Earnings call transcript: WRKR Ltd sees platform revenue boost in Q2 2025

WRKR Ltd (ASX:WKR) recently held its Q2 2025 earnings call, highlighting significant developments in its business operations and financial performance. Despite a slight decline in share price, the company reported positive cash flow from operations and outlined strategic initiatives to enhance its platform capabilities. The stock experienced a minor decrease of 4.55%, closing at $0.11, amid broader market fluctuations. According to InvestingPro data, WRKR has shown remarkable momentum with a 214% return over the past year and an impressive 111% gain in the last six months, suggesting strong investor confidence despite current volatility.

Key Takeaways

• WRKR achieved net cash positivity from operating activities.
• The company secured $2.2 million from MUFG contracts for platform development.
• Platform revenues grew due to renegotiated contracts.
• WRKR expanded its international presence with a new implementation in Hong Kong.
• The company is focusing on strategic acquisitions in compliance services.

Company Performance

WRKR’s performance in Q2 2025 was marked by robust operational achievements and strategic growth initiatives. The company emphasized its enhanced fraud prevention technologies and successful API integrations with SAP, which are expected to drive future growth. Additionally, WRKR’s expansion into the Hong Kong market and new contracts with major superannuation funds underscore its competitive positioning.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: Projected between $10 million and $11 million for the next year.
• Cash Inflow: $2.2 million from MUFG contracts.
• Headcount: Increased by 20 employees over the past year.

Outlook & Guidance

WRKR is targeting a 7 million member base and preparing for the implementation of Payday Super compliance. The company is also exploring potential market entry into the UK as part of its international expansion strategy. Balancing short-term revenue with long-term growth remains a priority, alongside strategic acquisitions to bolster its compliance services.

Executive Commentary

Trent Lund, CEO, emphasized the company’s strategic focus, stating, "Whoever wins the lion’s share now will hold that share over the next nine to ten years." Karen Gillmor, CFO, highlighted organizational development, noting, "We are looking at ways over the next twelve months to make sure we’re set up for the right kind of development operational organizational chart."

Risks and Challenges

• Real-time payment challenges could impact operational efficiency.
• Resource allocation and funding concerns need addressing for sustained growth.
• International expansion poses scalability and regulatory challenges.
• Competitive pressures from established players like Westpac and Superchoice.
• Market volatility could affect investor sentiment and stock performance.

In summary, WRKR Ltd’s Q2 2025 earnings call showcased its strategic initiatives and operational advancements, despite a slight dip in stock price. With a market capitalization of $118.74M and significant momentum in stock performance, the company’s focus on innovation, international growth, and strategic partnerships positions it well for future success in the competitive superannuation market. For deeper insights into WRKR’s valuation and growth prospects, InvestingPro subscribers can access comprehensive financial analysis, including 12 additional ProTips and detailed growth metrics.

Full transcript - WRKR Ltd (WRK) Q4 2025:

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: So the RAB bandwidth on my eyes. So we have a few of you in already. Please, I know it’s a few minutes past.

There’s just a couple I can see still still logging in. And if anyone can just let me know and make sure you can see our see our presentation, and I’ll Yep. Okay. There we go. You see it?

Mhmm. Right. Okay. I’m just kind of to change the alright. I think we’re we’re about ready as I just master this computer a little bit.

Thank you thank you, everyone, for for attending this morning. We we put out the we had our board meeting last week, put out our final quarterly result for the year, which was, you know, another fantastic result. So very proud of the of the worker team. We thought we’d take we’ve had many questions over the last couple of months, a few on the investor hub and and a couple coming in in in presentations. I just wanted to take the opportunity to share, clarify, and make sure that everybody’s on the same page in terms of the road map that we have ahead.

And then we’ll jump into a little bit of the financials and spend most of the time on q and a at the back end. For those wishing to ask a question, please feel free to raise at any time, and we will we’ll certainly put those put those up as we as we go. So, again, thank you very much for joining us. To my left or right, there now comes up on your screen. It’s Karen Gillmor, our CFO, and I’m Trent Lund, your CEO of of Worker.

So let me just jump jump right into it. And as I say that, I’ll my screen will fail me, and I’ll have to bring this slide back across. Apologies for the, for the small momentary delay. There we go. Okay.

So so jumping right in. What I what I want to just kick off on, if it let me. Sorry. Bear with me one moment. I’ll just reshare.

Okay. Sorry. Well, that is better. Move that to one side. Okay.

Promise I’ve got it now. Okay. So quick, quick reminder, to all. You know, obviously, work, our purpose is fairly clear. Make compliance effortless.

