Freelancer Ltd
ASX:FLN
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Freelancer Ltd
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Hello, and welcome to the Freelancer Limited Fourth Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. Joining me today, I have our Chief Financial Officer, Neil Katz [Audio Gap] of the fourth quarter results, and then I'll open up to questions and answers. So please save your Q&A for the end. And as always, you can direct your questions to any one of the 4 of us in the room. So today, we announced our fourth quarter results. I'll just go through the slides. Overall, it was a pretty good quarter. The group gross payment volume was an all-time record of USD 191.8 million, which was up 47.5% on the previous corresponding period or AUD 261.8 million, up 37.7% on pcp. In the fourth quarter, we had the second highest on record gross marketplace volume for Freelancer.com, which is after the third quarter numbers at USD 25.9 million, which was up 20.0% on pcp or in Australian dollars, it was $35.5 million, up 12.3% of pcp. Escrow had its best quarter ever by a long way. The GPV was an all-time record of USD 156.6 million, up to 56.9% on pcp or an all-time record of AUD 213.6 million, up 45.7% on pcp. Ex China, Escrow numbers were even better at USD 149.8 million, up 62.6% on pcp. Overall, the group net cash receipts for the fourth quarter were $14.3 million, down 0.9% on pcp. They don't reflect the underlying performances of either the Freelancer or the Escrow businesses. And I'll explain that in detail in a minute. In terms of the Freelancer segments, the $1.1 million of funds that were due from a major customer for engineering services in the fourth quarter, and this is actually primarily for work that was accomplished in the earlier parts of the year. And about 20% of that was from the fourth quarter. About 80% from the quarter is prior. So these funds were actually fairly well overdue. And the other thing is we're not running and do not plan on running the Startcon conference this year or actually in the close foreseeable future. And normally, Startcon runs in the fourth quarter, and it did run last year. So pcp, the numbers don't really reflect the true underlying performance of the Freelancer business. If you adjusted for the overdue payment, it was about -- it would have been up about 10% year-on-year pcp in U.S. dollars and, including Startcon, up about 13.1%. The underlying key revenue lines for Freelancer did reflect the growth we saw on the GMV. Project fees were up 19.3% on pcp. FX fees were up 21% on pcp. Transaction fees were fairly similar. So the core business revenue lines actually were growing in line with GMV, but the overall group numbers don't really reflect that due to a couple of adjustments. Escrow cash proceeds were USD 1.73 million, up 46.5% on pcp. The group had positive net operating cash flow of $0.1 million for the quarter. For the full year, it was actually positive $7.9 million. So that was a good result. And we ended with cash and cash equivalents of $34.4 million, which were up 7% on pcp. I will note that Freelancer, Escrow and the group were all profitable individually and in total in the fourth quarter and in the second half. And some part of this is actually before that. So we are -- yes, all parts are moving quite well in terms of profitability. Now drilling in a little bit into the Freelancer segment. As I mentioned before, the gross marketplace volume, which was paid to freelancers, the cash going out of the business were the second highest on record after the third quarter at $25.9 million, up 20% on pcp, or $35.5 million, up 12.3% on pcp in Australian dollars. And in the second half, the gross marketplace volume was an all-time record of USD 51.8 million, up 17.7% on pcp. We did have a headwind in Australian dollars. That's about 7% in terms of currency on the quarter. The Australian dollar appreciated from 0.6838 to 0.7314 against the U.S. dollar. As I mentioned before, cash receipts were down slightly, AUD 11.9 million or USD 8.6 million, where they're up slightly. And as I mentioned previously, some of that was due to engineering services quite lumpy and engineering services that we had basically delivered in Q -- quarters 1, 2 and 3 of 2020. That was 80% of the contribution and about 20% from the fourth quarter and Startcon. Startcon as a conference actually has been in the past running unprofitably. And not running it actually will deliver a positive benefit of about $600,000 to earnings. Receipts overall for the conference in FY '19 were about $675,000. So we've just been rolling off that, and that's partly responsible for the fourth quarter receipts numbers. As I mentioned, the core underlying revenue lines in the Freelancer business were on par with GMV. For example, project fees were up 19.3%, FX up 21%, transactions fees still like similar. Membership fees were a negative contributor. That was actually down AUD 237,000 or about 2% of cash receipts. And this is, I guess, another example of having to be very careful in a complex dynamic system. We've made a change. One of the most commonly -- feedback about the site is freelancers not reading the proposals -- the project briefs in detail and actually have been very quick to put their bids in and not actually writing unique bids where they've actually read the project very fully. So we've made a number of efforts to actually improve that by penalizing freelancers from cut-and-pasting bids or spammy bids. We also let the community report these bids and so forth. This has improved the quality of the bidding of the site, slowed things down just a little bit so that the freelancers do take the time to actually write a good brief. Overall, however, that has caused a number of the very top freelancers to actually downgrade their plans because the plans -- the membership plans primarily provide as a benefit increasing numbers of bids as you actually go up the membership tiers. And it's -- a lot of the sort of, I guess, poor-quality, spammy bids that are coming from the freelancers who actually have large teams and actually bidding on lots and lots of projects. And as a result, there were some membership downgrades from the premium plans, which was a negative impact on the membership fees, although overall, the quality of the bidding per se has improved. So it's one of those things we just have to kind of take the hit in terms of revenue to improve the quality. In terms of demand on the site, very, very healthy. I mean web traffic to Freelancer increased 46.8% year-on-year, with direct traffic up 92.3%. You can see that reflected in things like the Alexa rank. We're now the 1,190th biggest website in the world. We're up 794 places in the last 90 days. Across the board, all the traffic statistics were pretty good. Yes, pages views were up 131% to 407 million in the quarter. Pages per session were up 58% to 9.9. Average session duration was up 26% to 42 minutes, and the bounce rate was down 22.5%. And so overall, we've had some great performance. I will point out that, that Alexa rank, 1,190, is only for our Freelancer.com website. We've actually got 53 sites, including the .com and all the regional websites like Freelancer.in and Freelancer.de and so forth. As you go into the country domains, for instance, .in, for example, gets a fair bit of traffic. And so if you actually group that all together, some sites actually just run all their country domains off the one .com, and they do it with a directory stop, we would actually probably be in the -- well into the top 1,000 websites in the world in terms of traffic. Now in the last quarter, we reported that -- an all-time record in gross marketplace volume, and it's in the third quarter. And in the fourth quarter, that continued. You can see in the commentary that we've provided to the market that the GMV numbers actually are very strong and have been very strong from about April last year and continue to be strong. I will say that in 2021, it's only the -- we're only about 1 month into the quarter, but the GMV numbers year-on-year are actually better than the fourth quarter numbers. So things are looking strong into the year. But I will caution that there's been only 1 month into the year, but they are better than the fourth quarter numbers for the GMV in U.S. dollars. Similarly, jobs posted were up 20% in the fourth quarter on pcp. There was 524,000 jobs being posted. It was up 20.2% on 4Q '19. If you break down and look at the various segments where the demand is actually being driven on the site, there's different ways you can get work done. You can get projects done. You can get contests done. In terms of projects, you can get fixed-price projects done and hourly projects and so forth. So I want to kind of just maybe drill down a little bit for a second and talk about a little bit more detail what's happening there. So we put a lot of work into the hourly funnel last year, which I'm pleased to report is doing very, very well. As we transitioned from the legacy website to the modern web stack, which is a sort of single-page architecture like Facebook, which is really quick and lightning-fast to move -- transition between pages. In 2019, we did kick a few own goals operationally by shipping a few of these pages too early. These are very, very complicated pages. Effectively, we're rebuilding the entire website in this new architecture. And in the process of doing so, it did interfere with the funnel in a number of different areas. And that's kind of what explained a bit of a slowdown in previous years in terms of revenue growth. But we have been fixing these things one by one, and I'll give you an example. In terms of the hourly projects, you can see, if you think of 4 of the commentary, which we've uploaded to the stock exchange, hourly projects now are actually growing faster than they were prior to that rollout of the SPAs, is well and truly growing very, very strongly. And in the fourth quarter, hours tracked is up 27% on pcp, so growing even faster than the overall GMV. In terms of contests, the numbers are going off the charts in terms of participation. We now get 1.2 million entries every 28 days into contests. There's no other contest platform in the world as liquid as we are. On average, there's 260 entries per contest. Contests can start from $10 and go up. In fact, we've got -- our biggest contests ever are coming through in 2021 as part of the jointly won NASA