optimize the core infrastructure as we launch new product, new features, et cetera, and continue to grow the business.
Matt Barrie: While I think we have provided stabilization to the platform, we have got to now work to bring the revenue into positive growth. I think we are heads down about it. The quality of the marketplace does continue to grow in the underlying features and the improvements that we make. We have quite a number of A/B tests that we have been running over the last number of months, which do show some underlying improvements in things like award rate, funnel conversion, and so forth.
Matt Barrie: Average project size increased about 25% to $498. Projects receive about 63 bids on average. So liquidity is very strong. AI-related work is growing to 7.7% of GMV, up from 5.7%. Project GMV, and 7% in US dollar terms. Employer-rated Freelancers are up. Freelancer quality is up to 4.83 from 4.78. We do maintain the highest rating on all the major sites like Trustpilot and Sitejabber and so forth, compared to our peers.
Matt Barrie: So, the customers do love us despite some of the core infrastructure problems we have had. In the enterprise division, we are doing more work with NASA. We are doing something in robotics this time. Robotics specialists supporting digital twin simulations of multi-agent robotic systems with applications for lunar and Martian exploration. Some of you might remember we put the fifth astronaut on the Artemis mission, being the Rise zero gravity indicator for children's education.
Matt Barrie: We are continuing to work on the human genomic editing challenge, which is a multi-year, I think it is about USD 7.5 million now, challenge, with four or five reagent tests complete, and final testing scheduled for later this year. Our Data S-index innovation event was held in July, where the four winners advanced, and with a Boom: Trajectory Unknown Challenge for the distribution of particles in explosions also was resolved. We also worked with the United Nations Development Programme to mark underwater explosive ordnance.
Matt Barrie: I think you can see by the quality of the work we do there, that we do very high and sophisticated work on Freelancer that is very hard to do anywhere else on the internet. In field services, things are starting to move a little bit. We have got a field sales pilot for a very large trillion-dollar global payments provider. It began in July. The sales team have really boosted their cadence in terms of sales funnel activity. In September, we are onboarding quite a number of merchants for this particular payments provider.
Matt Barrie: In the US, we signed a service agreement with a medical device manufacturer for on-site work in medical care, and we are starting work there as we speak. We have also built two products in the process of doing this for managing and dispatching field workers. Something that would have taken us years to do in the past, we managed to do in the quarter, and also another product to run the field sales team for the big payments company. That is starting to get some real progress happening.
Matt Barrie: The enterprise also did a number of work for other companies. It is a very large trillion-dollar e-commerce company we do research and localization and video production for, et cetera. There is some work we did there and other BPOs and so forth. Look, I will talk about in the outlook in a second, the future. But really, this has been just working to get stabilization, work on the core infrastructure of stability, which is done. Search, which is lifting.
Matt Barrie: Payments, which I think is somewhat stabilized and growing now as we deploy new payment gateways in the platform integrity controls where we had churn. We have optimized as much as possible, and we now just focus on growth. For escrow, we are up 28% in terms of GMV. This is over the summer quarter, so this did pretty well. Revenue was basically flat because we were working on larger value transactions rather than smaller value. We think that will uplift in Q4.
Matt Barrie: It is just you do have a bit of a slowdown over the summer holiday period with activity in terms of count. But we think that will lift in Q4. Certainly, the GMV was quite up as we power into a very strong and I think very large new vertical wholesale electronics. That is about 12.8% of our GMV in the quarter, and it is our fastest-growing vertical. We have had quite a number of meetings in this vertical, which is new and very, very large. We have a whole dedicated workflow that we are planning on deploying.
Matt Barrie: There are also some other interesting verticals that are popping up, such as data brokering and so forth for the AI companies. On products, we migrated to a new platform, which was outstanding. We have activated JPMorgan Chase for domestic processing and rolling out international USD processing. We have quite a number of innovations there to try and get the mantra of fast, secure payments very fast.
Matt Barrie: I think with a number of initiatives in the real-time payments sector, which we now support on our accounts that we are rolling out progressively over Q4, I think that will provide a phenomenal experience. Also electronics and domain names will be our major drivers of growth in Q4, and we will be attending and sponsoring one of the largest conferences in that sector.
Matt Barrie: Loadshift delivered the best quarter on record. Revenue increased 18% to AUD 1.1 million. GMV increased 16.9% to AUD 8.9 million. September was the strongest month to date, doing about AUD 380K, up 13.7%. GMV is AUD 3.1 million, up 9%. Growth was driven by higher marketplace activity and conversion. Loads awarded increased by 14.8%, and the award rate also lifted. I think it will continue to lift because we finally deployed full PSTN and in-app calling.
Matt Barrie: We now have, across all the modalities, calling going through our system. We lifted the call connection rate as a result of that to 93% from 21% on estimates only. We have some optimization to go on that. As you can see, the award rate, as I have always been saying, started to lift as a result of this. I think we can continue to lift the award rate, which would lift the monetization of existing flows through the site, in addition to growing more loads on the platform.