tender of USD 25 million we won with a number of other companies. We have started to win task orders from that, the first being a USD 365,000 task order for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which is basically the hydraulic power scheme in the United States. It's for -- basically improving that. It's being managed through NASA. And as part of that, we're going to have 2 contests in 2021 of USD 100,000 each, which are by far the largest contests we've had on the platform. If you put a $10 contest into Freelancer for things like business cards, you can get 400 entries. So -- and in the past, we put $10,000, and we've got thousands and thousands of entries. I know when we redid our logo many years ago, we put $10,000 and had about 13,000 or 14,000 logos to look through. So when we put $100,000 in, it would be interesting to see what happens. But contest platform is phenomenal in terms of engagement. And you can see there the metrics, that the entries are just up with the Board, and the average number of entries per contest is also up with the board. So over 85% of contests now get entry within the first hour, so it's incredibly dynamic. So the area we now need to focus on is our fixed-price funnel, and we have a big team on this. And we're pretty confident we will get this into pretty good shape, and that will be growing at a very fast speed once we power through that. And that -- then we'll have basically all the projects, contests, fixed price, hourly all powering along. I will also point out that we've got mobile looking pretty good. We've -- in the third quarter, we ripped out the legacy mobile version of the website and replaced it with this new front-end stack. And actually, the numbers have been pretty good. In the second half of 2020, fees from mobile web grew 51.5% on pcp. So mobile is looking pretty good, hourly projects looking good, contests looking pretty good. And we just to need basically get the fixed-price projects, other things which we're working on actively now in Q1, and everything will be firing on all pistons, which would be great. In terms of looking at supply, so looking at the number of freelancers coming in and how that's shaping up at the moment. We are by a very, very large margin the largest marketplace in the world for crowdsourcing in terms of users. We've just passed 50 million users of the site as of last week. Our closest competitors have between something like 1 million and 2 million last time I checked. Might be 3 million now, but it's well over an order of magnitude in terms of liquidity. And in terms of being able to source talent across almost 2,000 different skill areas, anywhere in the world where there's electricity and there's Internet, there's no other marketplace that comes close to the ability to find people so equipped with such a breadth of skills and in geographic locations. In the first half report of last year, we detailed, in response to big growth in new clients, we had about 10 million sign-ups last year. That we did see with all the labor coming in that the -- because it is a dynamic marketplace where pricing is adjusted by demand and supply, that the average completed project size did fall from USD 216 to USD 161. Now at that point in time, I said that there was a big spike in labor coming in as 94% of the world's workplaces went into active lockdown measures. In addition, there was a big spike in demand coming in from job posters and our new job posters, as we call internally here, freelancer rookie job posters. Now typically, if you use a website, you just try it out, put a little bit of money in, and over time, you build your confidence to then spend more money. So there's a big spike in new -- demand from new clients in terms of ratio compared to old clients as well as a huge spike of labor. So just at the time that, that number would rise, and it did rise, it rose to $172 by the end of the third quarter. And in fact, for the full year now for 2020, that number has risen to $178. And if you do look at the long-term trend line in the presentation, and I will try and skip through to it now, you will see that the general trend for average project size on the website has been up over time. And there was only really 2 instances where it dropped down. One was in the global financial crisis, as you can see in the bottom right hand of this presentation where again, you had very similar dynamics. We had a lot of labor coming online at the same time as you had a lot of new clients are coming along with sort a temporary drop. But overall, the trend over the last 10-plus years, it's been up. And we're seeing that again with COVID, a big influx of labor and a big spike in new clients that we do expect this to trend up. Now we're also doing a number of things to increase this over the course of the year. We're building out a number of collaborative tools and -- which allow people to work more than just in one-on-one environment but to work in teams. And we expect that number to grow actually fairly rapidly over the next years as we allow people to work in small teams of, say, 10 or so where you might have a web designer, a copywriter and a graphic designer working together with you and a few coworkers and maybe some of our staff from Freelancer assisting you such as a recruiter and a technical copilot. So we think we can add a 0 to the end of the average project size with a number of these collaborative tools. So that's a big thing we're going to be focusing on over the next year. Now I did talk about, in the last quarter, something a little bit about expired fees. This was another sort of dynamic that kind of came out of the big influx of labor onto the platform. So in the second quarter of 2020, we saw a huge number of new freelancers coming on board at the same time as new clients. And in fact, that shift of talent onto the online world did result in an increase of about 12% in terms of the shift of the ratio of work being won by new freelancers compared to experienced freelancers. And one of the great things about our site is it's free to sign up, free to bid on projects. As you win jobs, you pay us over time. And it's not like you have to pay any upfront fees or access fees or management fees to actually access work. So you can be anywhere in the world, and you can just sign up, bid on jobs. And as you start making money, you can start paying us. So that's been, I think, phenomenal in terms of its contribution to, I think, providing opportunity income to people in all sorts of places around the world as well as I think it's probably one of the best forms of aid, foreign aid in the world in the form of providing -- feed a man fish, feed him for a day. Give them him a job, feed him forever. And so I think we've done a tremendous sort of good in terms of changing lives. This is what company does. But in the process of doing that, new freelancers are less likely to complete work than experienced freelancers obviously because some people are just trying out the site for the first time and also how maybe it works or maybe they're not as committed as experienced freelancers that are in there and doing this day in, day out. So in terms of that, we did see a lift in expired fees within the second quarter of last year. Now I did also mention at that point in time that we were doing a number of things to bring that -- those expired fees down. And those included improving the trust in the marketplace through increased verifications of new users, tightening up payment verification, calibrating membership plans and so forth. You can -- again, you can always start for free and be in the free membership plan and access the site, but we did deliver the calibration. And we did bring down the expired fees by about 48% compared to the third quarter of '20. And we will continue to work on that over this quarter and next quarter, et cetera, to see if we can bring that down a little bit more as well. But there will always be some element of expired fees in the business because our model is basically that anyone in the world can sign up, win work and not pay any money until they actually start earning money, which I think is a phenomenal amount of good we're doing in the world, that we're bringing opportunity to people sometimes in underprivileged and remote areas of the world. Now talking a little bit about mobile. So I did talk about how we ripped out the legacy mobile website -- I think that was third quarter. And we saw a big increase in fees being generated from the mobile web using the responsive new stack. And we are in the final, final, final stages of replacing the iOS and the Android apps. So iOS is already in beta testing. If any of you on this call would like to -- use the website regularly and would like to take a look at it, we're happy to send you a test flight link. Just send me an e-mail at matt@freelancer.com, and we'll send you a link so you can inspect the beta. But basically, it's the full website. It's the full desktop website, which is now responsive, wrapped in the technological capacitor, and it's delivered on your phone in an app, which means every bit of functionality you can access from the desktop website, you can access in the app, right? And as we saw with ripping out the legacy mobile version of the website, which is a separate website, a cut-down version of the website facility within fees, we expect to see that with iOS and expect to see that in Android in a big way. So iOS is in beta. We're expanding that beta this week to many, many thousands of users. If you're a member on Freelancer right now, you'll get an e-mail this week saying -- with a link to basically invite you to join the beta because we're now going to full production. And Adam, when are we going to roll out iOS? When are we targeting in the App Store to roll it out to basically 100%?
I believe the first couple of weeks next month.
Yes, first couple of weeks of March. So...
No, Feb.
Sorry?
February.
February, sorry. This month.
Yes.
I believe we're in February now. So basically, iOS is imminently going into full production. If you want to be part of the beta, you can send an e-mail or if you're already a member on Freelancer, you'll get basically a link e-mailed to you this -- the next day or 2. I think it isn't going out today. But iOS is not far away from full production rollout. Android is not far behind. We aim to go into beta testing, I think also this week or is it next week?
I think it's next week.
Next week. Next week, we're going into beta testing for Android, and then we're rolling out over March with that going into full production. Android's lagging a little bit behind iOS simply because our clients are more likely to use iOS. Freelancers are more likely to use Android. And so basically, we prioritize iOS because that's where the clients are first, but both will be up this quarter in mass production. And we hope to -- well, we expect that -- and we know actually that we're going to get an uplift here because there's simply functionality that didn't exist before in mobile that does exist now on every single mobile way of accessing the website. Now the other positive thing about this is in terms of productivity with engineering. So we now have one code base for desktop, for mobile web, for iOS and for Android. Now there is obviously a bit of function that goes into the rack that makes it still work on mobile. But it basically means that when we produce a line of code, it goes everywhere. And it's not like we have to have 4 engineering teams to manage 4 different code bases, which is what happened in the past and why I think sometimes it could take a bit longer than expected. It's simply because you have to try and keep features in lockstep before platform. So that's gone now. So right, we want to push everywhere. So that combined with the productivity gains we're getting with the new stack, the new front-end stack, which is on Angular and so forth, where -- things are moving in leaps and bounds in terms of products and -- product features and so forth. So this is fantastic, and it will just mean that every user of Freelancer will gain access to kind of all features and functionality as they get shipped. And so that's a big one. In terms of enterprise, there is so much stuff happening here. And again, you're also welcome to ask Sarah Tang if there's any question you would like in the Q&A. But I'll just go through a few bullet points. These bullet points are in no particular order, and it's -- and absent hyperactivity in that team. And we're also hiring in multiple countries every week as new people or new heads are coming in. So in no particular order, GMV for enterprise grew 62% quarter-on-quarter. That's actually from last quarter to the fourth quarter. The numbers are still low in the scheme of things compared to the gross payment volume of the whole business, but there is very strong growth. We closed a further master services agreement with a global computer company, a U.S. computer company. I've talked about in the past how we have been running a pilot in Indonesia for computer or printer repair. So if you break your computer or printer, you call up the usual phone numbers or the usual support ticket -- support desk on their site. That actually gets injected into our system, and a freelancer goes out on a scooter and will have them rip and replace your computer or printer or laptop. That has been very successful, and we reported from that. We did have some great cost savings. That's now also live in India. That's the second country. We actually -- as part of that, our operational team expanded to India, so we have people on the ground now working for Freelancer in India. We've got many other countries in the list. I think the total is 13 more or so that are in the lineup and including the United States. Overall, this is a very large amount of business if we can win it all. There's still a lot of work to get there, but we are in the process of finalizing an agreement to basically do the engineering services and to do the integration. So I'll hopefully report on that very, very soon. Sarah will probably provide more detail on that, but we are effectively figuring out how we can fully integrate -- not a partial integration. They've actually upgraded it to a full integration into their systems so that globally using our Freelancer Global Fleet, which is our field services version of enterprise. We will be doing that --this in many, many, many countries around the world. And if we can get this all through to production and within all these countries, it's a serious number in terms of the GMV, which will make a big dent in the GMV numbers. So that's just one customer, and we have many irons in the fire. We also signed a contract with a global telecommunications infrastructure company to roll out 5G technology in Europe. We've been talking about this for a little while. The pilot had started already for that in the United Kingdom. And it's many, many phases. The ultimate prize is basically upgrading all the world to 5G telecommunications infrastructure with 24 different types of projects. But there are many phases to this. And after the pilot phase, the next step is basically tens of thousands of tasks across Europe doing various things related to 5G. And if you have any questions about it, you can ask Sarah in detail about that afterwards. Expansion also continued with a $150 billion consumer goods company that's seeing cost savings, about 90%, in their supply chain for labor for all sorts of back-end work, which is great. We signed a scope of work with a $70 billion multinational outsourcing firm, which is committed to spend more than $1 million in GMV in 2020. We're also excited to roll out from an initial USD 250,000 pilot with $100 billion multinational, 4 additional workflows for the client, including a bunch of custom platform enhancements. And we're about to sign another engineering services agreement with them. We closed $0.5 million revenue per annum licensing deal for the core enterprise products, which has already commenced. We closed a $1.1 million engineering services contract to build customer workflow integrations to scale and enterprise engineering in the first quarter. We have another agreement with them, which will be in the 7 digits. And in total, there will be 6 customers where engineering services will be engaged, with more in active negotiation over the course of the year. Talk a little bit about NASA, in which we have jointly won a $25 million tender with them. There were 19 companies in total, but we were the largest company by far in terms of the bidders. We started winning the task orders, and the first is, I mentioned before, USD 365,000 for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which is the hydroelectricity power regulator. And the project is basically to improve the reliability of hydroelectric power generation by automating safety equipment testing and reducing plant downtime. And we're unique in the ability to provide a supply of labor, of high-quality labor for this because through our partnership with Arrow Electronics, we have the largest pool of online electrical and electronic engineers globally on the Internet. So no one can come close to us on that. So that was a good win, and it shows how our partnerships are kind of paying off with each other. We also cohosted an event with Udacity and the Egyptian government with 95 other countries. We're doing a bunch of big things not just in Egypt but in other parts. But actually the Middle East, we've got some other big things hopefully we can announce down the track. And we made a number of releases to enterprise software. In terms of the head count of the team and so forth, we expanded in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia with enterprise. We've broadened operations for the first time in India. And we also brought on Chris Whittock, who is running the core enterprise product group, and he has worked at just about every staffing company in the world, and so he's a seasoned executive in this space and knows transformation systems better than anyone. So we're glad to have his expertise on board. So that's the Freelancer segment. In terms of the Escrow segment, we had a great quarter. Just trying to get the graphs -- get back to the GPV slide for Escrow. I mean it was the best quarter by far in the history of the company. You can see here, this is a 20-year history of the business literally from the year 2000 quarter by quarter by quarter. And we had a big uptick. So GPV was AUD 213.6 million, up 45.7% on pcp. In U.S. dollars, of which I think it was 85% of volume, is that U.S. dollars? Or is it higher than that 87% of the volume?
No, that is between 85% and 88%.
Between 85% and 88% of the Escrow volume is in U.S. dollars. Just I mean operating currency, it was $156.6 million, up 56.2%. And if you exclude China, it was up 62.3% to $149.8 million. Now I will note this was not due to eBay. So there is some upside potentially coming there this year. eBay Motors had a small contribution. It was in the single-digit millions. But this was from the core business of Escrow. So there's a big uptick. The number is looking pretty good so far in January as well. I will note that the last 4 months of 2020 were particularly strong for Escrow. December is usually a pretty soft month because you have the holiday season. But in December, our GPV was $84 million, which is up 91.5% on pcp or $63.8 million, which is up 111.5% on pcp. So very, very strong ending to the year with the Escrow business and with the doubling of the GPV in U.S. dollars, which is the main operating currency. And the growth is primarily attributed to the main business. So domain names, IP addresses and so forth on automotive and a smaller contribution from eBay Motors. In terms of -- I've got a video actually in the commentary of the CEO of eBay, discussing what we're doing with eBay, including their watches. For those of you who haven't watched it, just you can skip down to the 9-minute mark to get to the commentary about Escrow. We have rolled out Motors. That's live in production. And in watches, we're in beta with about 30 of their PowerSellers at the moment. We were planning on that going live in the fourth quarter of last year, but it got a bit close to Christmas, and the sellers basically didn't want to basically interfere with anything prior to the Christmas buying period, so they pushed it to March. So we're still in beta with that. We've been pushing a number of enhancements actually to eBay platform. We just turned on Friday ACH payments, which is a bit like direct debit in the U.S. The U.S. banking system is kind of antiquated, but it basically allows us to pull money from people's bank accounts, which is a new payment type that hasn't existed on Escrow.com before, and we will be rolling it out globally to all Escrow customers. That started with eBay, so that's went out on Friday. Already over the weekend, we saw transactions go through with ACH. That's good. We should get a little bit of a bump there across the board once we roll it out for everyone. And we've also been pushing a number of funnel optimizations. We're making the flow for Escrow look more like a PayPal checkout. And there's some -- actually some images and screenshots in the commentary of what that looks like. But it looks like your normal checkout flow, which -- and it doesn't require you to kind of sit there and set up accounts and so forth as the previous flow did. So all our partners will benefit from this as we roll it out progressively to everyone. And it's looking pretty good. And I will mention, Escrow is a very unique payment type in the payment space. We are the world's largest by far online escrow business. We've got about 48 financial services licenses covering U.S., Canada, Australia. We just hired -- she starts today, [ Rafaella ], in compliance, who's going to be our U.K. MLRO so basically our anti-money laundering officer and our API -- for our API application in the United Kingdom. So imminently, we hope that we will be awarded license stock right in United Kingdom. And that will basically allow us to really unlock that market and pound sterling. And so that's going to happen. And I will mention, we also got Chris Weir as the Head of Business now in Europe out of our U.K. office, who is driving sales and other activities operationally in Europe. So we've got feet on the ground there as well. In the fourth quarter, we had a number of partners who went live into production for Escrow. They included but were not limited to Blinker, which is the automotive marketplace in the United States. And I've mentioned before, I think we will hit the entire automotive industry globally over the next couple of years. It will take a few years, but I think we'll get everyone or close to everyone. eBay Motors down. Artland, we've been winning a lot of art marketplaces recently. We're live with Artsy. We're live with Artland. I think there's 2 or 3 other marketplaces we're also live with. So we're kind of -- it's early days there in the art world, but obviously, there's a lot of GMV globally for fine art. And there's a lot of mistrust about the provenance of particular paintings, et cetera. You have -- typically, transactions are international. It's a fantastic market for Escrow, really plays into all the core features that Escrow's known for. Livestock.com.au, the livestock trading marketplace. We're going -- we were -- we have actually transactions going live in that shortly. Energy Domain for trading mineral, oil and gas rights. We've also got a number of different customers that do things like trade intellectual property related to the film industry. Machine Market, another U.K.-based machine marketplace for industrial manufacturing machine. We do a fair bit of machinery now for industrial robots and so forth. And another automated classifieds marketplace called Antengo. Also of note, a major cut gemstone and jewelry marketplace serving private and business buyers is currents in integration but not live in production. So that's the Escrow segment. It was a great quarter. And in conclusion, overall, the group had $0.1 million positive operating cash flow for the quarter, $7.9 million for 2020. And we ended with cash and cash equivalents of $34.4 million, up 7% on pcp. Both Freelancer, Escrow and the group were all -- each and individually profitable in the fourth quarter and in the second half. And that was even though we had a 7% headwind for the quarter on pcp, [ as this trend ought to ] appreciate it. So I would like to now open up the floor for Q&A. You may address your question to either myself; or to Neil Katz, the CFO; or to Sarah Tang, who's the VP of Enterprise; or to Adam Byrnes, who's the VP of Product and Growth of the company. So operator, please open it up.