Matt Barrie: We have also introduced a new way of loads being found and published by carriers, which is basically a big map where truck drivers can basically put their return legs or put empty legs up on the site. We are in the process of making this automated, which allows a huge amount of liquidity to be surfaced. In the early days of FedEx, the innovation that happened was the planes used to only fly when they were booked. When FedEx came along, the planes flew empty or not, and then they auctioned off the spare capacity, and that opened up a whole new sector in low-cost air freight.
Matt Barrie: We are basically doing that for trucking, in addition to how the platform works today. I think that is pretty exciting and something to look forward to in the future. The monetization continues to improve. Paid memberships increased, and we have enterprise membership and so forth. We are also awarding larger and larger jobs. There is a AUD 300K job which has not been reflected in the Q3 results, but will be reflected in the Q4 results. We have a number of conferences we are also attending, et cetera.
Matt Barrie: Now, I want to talk a little bit about outlook before I open up to questions. Of course, Dylan is on the call if you want to ask him more about financials, and I have also got Andrew here about product. The main thing we have got to do for Freelancer is we really need to focus on payments. Our US credit card processing looks very healthy. When you look at it is a growing business. Customers are returning. That is growing. We just need to get all the flows looking like that. Google Pay literally is being commissioned as we speak.
Matt Barrie: India is in progress. It has been in progress for a while because it is quite complex. We have implemented the e-mandate, which is a way in which cards can be charged when someone is not present, for things like memberships and so forth. We have an integration with one gateway, and we have an alternative payment provider which is being integrated now for things like RuPay and UPI. There is quite a bit of bureaucracy in that particular space, but I think that that will deliver quite a strong benefit because we have quite a large Indian user base.
Matt Barrie: We have the UK payments being peeled off with in-app payments coming for Apple Pay and for Google Pay, et cetera. We are just laying the focus stream by stream by stream and getting those payments up and running, because that is a big thing. There is probably going to be some questions about AI, because I know everyone, a hot topic. My thoughts on AI are well-published. There are a number of essays on Medium and a number of guest spots on Macro Voices, which is the number one macroeconomics podcast in the world. If you go to macrovoices.com, you can listen to it, see my thoughts on it. But I think we sit in a fairly unique place in the world.
Matt Barrie: On Freelancer, while there are quite a number of types of work that AI can do, and AI is very good for getting things started and for imagining and so forth. What we increasingly find is AI is great for that, getting things going. But you very often need humans to make it real and to get the work done. We have the largest workforce of humans in the world, about 90 million. The other main benefit of Freelancer is we are pay per outcome, not pay per token. When you get a job done on Freelancer, you are paying fixed price most of the time. So you know what you are going to get, and you know what you are going to pay for it, and you do not release the funds because they are held in milestone payments until the job is done.
Matt Barrie: It provides quite an attractive way of getting work done. Of course, all the freelancers are AI-powered as well, so they have access to all the tooling. One of the big things we need to do is we need to surface which tooling the freelancers have available better to the clients, which we are working on now. The skills of all the freelancers now obviously being enhanced by AI, has really lifted the quality and the value of the marketplace. So now you have got a lot of highly entrepreneurial, highly skilled professionals that are already priced in the best model you could think of, which is fixed price, pay per outcome, but also with the benefit of being able to access not just human skills, but also AI skills. Not that everyone wants AI.
Matt Barrie: There is a lot of people that actually specifically don't want AI-related work and make a very big point of that for various reasons. Either they don't want AI work, or they don't want AI to be sucking the content into the training data of the models, or they want a human to talk to, et cetera. A contest model, I think is also. We've got a number of optimizations coming into the contest model, which I think is going to be great and very AI-proof, because effectively, it's a competitive marketplace for getting work done, whether or not it's human-human, augmented with AI or AI-related. When that gets deployed towards the end of this year, I think people will see some pretty exciting things and pretty interesting outcomes as a result of that. It's very key for us that we should build the bridge to AI.
Matt Barrie: I think many times people get stuck in Claude or what have you, and go in loops trying to get things done. It's great for punching something in and saying, "Oh, I want to build a website," and you get a nice-looking page. Then you realize to actually turn that into a fully featured site that goes into production, et cetera, that actually works and has ongoing tweaks and ongoing maintenance, et cetera. Either you're sitting down there trying to hammer away at the keyboard and paying your AUD 200 subscription or whatever it is, having tried to figure it out, and not everyone is capable of doing that, or you might end up in a bit of a loop. We've got to build that bridge to AI. So, whether it's via API or MCP, we've got both efforts underway already.
Matt Barrie: We already have a beta MCP server that we're testing at the moment. We really think that we could be the operator please for AI. So, when people get stuck in Claude or Figma or whatever it may be, or ChatGPT or any of the software packages that are out there, whether it's a CAD package or whatever, and you want to get to a human operator, you hit the button, operator please, and you get a human professional on demand, fixed price or pay by the hour. I think that is a great marriage and I think a big customer acquisition channel in the future for us that we're aggressively working towards.