I have one question here from [ Adam Boltz ]. When will we get access to the teams functionality regarding the Freelancer product?
Okay. There's a question there, when will we get access to the teams functionality? And maybe this is for you, Adam. You can talk about the different aspects of -- different types of teams functionally we have.
Yes. So there's a few different plans around this. Obviously, plans that are letting sort of freelancers create teams internally among themselves. There's collaboration tooling, which is where you're effectively creating teams between clients and freelancers. And then finally, there's even the concept of a team among clients. And we will be working on all 3 of these sort of concepts, I would imagine, throughout this year. We have a number of sort of early prototypes, which I'll -- which I'm looking forward to talking about in future quarters. But yes, look, I think primarily we will sort of progressively roll it out throughout the year.
Yes. So we do have groups already live in beta. So this is the ability for people to get together in groups and basically communicate with each other. That's -- we're building out a number of professional communities around those groups as we speak, and they're live enterprise customers and for some of our managed service customers. We're imminently going live with team billing, which is the ability to share your credit card or your billing method with the people that work in your firm. So for example, if you're a small business and you have 4 people working for you, they can now share your billing agreement. When's that going live, Adam? It's like...
Oh, it's already in alpha. So it is live on the site. We're just progressively rolling it out to different customers and eventually to the primary site.
Yes. So I think customers will really start seeing that en masse in February, so that's the next few weeks. Then we do have the notion of teams as a corporate membership. Maybe you want to talk about that a little bit?
Yes. So a corporate membership basically, it's something like the very beginnings of a freelancer team whereby freelancers kind sort of band together and establish an internal company on the website itself. And this allows them to basically bid on projects collectively, work on them collectively and so on and so forth. We do have the additional functionality that -- already live, which basically allows a freelancer to sort of represent themselves as a company. And over time, we'll probably progressively roll out more and more features that also support this -- that will assist this rather.
Yes. And there's plenty of other things related to teams and collaboration that will come out of it over the next quarters.
Yes.
I'm sure...
It'll be a big focus.
I'm sure on the Q1 report for 2021, we'll be discussing quite a few things that will go out live to the market.
[ Richard ] has asked, it seems that the fourth quarter report was released -- no. It didn't seem that the fourth quarter report was released today. Was there a reason for this?
Yes. I think that question relates to the Appendix 4C. We're no longer required to release Appendix 4C. We got relief from the ASX in October after having issued about -- I think it was 27 consecutive 4Cs and 4 consecutive quarters of positive operating cash flow. And we sought relief, and so we no longer have to file these.
Yes. We will continue to issue quarterly reports in the style and manner as we have today. So we will continue to do quarterly reporting. But the actual 4C is usually in place for -- is primarily in place for cash flow-negative companies that are very...
Yes. I mean historically, it's for sort of start-up and mining companies who sort of are just burning cash. That was the intent to it initially.
Yes.
Yes. And our full year results, they're going to be released on Tuesday, the 23rd of February. So further details will be in those full results.
[ Michael ] has asked, how do you compete with Fiverr and Upwork as they continue to take market share?
Well, I would say in the fourth quarter, they haven't really taken market share from us because the GPV growth is basically on par with their GPV growth. Last time I looked at Upwork's numbers, it was 22% for GMV, and they're spending a hell of a lot of money to try and drive that growth. So I think we actually are growing. We're spending a lot less on a relative basis. Look, I don't want to comment too much on the competitors and so forth. But I will say, I think we've got the better strategy of the lot. We've got substantially more users than both of them combined. I think we have a better model than they do in terms of allowing the freelancers to kind of work however they want, whenever they want to work, set their own pricing and so forth. Some of the growth by the competitors has been driven artificially. It's been driven by increasing in commissions. And it's being driven by increasing the unit price work. And the way that they've done that has been by kicking -- either kicking freelancers off the platform or not allowing them to sign up because their hourly rate was too low or by removing free features on the platform. So for example, on at least one of those sites, if you sign up, you get a small number of bids. And after that, you have -- you're forced to go on a membership package. There's no other way around it. You've got to start paying, which is not a great experience for someone for the first time. Or by shuffling people to the back of the catalog, who may be providing work a bit more cost competitive. I mean you don't become the Amazon in the space by saying that my marketplace is more expensive and the vendors make more money because they can charge higher prices. You become the Amazon in the space by having the widest range at the lowest cost. And that's where we are. So I will say that if you look at the metrics and you look at the market cap of some of the competitors, I will say, our market cap is ridiculously low compared to where our metrics are. So I think that won't stay there for very long. I think the market will probably wake up to that in short order.
[ Tim ] had a question that related to that. Thanks, Freelancer team. Good progress, all metrics moving in the right direction. But can you make any comments on the insight due to the flatness of the share price and why the disconnect with improving metrics?
Share price sorts itself out in the longer term. I think a lot of people think that the prices have soared for a long time, and that's about to sort itself out in this way. So I think the share price, it's really dynamics of a couple of -- 1 or 2 sellers who have basically had fairly large lines of stock, which I think they've been driving out the bid. I don't know why they've been doing that, but I think that will sort itself out pretty quickly. And I think not too long from now, people are going to look at the share price and go, "Gee, maybe I should have bought more back then." I think it's ridiculous that the share price is at the same price as on the IPO back in 2013 when the business was doing $18 million on a forward basis in revenue. This year, we'll do over $1 billion in turnover, I'm pretty confident. And we're a top 1,000 website globally. To replicate this business would be almost impossible. And we -- plus, we have Escrow, which didn't exist at the time of the IPO, which will be IPO-ed in its own time, although I think it's probably on the business plan to IPO before that in the group. But people will look at the share price in not so long from now and they'll go, "Why was it ever this price," right? I think it's ridiculous. But the only thing that will sort this out is just time and execution and delivery of results. And that's -- I think you can start seeing some of that coming through now. And I think we haven't been in a better place in terms of product in the business since we started. I think we're in a phenomenal place. And I think if you look at the numbers, you'll see that all the parts are really staying in the fire. So I think there's a very bright future ahead of us. I also think we're in a space where you can not just add a 0 to the numbers. You can add many zeroes to the numbers. We're in the global marketplaces for services. The company is on par with the likes of the companies in the global marketplaces for products, the Amazons, the Alibabas and so forth. And there's a long way to go in the space. It's still very, very, very early days.
[ Adam Boltz ] had a question. Is there any plans for buy now, pay later service being offered as a payment plan in the future?
I do know the payments team has one of the many things in the road map to add one or more of those services to Freelancer. So I know it is on the project plan. I mean the thing that just turned on for Escrow has been ACH payments, which is direct debit. It is in the road map. I don't know where it is exactly, but it will probably happen some -- over some point probably this year.
Yes. We've been speaking to a few. I know we're -- there are a few of the main players out there that we've been in talks with already. I mean it's not that complicated. Ultimately, it's just another payment method that sort of gets added on. And it's like just a credit card payment from our perspective in a lot of ways.
Yes, yes.
So it just gets bolted on.
It's in the backlog. There's a lot of things in the backlog. It's just a matter of prioritization and gaining the engineering time to be able to do that.
[ Michael ] had a question. As you move into enterprise, how do you verify clients are not criminals, work experience is true, et cetera? Is there a scalable solution?
Okay. So when we talk about clients, we're talking about the actual job posted to the site. So I think you met the Freelancer site. So on the Freelancer site, there's an increasing number of verifications that we do. So we do do KYC on the platform on various attributives, including lifetime earnings, volumes of earnings. There are things that -- activities on the site that will trigger KYC. This is a fairly robust process. It's actually one of the largest teams in the company, is the KYC team. It's been running for many, many years. They're experts in knowing which way you're supposed to look in a Bulgarian driver's license and so forth. They know all the different ways in which these things get forged. They're pretty good. On top of that, we have a Verified by Freelancer program, where we will not just KYC you. We will also look at your profile, verify it's put in correctly, make sure the addresses are all checked out and so forth, interview you to know -- to figure out whether you actually know what you're talking about and actually can deliver on the skills and so on. We have a Preferred Freelancer program, which is a competitive program where you get to a certain level of quality and you get admitted to that sort of the top 1%. And that's the pool that we typically go to with enterprise, and they stand out with badges on the site. We have a number of certifications that we offer for skills. We aim to improve that hopefully sometime later this year. There's a number of other certifications where you can kind of pay to get your skills checked out and verified. And on top of that, we've got community policing, where the freelancers are also very, very competitive with each other. And let me tell you, they're faster than anyone to try and sniff out if someone isn't who they say they are and report them. And every profile can report and kind of -- as do the bids have report links on it, et cetera. And all that stuff gets triggered and goes to human operators to verify. So we've got quite a number of mechanisms. And I talk about the opportunity of running, detecting things and triggering things and putting things in queues. So there's a lot of stuff there to verify the talent and to make sure that it's all -- and on top of that, we've got a number of trust scores you've got on your profile. So as you do various things like verify your phone, verify your e-mail, verify your payment system, verify your ID and so on, that little lights up on your profile and I believe [ the only bids -- if not soon, the only bids ] which will make it very, very clear of kind of where your trust score is compared to others.
[ Ethan ] asks regarding Deloitte. How is this partnership progressing? What are some of the unique features that have been developed or used that is better than using any in-house? Will they be paying per staff head a month's subscription fee and general subscription revenue staff?
I'll take about 2 minutes for this, and I'll hand it over to Sarah because she's closer to the [ call phase ] with Deloitte. But Deloitte is a massive opportunity for us. So this is running out of Deloitte U.S.A. It's running out of the Washington office. That's been the amalgamation of several projects within Deloitte globally. So we have developed for them and deployed for them and continue to enhance a product called Deloitte MyGigs. And this is Deloitte infrastructure that's being deployed internally within Deloitte. It has 2 parts to it. The first part to it is that Deloitte -- the consultants can hire other Deloitte consultants. And so it's part of a workforce efficiency program. Deloitte is the largest of the big 4. They have about 400,000 staff globally. They said to us over a -- well over a year ago, I think 2 years ago that there is no way we can go 10x in terms of our staffing. That would be 4 million staff globally. You'll be like the People's Liberation Army of China. It would be very, very hard to manage that. So they know they're going to go to the cloud. So in addition to that, they're going to try and get utilization of their workforce up. So what -- there's 2 parts to Deloitte MyGigs. The first part is Deloitte consultants hiring other Deloitte consultants. That is live currently. That's scaling up to 52,000 consultants as we speak. It's over 20,000 at the moment. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it's well over 20,000. They've done over 100,000 hours' worth of work. So someone in the Deloitte Washington office can hire someone in the Deloitte London office or down in Deloitte South Africa office and access broader skill sets and talent and so forth. That's been live for a few months, and that's going up very, very, very rapidly. The Deloitte COO got on stage and told everyone about it and so forth. So this is Deloitte-branded infrastructure that's being rolled out. And this is -- Phase 1 is 52,000 consultants. There's Phase 2, which is multiples of that down the track. Now the second part of that is when you post your project, the left-hand button goes to Deloitte, the right-hand button goes to the cloud, right? And so that is not live yet. Deloitte are using our main website just as any other customer would be, posting projects all the time and getting things done by freelancers. But in terms of the Deloitte infrastructure with MyGigs, we have just closed a contract with them to deliver that. So the engineering team is working on making that enabled now. There's obviously a more detailed funnel that's involved with things like compliance checks and so forth. For Deloitte, work would actually go up to the cloud. So there is a fair bit of sophistication that we're building in, and also, that sophistication is going to be beneficial for other enterprise customers. So that's in the process of being worked on as we speak. Now in terms of the ultimate goal, there is a public quote that the CIO, Chief Innovation Officer of Deloitte, has said publicly and allowed us to use in our marketing material. And she has said that success for us is 20% of all U.S. consulting gigs going from Deloitte to Deloitte and 10% of all U.S. consulting gigs are going from Deloitte to the cloud to freelancers. So these are pretty big numbers, right? You can see there how much revenue Deloitte generates per annum and what percent that would be in U.S. consulting. So that's the main game. That's the ultimate long-term eye on the prize. And we are well on the way in terms of the infrastructure delivery. Now on top of that, we are also working with Deloitte to bring this to other clients around the world, other Fortune 500 or similar organizations. And there's quite a number of opportunities we've been working with Deloitte on that. But we won't probably make any detail about them because they're not public yet. Sarah, I hope that you maybe can talk a little bit about Deloitte.
Thanks, Matt. Well, that's a really well-said summary, pretty much captured all the important points. But when Deloitte first came to us, they had actually tried to build an internal marketplace themselves in order to solve one of the key problems with their commercial services, which was to drive up utilization rates and billable hours of their internal staff. Now their initial vision when they came to us was, like Matt said, to have 20% of their workforce at some point in the near future to be captured by the freelancer workforce. Now what they actually want to do is to have one unified platform that will be able to provide them to capture the entire life cycle of their workers from when they are internal full time to -- at Deloitte to when they potentially leave Deloitte, become a freelancer as well as open up that to the wider users of talent. And so we -- our vision at Freelancer Enterprise is really to be that default platform for all Fortune 500 companies to connect and collaborate with their blended workforce on one single platform. And that's exactly what we're building here with Deloitte. We started with building the MyGigs platform in which we're able to capture the entire talent workforce of their internal staff to drive up utilization rates. As Matt said, the next phase is really building that integration with our wider platform. And we've actually found so that Deloitte internally, when they were -- they had about 100,000 hours, actually now growing to 120,000 hours that have been posted on the MyGigs site. About 30% of the total posted projects actually had 0 bids internally, which goes to show that we've actually captured some great data in terms of figuring out what parts of the Deloitte organization they're highly liquid in terms of the capacity and skills and what areas they might have a skill shortage internally with. And so what we're doing in the next phase is we're integrating with the wider Freelancer Enterprise platform and connecting our ecosystem of freelancers to fill that skills gap internally to Deloitte, remapping out work packages and skills where it's not so highly liquid within Deloitte. And so phase after that, we actually are in conversation right now to scale MyGigs and this whole kind of total talent ecosystem to a number of Deloitte clients, one of them actually being a really big -- one of the biggest health care companies in the U.S. as well as a number of their other commercial clients. So that is a summary of what's been happening with Deloitte. And they are paying in terms of the pricing model, a monthly fee, a licensing fee for us operating the platform. And like I've said before, they've actually tried to build an internal marketplace internally but realized that just that technology just wasn't their capability, and it's actually too hard. And so we have seen actually that narrative with a number of our clients that are coming to us to -- for more of the platform technology solutions.
And in addition that, we generate when they go to the cloud all the normal commissions. So for example, the 10% Freelancer commission and so forth.
Exactly, yes.
Yes...
Matt, can you hear me? It's [ Louis ] on the call.
I can, yes.
Yes, yes.
Just had a quick question on the Escrow side. Obviously, very strong volume growth. Was there a standout product in that? And do you think that those sort of numbers are sustainable?
It was actually just the mix of the everyday business. So there's a fair number of large-value domain names that went through, IP address blocks that went through. We do a lot of them. I mean the IP address business, we basically -- the default platform now for IP address is to be paid for around the Internet, which is great. And obviously, IP4 addresses are running out. There's contribution from automotive. There's contribution now from art, fine art. As I mentioned, we're in Artsy, Artland. There's about 4 art marketplaces we're in now, which is growing. And I mean all sorts of bits and pieces, like it's constantly pretty amazing things and the stuff that goes through. I mean it wasn't really through -- from one major partner. There was a little bit of contribution from eBay Motors that was single-digit millions in terms of GMV. It's looking pretty good so far in January. I'm not going to commit to forecast the quarter. But the big initiatives for Escrow, which I think -- which will help, which are in the very near term -- and what I mean near term, I mean in the next few weeks, is, number one, rolling out the ACH payment method to all customers. So at the moment, it's just enabled for eBay in terms of the first beta, and it was turned on, on Friday. So I literally went to [ Chris ] this morning. And the first thing I did when I walked in the office, I said, "There's 3 things I want you to do. I want you to turn on ACH globally for all customers as fast as you can. I want you to turn on pound sterling for all customers as fast as you can. And I want you to push the follow-on improvements you made with Escrow Pay to all the Escrow Pay customers." So those 3, I think, will deliver wins. And then on top of that, we've got a lot of partner activity. We've got a lot of funnel optimizations that are happening with Escrow. There's plenty of thing happening there. But yes, it's really -- it was just the fourth quarter, ordinary course of business. I mean I am looking forward with both Freelancer and with Escrow for one customer. And I know there's so many irons in the fire now both with Escrow and with Freelancer. I know that there's going to be a customer where there will be a noticeable bump with GMV or GPV or if not multiples of GPV, global GPV with one customer. There's just -- there's some really big things happening. Now a lot of this stuff is complicated and complex. And there's a lot of work to win, and these things are usually phased. So it's not like the tap turns on and just the volume comes through straight away. It's progressive rollouts. But if we have won one, for example, automotive and won watches with eBay, we should go win many other categories. And in the -- I don't want to preempt anything, but in the conference call that the eBay CEO gave to the market, and there's a link in the notes where you can go through the 9 minutes, he talked about many -- what they're trying to do with eBay, for example, is they're trying to go category by category by category and just get rid of all the reasons why you would not use eBay. And traditionally, people look at eBay and they go, "Okay, it's a bit of a flea market. If I buy a phone from there or I buy designer clothes from there, how do I know it's not fake? How do I know it's -- there hasn't been a problem with it," et cetera. And so with watches, it's really the starting point for them with the -- they've got the authenticity guarantee, which means that any watch you buy goes through a third-party authentication service. They will inspect the watch, pull it apart, make sure it's not fake, put it back together, put a sticker on it and give you the sticker, you put it in a nice box and send it to you all the way through your funds in Escrow. So they're talking about that now in other categories. They're talking about the authenticator service now being provided in things like sneakers. We are not currently engaged with sneakers, but we are engaged with other parts similar to that within eBay. So I anticipate that both across other marketplaces in automotive as well within eBay itself and other businesses like eBay that there's a lot of opportunity. So -- and some of these businesses have got some pretty big volumes in some of these segments. So there's quite a lot to come, and I think we've only just started scratching the surface of our partners. We've only really had the API able to be integrated really in the last 18 months. And it was -- and so to win customers like eBay and so forth, Shopify and so on, it's a pretty testament to kind of where I think it's going to go and the business itself and the strength of the offering compared to what's out there normally in the payment space.