Matt Barrie: It's also key that we work on. The great thing also about technology is that while there can be temporary dislocation, over time, whether it's the mechanization of agriculture or the mechanization of the factory, the information economy and the transistor and so forth, and software and the internet and mobile apps and so on. Ultimately, what we have seen is that more jobs get created than get destroyed over time. What happens is with new jobs is the productivity gains are so large that what you can get done, they're highly deflationary, these advances. What you can get done in terms of bang for buck gets leaps by orders of magnitude. It's key for us that we enable more sophisticated and more complex offerings to be done on the site. There are also quite a number of jobs that can't be done by AI.
Matt Barrie: Obviously, a lot of the physical jobs, et cetera. There is a lot of things that literally I think AI struggles with. I think, for all the things that people say design work may be at risk with AI, and there is flashy things popping up on social media all the time about, oh my god, motion is dead or design is dead or what have you. I don't think AI has really cracked that yet. I think one thing that humans have is taste and judgment about trends and so forth, that I think is actually quite hard to supplant. Internally, when we look at automating a lot of the work that we do internally to kind of make the benefit of AI.
Matt Barrie: Where AI is most applicable is things like queue processing, whether it is answering support tickets or processing requests that come from customers in various form factors, for manipulation or processing or reporting or what have you. AI is very good for that. But we have seen it really struggle in trying to be at the bleeding edge of, for example, design quality work and so on. But the key thing is we have got to work on enabling more sophisticated and more complex offerings. We are going to be launching something literally in the next couple of weeks, as a first step towards doing that, where you will be able to get something built that you would never be able to get done before online, through quite a neat product offering that will continue to get enhanced.
Matt Barrie: I won't take the thunder away from it, but that literally is in its very final stages of testing and in with customers now in beta and about to go live. We are also rolling out quite a number of vertical offerings, to really build focused, value add, interesting, contemporary, sophisticated, high-end vertical niches. A bit like eBay did with cameras, cars, collectibles, computers, and so forth. They had category managers and really focused on those categories. We are doing the same thing and we are launching a range of categories, whether it is humanoid robotics or electric vehicles or anime and so forth. So, there is quite a number of things that progressively come out there, and we really have a factory set up to do that and rolling out. We have quite a lot of things we are doing around collaboration and sharing.
Matt Barrie: We have been incrementally releasing some of that over time, which has been a little bit masked by some of the greater issues we have been dealing with. But I do think that is going to lead to some big improvements on the customer acquisition front as well as retention front with all the teams' work and so forth we are doing. As I mentioned before with the contest offering, I think we have something that is very future-proof and very exciting and works well with or without AI on the contest front. We have also been automating a lot of the back end. We have been doing obviously a lot of work on the cost control. We actually have a fair way to go still on the cost control. We have got quite a number of areas which we are chipping away at, and cost control will continue to flow through.
Matt Barrie: Then really, probably the last thing I want to talk about on the acquisition front is really just on the channels. What I mean by customer acquisition channels. I do think AI is going to be a great new customer acquisition channel for us, as I mentioned before, as the bridge to humans from AI. I think we offer a fairly unique proposition with all the largest workforce in the world of humans, that we have ratings and reputation and so forth too, and bridging to help really make it real once AI gets things going. On the channel front, we did get knocked around. I think we are seeing some stabilization.
Matt Barrie: On the SEO front, I mentioned before, we kind of had a bit of a mass de-indexing event where we kind of rate limited the crawling of our site by some of the AI scrapers, which were also using the same IP addresses to do search indexation. As I have mentioned here, that has bounced back quite significantly. The quality of the traffic is not as good, nearly as it was before, but it does continue to lift. That will continue. On the search engine marketing front, we have made quite a number of optimizations. There has been a little bit of cost control while improving the return on investment there. I think we have quite a lot of new avenues to explore there over the next quarter or 2, which I think will deliver some value to the site. Overall, it is really 2 out of 3 businesses are going okay.
Matt Barrie: One business, we just need to work at. I think we have identified the issues, and we are just aggressively in there this quarter. We are giving a bit of an update, but hopefully in the next quarter we will kind of show you some real progress being made there. I will now open it up to Q&A with the audience. As I mentioned before, Dylan Carter, the Chief Financial Officer, is on the call, calling in from the US East Coast. So thanks, Dylan, for making yourself available. I have Andrew Bateman here from products. I will open it up, and I think, Dylan, you are going to be doing the hosting for this.
Dylan Carter: Yep. If there is any questions, please feel free to put it in the chat or
Matt Barrie: Okay. We cannot hear you, Dylan. I think there are audio issues. Maybe, Kurt, you want to do the hosting then? Any questions in the audience? Not currently.
Matt Barrie: Do not be afraid to ask a question. If you want as well, you can always email myself at matt, M-A-T-T, @freelancer.com, dylan, D-Y-L-A-N, @freelancer.com, or investor@freelancer.com. Or you can post your questions in the chat. No questions. Okay. I have given us 60 seconds. There must be questions. No? Well, thank you very much for calling into the Q3 results. I will see you in the full year results. Thank you very much.
Operator: Goodbye