Great. And just on the enterprise, you said that enterprise GMV is up 62% quarter-on-quarter. Does that include all of these development and integration fees?
No, it's excluding.
So there are some questions here regarding cash receipts reducing about $11.9 million, which is down 17% from the fourth quarter last year. Why are cash receipts reducing while GPV is up 47.5%?
Yes. So I addressed that in some detail at the beginning of the quarter. I don't know if you joined at that point. The core -- so in terms of Escrow, it's quite simple. The cash receipts are growing in line with GPV. The GPV in U.S. dollars is up 56.2%, and the cash receipts were up high 40s. So Escrow is in line. With Freelancer, if you actually drill down into the actual core revenue lines of Freelancer, they're also growing in line with the GMV. So GMV was up 20% in -- 20.0% in U.S. dollars. The project fees were up, I think, 19.3%, and the FX fees were up 21%. The transaction fees were up similar sort of numbers. There are a few things which have caused the Freelancer numbers to be down. One is that we group in with Freelancer the Startcon conference. The Startcon conference we ran in 2019. It did not run in 2020 and won't run in 2021. So we've rolled off a contribution in terms of cash receipts there. For the full year of 2019, there were $675,000 of cash receipts for the Startcon conference, which have zeroed in 2020. I will note, though, that, that conference is running at a loss. And not running actually will contribute $594,000 roughly positive to earnings. So it's actually beneficial actually not running it, even though that -- it's optically in the fourth quarter numbers, a little bit negative. The other thing was that we had some funds for engineering services, which were 80% performed in Q1, Q2, Q3 and 20% in Q4. They weren't paid until 2021, and they should have been paid well earlier in 2020. And so that would have been up 10% in U.S. dollar terms year-on-year if that comes through. And there's [ a few things ] around memberships and so forth, which I've talked about earlier and I probably won't repeat in detail, which was a little bit negative and so on. So overall, the underlying key revenue lines are on par with the GMV, but there's a few things that affected negatively in the fourth quarter. And some of that now will kind of just roll off, and we should see some good growth. And I will point out that the GMV number for January so far is actually higher than the 20% reported here in U.S. dollars at the moment. So things are looking pretty good in January.
[ Alan ] had a question regarding -- sorry, [ Andrew's ] question. 50 million users, you had 19 million job posts. That means half the users don't get a job. What are you -- what are we doing in Freelancer to increase job posts?
Yes. So it's always been like that. So it's broadly reflective of the world population that in the world population, the vast majority of the world's population live within emerging markets and developing markets and need a job and primarily come to the website to get work, right? So since the beginning of the business, there's been twice as many users of the site as jobs posted. Now there's a few things we're doing here to drive this now. I will note in the fourth quarter that job numbers were up 594,000, up about 20% year-on-year. So they're broadly in line with the GMV growth numbers, right? We are making and doing a number of things to make it easier to solicit work from a freelancer's perspective on the website. So there are a number of things we're working on as we speak and over the course of this year to allow freelancers to basically win work and propose work as opposed to wait for a project to come in. In addition, we're doing a number of things around the customer acquisition side of the business and all the various channels, whether both organic or paid, although in paid, it's less on paid. It's more organic to bring users into the business, whether it's SEO, whether it's referrals, whether it's inherently viral things from a site like sharing your project with other people and so forth, bring coworkers in and forming teams and so on. And in addition to that, we're matching our latent large supply of labor with large demand in the enterprise division. And as I've mentioned before, in previous conference calls with the enterprise division, we really don't spend [indiscernible] of time with any customer that we don't have the potential to do at least USD 30 million in GMV per annum at some point in the future. That's not only the first year, but you can ramp up to that. Below that, we refer them down to the lower managed service layers of the sales organization. But we're really aiming at the top level in terms of GMV, and we've got enough irons in the fire that we're pretty confident at least [ 1 or 2 of which will follow up ] in a big way. So a good question. Thank you for that.
[ Alan ] asks if there's plans to improve rewards for the affiliate program.
Yes. So it's something on the list that we've been talking about wanting to improve. We've had for many years an affiliate program that hasn't been loved, and it's kind of -- it's been left by the wayside a little bit. There's a lot of work we want to do there on that affiliate program. The great thing about the affiliate program is you're paying your own users to refer users. So it's not like you're paying a third-party platform like a Google or a Facebook to refer users. Plus, you don't have a variable cost of acquisition like you do on these other platforms, which are auction-driven. So one day, you might be bidding on a certain keyword, and it's profitable. The next day, the profitability changes because it's a dynamic system, and it could change because of greater demand from competitors or it could change from Google or Facebook just changing the pricing. And they do constantly tweak things around with -- under the guise of quality scores and other touchy things like that, that they do to kind of ramp the revenue. But the good thing about affiliate programs is you have fixed costs because you say [ that you have to ] pay it. So yes, it is one of the many things that we've got on the plate to work on and improve. And it's just down to getting the resources to do it and a lot of hiring. And we're actually in the midst of hiring quite a number of people on the product side that can hopefully assist with this. But yes, that's a great question. And ultimately, at the end of the day, if you can pay people in your own platform to grow your own platform, it's the best way of doing things rather than pay a third-party platform to doing that.
[ Adrian ] asks about the halving of enterprise revenue on pcp from first half through 2020. Lots of talk of a strong pipeline, but can you provide color on conversion to a lot of these enterprise customers, if it's a sustainable revenue generation?
Yes. So I mean I don't know if, Sarah, you want to say something in a minute. But the ultimate prize we hope to win with enterprise is from GMV, right? So our strategy is not to charge an upfront fee, a big monthly access fee or engineering services. None of that -- with that, there's no upfront fee. There's no forced subscription you got to pay for, which is what some -- one of our competitors does. It's basically we aim to make -- generate revenue as volume goes through and not attributable volume. We're looking for, as I said before, a minimum of $30 million GMV per annum per customer. And that's kind of what we're aiming for. Now we don't know if it's 1 year, 3 year, 5 year, 10 years away with some of these accounts. But certainly, the overall consensus that seems to be driven by the C-suite from Fortune 500 is they're utterly convinced -- and these are their own numbers, they're not coming from us, that somewhere between 5% of their workforce will come from the cloud in the future and 25%. That's the rough numbers they're thinking about. They're not sure if it's 5%, 10%, 20%, 25%. They're not sure if it's 1 year, 5 years, 3 years, 10 years away. All they know is COVID has accelerated. And so that's how we aim to generate the revenue big time around enterprise. So we're not aiming to make it from enterprise engineering services, although that's been a reasonably large contributor in the past in a relative scheme of things. And it's very lumpy and so forth. That's just renting out bodies to do integrations to enable the main prize. And there are bits and pieces that enterprises do pay for in terms of the managed services and so forth, but none of that is compulsory. So that's kind of where the prize is. Now we are well down the path with a number of very large accounts with very deep relationships where we're doing deep integrations. We're having people we hired in a specific location of a world that are dedicated to these accounts. And some of these accounts, honestly, you could put 50 people on the account, and they still wouldn't be satisfied in terms of the number of people we could put on them to really drive the opportunity, right? So yes, we're doing what we can. We are operating within the constraints of, "I want to grow the revenue as fast as I can and the GMV as fast as I can while not going into a deeply negative cash-burning company," right? So that's a strategy, is that we're profitable. We've been profitable for a couple of quarters both individually within segments and also as the group as a whole. And we want to continue with that profitability, not aim to generate a large profit, although it wouldn't take much to accidentally generate a large profit at this point given the fact that there's no CapEx in this business, and there's really -- any revenue comes through be spent on other head count or rent, which barely moves and certainly in COVID, no one's really signing new leases, and if you do, you do at a discount, and marketing, which is a lesser extent of how we acquire customers. So there is potential at some point to maybe accidentally step up in the profits. But I aim to keep it profitable. And within that, we're hiring people all over the place as much as we can to basically grow the business as fast as possible. I don't know, Sarah, do you want to say anything about enterprise strategy and how it generates sustainable long-term revenue?
Sure. Thank you, Matt. I think when we started enterprise in 2018, the theme of boot strapping, as Matt was saying, is we found our go-to-market strategy was really to find a number of large Fortune 500 companies that wanted to help us build enhancements to elevate our enterprise product. And so the majority of that revenue came from engineering services, as Matt said initially, but that really is our long-term gain. And what we really want to win over is all the Fortune 500 companies to start putting 10%, 20%, 30% of their workforce in the future on our people system and on our platform, whether that's through MyGigs and the solution that we've built for Deloitte in which we're building that total talent and blended workforce ecosystem for them or through our platform. And so 2020, I think we really were focused on converting a number of those customers from doing just initial engineering services to pilots. And we had a record number of pilots in 2020 within the industry, such as consumer goods companies, technology companies, governments, professional services companies. So we actually now, at the end of 2020, finally see our hard work paying off. And a number of those actually have not, 90 -- actually, 100% of those customers have actually converted and committed to scaling up. And so what we're really aiming for in 2021 is a number of those customers have already come back and said, "Look, we're committed to the first work order of at least $1 million in spend." A number of them have mentioned scaling up to additional regions. A number of them has also mentioned, how do we actually -- now that we've got 50 people hired, this use case has really been proven to, across the board, increase NPS scores roughly about 20% to 30%. And a number of our customers have saved costs about 5 to 10x. And they're really seeing that there is extraordinary talent that we have, really the cream of the crop on our platform that we've specifically vetted for enterprise in a number of skill categories, namely technology, marketing and data science. And so what we're really focusing on in 2021 is, okay, how do we scale these use cases from 50 to now thousands of people that are getting hired? And so that's really the long-term game that we're aiming to play. And I think actually with it, [ Adrian ] had a question around Deloitte's internal outsourcing model. Is that something we're willing -- we're looking to charge for? Yes. So what we've done is it's on a per seat basis. And actually, within a number of governments around the world, including one that's very close to home, to all of us, as well as a number of Deloitte customers, we're talking through how do we actually scale that up to, yes, scale up the usage and so -- to a number of their customers. And what that will also give us is actually monthly reoccurring revenue as well as ability to grow our enterprise revenue on sort of that per seat licensee basis so that we capture the entire sort of the value of the total talent supply chain, if you will, from when somebody is a full-time worker, say, within Deloitte, the government, Facebook, whatever that may be to when they leave that firm and become a freelancer, they're still hosted on our platform, and they continue to do work on our platform, whether that's within a community that's specifically for Deloitte, their past employer, or any of our other Fortune 500 companies. And so we really want to capture that entire kind of talent life cycle, if you will. And so -- yes.
I'll just clarify that a little bit. So the per seat licensing is for the use case where the talent is internal within the company.
Yes.
So it's going from within the company to within the same company. So if I'm a Deloitte consultant hiring another Deloitte consultant, they're not -- obviously not going to be paying them with physical money, right? It's just billed with -- basically, it's time and materials internally in their internal tracking system. And certainly, we're not going to be able to charge a 10% commission on that work, right? So it's -- there's a per seat licensing model for that where it's basically the internal cloud within a particular corporate. When they go to the external cloud, hire freelancers, that's when we charge the commissions because there's actually money being -- money flowing through. I actually have a question from [ Michael Chan ], which is a good question. He said, enterprise, with both Upwork and Fiverr both targeting this segment, how has the environment changed? And how do you differentiate our enterprises looking for one supplier or a panel of suppliers? So that's a great question. First of all, we have seen Fiverr precisely 0x in any engagement that we've had in enterprise. You see them anyway ever?
They're not mentioned as a competitor really within any RFPs that we've submitted.
No, it is -- I haven't seen them once. They have a business solution that they're offering, which I think is more targeted towards small businesses. I mean you can't go to the CEO of Coca-Cola and say, transform your workforce, where 10% of your workforce will go from the cloud by getting real staff to click around and go, oh, wow, there's a list of offerings and browse this catalog and click, click, click. This just doesn't work, right? You need to have a deep integration within their system deployed infrastructure. It's a very, very, very different proposition. So there's [ little ] presence of Fiverr in our space. Now that's not to say that might not change in the future. They might decide to change something and build something out, but they just -- they don't exist in this space. In terms of Upwork, we expected to see them more than we do. I mean, Sarah, how often do we see them in accounts in enterprise?
Actually, we actually found a number of Upwork customers that have transferred over to us. There are a number of reasons that they've given, including being that the cost of labor on the Upwork platform is too high. They're not really seeing as much kind of competitive differential within the U.S. The second thing is our flexibility and our ability to not just sell them a standard enterprise subscription, which is in more of Upwork's strategy. It's really we're about building transformational programs, doing integrations that scale with their existing workflows, such as SAP Fieldglass, Beeline. And the third thing is obviously our global reach. So a number of the customers that have transferred over have said, we're looking to design workforce transformational programs not just within the U.S. but really to a number of our other countries, and we really want a unified global experience and solution. So the customers that we're targeting really are the ones on the Fortune 500 list that need one of those 3 things.
Yes. I mean from what I can gather from the quarterly reports or read from Upwork is that they originally were going to go out to Fortune 500 that decided instead to kind of aim for more the midsized companies. Now I will point out, they're only in English. They're only in U.S. dollars. Primarily, it's the U.S. workforce hiring U.S. workforce. Yes, there are international freelancers on their platform but don't support them with language. They don't support them with currency. And in fact, they've been kicking off lots of freelancers. They got to about 20 million freelancers, and they kicked off about 18 million or 19 million of them. And they're really focused on the U.S. mid-market from my perspective and from what I see, U.S. companies hiring U.S. freelancers. I think in one of the previous quarterlies, I don't know if it's the most recent one or the quarterly before that, I know they set up an office in Chicago where they hired -- I think I heard they hired about 180 people for enterprise sales. In one of those quarterly reports, they talked about letting go of 1/3 of that office and saying that they're not going to target Fortune 500 anymore. They're going to target the mid strategy. It's a healthy business there for sure. I think they're probably our most worthy competitor. They're the closest competitor to what we do in the enterprise space. I am -- I expected to be fighting them in every single account. And we've seen them rarely in accounts, and we've won quite a number of accounts often including them, recently a major U.S. health care company that had them for 3 years that -- with Upwork for 3 years. And they came across to us. And in addition to that, I mean there's a chip manufacturer we were talking to the other day who said, "Supposed to be an on-demand model. Why am I paying always upfront fees and subscription fees and so forth when it's supposed to be on demand? It doesn't make any sense." So look, I think it's a big space. You've got to have competitors out there. But I think they're a decent company, and they've got a set strategy, and they're targeting more of the mid segment. We're targeting more of the Fortune 500. And we'll see how it goes.
There's a question from [ Michael ]. Are enterprises looking for a single supplier or a panel?
Yes. Sorry, I forgot to address that. So Sarah, probably you can probably talk about how you see this. In the long, long, long term -- initially, I thought maybe they'll be like dual-sourced, maybe that a bunch of these enterprises will think about 2 sources of supply for labor. But increasingly, every time we talk to enterprise, and they say, "Oh, we've got this little marketplace over here for maybe data scientists or a little marketplace over here for brain storming or whatever. And we want to use them and you." We kind of look at it and go, "We've actually already got [ all the users ] already. So why would you actually bother integrating with both," right? There's one in particular, a marketplace I remember for one particular customer. And we went through all the profiles, and we actually matched them up on our site. We had everyone and a lot more. We had, orders of magnitude, more talent. So if we're -- if there's no cost upfront to use Freelancer and we have 50 million people, it's growing at the moment by 20,000 to 40,000 users a day. I mean everywhere that's electricity, Internet, every skill set you can imagine, you can get all forms of labor, online labor, physical labor, field services, whatever. I mean why would you bother with the smaller marketplace messing around, right? We've got everyone, right? And we've even got very large segments of the Upwork user base and very large segments of the Fiverr user base. And I've been the most acquisitive of anyone in the space for freelancer talent. We bought 23 businesses over the history of this company. Most of them have been in freelance talent. And every time we buy these marketplaces, we buy our users all over again. We buy them. There's new users, of course, in these marketplaces, but we also buy back users that have dual accounts somewhere else. So we pretty much have all talent on the Internet in one way, shape or form. And any freelancer work that sold will have a Freelancer account, whether or not they're on another platform and whether or not they -- and the majority of their earnings on another platform or our platform that will have an account on Freelancer. So increasingly, yes, there are some accounts that do say, maybe they've got a pet project, they like a certain feature or certain functionality on a smaller platform. I've seen that where they go, "We like this little functionality. Can you build it again?" In some circumstances, we've been paid to build it in. So for example, with NASA, they're doing a lot of stuff with contests. And there are a few smaller contest platforms out there that have some deeper functionality in contests. And they're paying us to build that functionality. And so we kind of eat the whole business model with the feature upgrade. And it's being paid for by customers. So is there any other color on this? Do you think enterprises are dual-sourced? Or do you think that will go -- it is integrated with one? Or how do these...
It's a really interesting question. I think I'm aligned with you. As we progress forward, we're seeing that a lot of our customers are now increasingly preferring -- having just one preferred supplier on one platform, so to help with their entire workforce transformation. And I think what will -- there certainly is an opportunity for us to win over in the space and become that preferred supplier and to take a majority of the bulk -- of their talent spend within that organization. Perhaps there's a couple of ways we can do that. One thing, I think, the first -- one thing with our platform is that we've got a [ 800 ] different skill sets. We're in all of the countries and regions and territories of -- or most of them. We're a very generalized platform across all skill sets. And increasingly, we're seeing a number of our customers saying on the enterprise space, we want more specialized skill verticals. And so there's opportunity for us, I think, to build out specialized talent communities with the specific customers and perhaps co-branding them and then reselling that to other customers. The other thing is to really get deeply rooted within the organization through integrations. So really locking in our product, we're seeing this with 4 or 5, 6 of our customers already sometime this year. But really getting deeply rooted in their existing workflows, SAP integrations, existing systems so that there really is that lock-in. So I think if we can achieve those 2 things in 2021, there is a really high chance that with a number of our customers, that we will become the preferred supplier. And actually, in a handful, we already are. Yes.
Yes. So there's a question here in the chat room about news flow and why we don't do more investment in news flow and get more stuff out to the ASX. Let me tell you, it is an absolute battle to get anything published on the ASX. The ASX rejected our press release around winning -- jointly winning the NASA tender. We had to sit there for an entire day arguing with them to allow us to get that published. They rejected our eBay announcement around eBay Motors. We had to spend a day arguing with them to allow that to be released. Just about any release that we make with the ASX, we've got a certain compliance manager at the ASX who does not let us issue news. And in the meantime, I see Afterpay making announcements about frequent flyer points being enabled on Afterpay. Wow, okay. Fluffy releases go out all the time with a bunch of other companies, but we are subject to extreme scrutiny just from this certain compliance manager we have in the ASX. Neil, maybe you want to give a comment about how [ hard it is ] to try and get a release out in the ASX?
Invariably, whenever we have a release out, there's invariably a phone call to my mobile 5 minutes later before anything goes out. So yes, before you get anything on that side...
It is a constant battle to try and get anything issued on the ASX. I don't know why this particular manager is being so difficult. We have a fiduciary duty as directors to make sure the market is informed and provide continuous disclosure. But for whatever reason and I have e-mailed this to ASX management, what have you, that really, it's a bit of a risk from the ASX blocking releases that the directors think are newsworthy from going out and, in fact, in some circumstances, forcing us to edit those releases and put numbers in them, et cetera, because they won't let them go out unless we kind of make up a number. In some circumstances, you can't forecast things. In some circumstances, you don't know what the uptake of a certain product will be because it's brand-new, right? Or in some circumstances, it might be client -- company confidential. For example, we're not allowed to release what the GMV is for eBay Motors globally because they -- we're under contract. We can't do that. So in return, they say, "Well, we're going to block information in the release." But we have a hell of a hard time trying to get anything out to the ASX, and it usually revolves around it. If it's not a quarterly report, we even got a phone call today about the quarterly report for some reason. But if it's not a quarterly report, it's usually a multi-hour backwards-and-forwards argument that -- which, in some circumstances, I believe, can leave the market uninformed particularly when news breaks through the press or what have you. And it hasn't made it out to the ASX. There's been certainly circumstances in the past where it's hit the newswire. And we well hours and hours and hours before sent it to the ASX, and the ASX, just for whatever reason, wouldn't let us publish it. So I don't know why they do that. In addition, they should also increase their megabyte size and actually put some high-quality images out in the release. But it's -- you constantly have to kind of compress it and so forth. But yes, that's a good question.
[ Peter ] asks, have you seen growth in conversion throughout the year of 2020 users to paid membership plans?
Yes. So this is why I talked about it very, very early in the call, and I don't know if you were present for that. I'll just recap it very briefly, but I did discuss it already once in the call, and it's in the commentary. There was negative growth in memberships. And the negative growth in memberships came because of -- it's always -- with a dynamic marketplace with 50 million intelligent people [ that they adapt ] to changes. So we -- one of the big initiatives we had last year was to reduce bid spam, which is one of the top complained things about by clients is I write my project, get my brief out there, [ brands spin ] on it. They don't read my brief and they just cut and paste their bids. And I want them to really take the time, slow down the bidding, really take the time to read the brief and provide a great-quality bid, right, rather than spam.So we've put a number of initiatives in to stop that. We allow community reporting on the bids. We allow clients to mark a bid whether spammy or not, provide a rating to the bids. We have machine learning running on this. We put it into a queue that team operators look at. We have an [ exponential back-off ] penalty in terms of time that we will ban someone from bidding again if they have spams after human review. Now that has improved the quality of the bids. But it has also meant that who's doing most of the poor-quality bid running, the large freelancers with large organizations that need to win lots of projects that they've got great reputation and they're spamming the bids out because they need to win a lot of it. They need to win a lot of projects to make -- to fund their organization because maybe they've got 10 freelancers, 20 freelancers, 100 freelancers. And so when we slow that down, I mean we penalized the freelancers for spamming. A number of people did downgrade their memberships from the top plans in particular to the plan below. And so there was some negative growth there as a result of us cracking down on bid spam. So overall, the quality of the bidding is better, but it's been a negative impact to revenue. Now there are a number of things we're doing to increase membership revenue. And we have a team on this right now. They're incentivized to do -- get some results that we're building on a number of things in the membership plans to provide more value and to basically improve subscriptions. But as I said before, memberships are optional. You can just sign up and you can use the site for with a free membership plan. But It is one of the things we're focusing on over the course of this year to look at that.
[ Ned ] asks, how are you making sure that enterprise business is scalable as opposed to being overly customized for each plan?
Yes. It's a great question, right? And so you have this challenge where do you dedicate your resources and your engineering time to building something that everyone can benefit from? Or do you -- how far are you willing to customize the platform for a particular client and their particular use case, which may not always be transferable to other clients or other parts of the marketplace? Well, it's a very, very good question. As I said before, we are really focused on enterprise customers that can do $30 million of GMV or more. That's where we're really focused on at some point down the track. And so for those customers, we do offer engineering services. These are paid-for engineering services. We make a margin on them. It's not how we aim to generate revenue, the main prize of revenue, but it is -- it does earn a profit. So from our perspective, if a customer is willing to pay for those engineering services, as it turns out, 8 out of 10x, those are features that other customers want. So we build a feature for one particular customer. It's used by other enterprise customers. And in the vast majority of circumstances, it's a feature that can be pushed down to the main marketplace. So in some respects, we are being paid by some big customers to build features that don't just benefit them but benefit other enterprise customers. And also, it filters down to the main marketplace. Now that's not always the case. For example, with Deloitte, there are some customized flows that we're building. We have to check, for example, if a client posts some work, there's a conflict check to make sure they're not being ordered by Deloitte. That's custom for them. It may have been to other professional services firms but not more generally the enterprise world. So it is a challenge. And it's a constant -- the constant thing you do in a business like this is, I think, that resource allocation. And in particular, engineering time and product management time is very, very, very scarce. And so -- but for the most part, what we're doing is we're trying to build features that are, a, paid for by enterprise customers, so there is a profit motive behind here, that, b, other enterprise customers; that will, c, have a big prize, a pot of gold in the rainbow for that particular customer that you're building it for; and d, ultimately, we can drip down into the consumer version of the product. That's a great question. Now if there's not any other questions from anyone on the chat, it looks like we've run out of questions, and we've also -- 1.5 hours in. I do welcome you, if any of you would like to do one-on-ones with any of the management team, you can always e-mail us at investor@freelancer.com or matt, M-A-T-T, @freelancer.com. My e-mail address is in the front of the presentation. Available to do one-on-ones. And -- or if you sort of e-mail questions, you can always e-mail a question in or -- and we're happy to answer it. But thank you very much for your time today. And that draws to a close the Freelancer fourth quarter 2020 financial results. Thank you.