Obviously, our target is to do this for employers, but the best way to do it for employers is through partnership with some of the biggest players in the ecosystem, specifically the super funds. It’s one of the most regulated and complex payment compliance moments that employers have to do, and, obviously, a compliance moment is going through a fair amount of change under the payday super regulations. So that mission continues. And, of course, while we’re central around superannuation and pay, worker continues to stay abreast of and work on other compliance moments that are pertinent to onboarding an employee for the first time, so ensuring their credentials, identity, and the likes are up to spec. I’ll do a little one on one.

There’s a few new people that have been joining the stop at Lake. I just wanna at one level, and this probably talks the hard of making compliance effortless, worker really does three things. We move money. We move messages, and we move credentials. So we move superannuation payments from employer to the fund or self managed super.

We move the messages such as the super stream super messages from the employer into the super stream network into the fund, and then from fund to the ATO. And, of course, we move credentials. So within that, it’s not just a banking or a financial platform. We move very complex credentials from tax file number and super fund all the way through to identity and and other licensed credentials of of individuals. So it it really puts us in the center of an ecosystem between the employers, their banks, their HR and payroll systems, and their employees who who interact directly all the way through a crossing to those receiving entities around from be it an SMSF account or the ATO themselves or, of course, the 706 regulated APRA funds with over six over six members.

So, you know, that market in and of itself just in Australia alone, is significant. And although we when you look at the complexity, there’s about a million employers. There’s actually close to about 360 payroll companies, about 15,000,000 active employees, so those who are in accumulation phase but also compliant with requiring super. About 19,000,000 jobs in Australia, just to give you an understanding of the two. There’s 22 to 23,000,000 super member accounts, about 620,000 SMSFs.

Wages is is the large largest, which is 500,000,000 pay events in Australia. And, of course, single touch payroll events match that, so that’s the message that goes with pay. And then a 160,000,000 super events, which, of course, with payday super will move to 500,000,000. So that’s a fairly substantive uplift in our market. It also means more than just volume, though.

It means far faster frequency, much larger, much faster retrieval and rep and repair of errors in data, and that’s really something that that is a core strength to work at. So let me jump in with some of the quarterly highlights that we’re we’re immensely proud of, and and then I’ll jump into a bit on the implementation journey. Well, first, we would have you’ve seen the REST Superpilot success. That was substantive in in a couple of measures. One, we’ve implemented in partnership with REST and MUFG, and that was more than a pilot of our software.

That was a pilot of the level of integration to the MUFG Aspire platform, integration to the support processes provided by MUFG, whether it be contact center, technology or staff, any integration into the funds compliance requirements. So an enormous amount of business activity tested. The customer experience feedback was exceptional. The just to give you a a sense, we we marked up around in some areas around the 92%, and that wasn’t just against other funds or other clearinghouse platforms. That was actually against technology, employer compliance technology more broadly.

So, that was independently tested, by a third party company for, for the rest and really, gives us, you know, something we’ve believed in for some time. But, a real clear strength is the ease of use of the platform, which makes migrating customers onto it that that bit easier, but also a lower cost to support because it’s much easier for people to understand.

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: Sorry, Trent, to interrupt. I think we are frozen, so I just wanna check that people can hear us. If you could just pop something in the chat if you’re unable to hear us.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: I think Says all good. Can hear you. We’ll keep on. It’s just my my screen’s frozen, so you can see me looking like I’ve had some some kind of some kind of issue. Please do reach out if if you can’t hear us.

So the Aussie super win, that mattered incredibly to to our team and for a couple of reasons. Obviously, they’re the largest player by a factor. They also are a very sophisticated organization and took a very different approach to rest, well rest, used a pilot mechanism to assess the platform and the experience. Australian Super went through a very detailed competitive tender, which really benchmarked our product against all of our unknown and major competitors. And so to to win under a competitive tender as well as, you know, to have such a large organization, we really feel that’s a great set of the domino.

And and between Australian super and rest, actually, what it what it does mean is we’ve got enough volume there to really set a a standard and a benefit, a significant price benefit for any other funds who join that same industry fund or as any of you would call it, the Lukra employer platform. Australian Retirement Trust is is undergoing a large transformation. We continue to do work for them, readying our license platform and technology to underpin their transformation, and that is will continue to increase some revenues with them on both the implementation side, but also shows that continued strength and long term relationship with with Australian Retirement Trust. At the same time, MUFG went live in the quarter, which is excellent. We’ve it’s not dealing with an enormous volume as yet.

The target is around the 300,000, but it is an entirely new process. It’s a pension based process dealing with HSBC. So we we are excited by that for two reasons. Increases our global relevance longer term. And and short term, it it really does give a another layer of of credential for our our platform.

NERFG referred retirement solutions referred to the platform as a lucrative employer platform, and it is now fully market ready, and they are active out with their with the rest of their funds, which is obviously taking making the partnership pay back for us, obviously, with a much lower cost of of sales as we move forward now. And the API progress has been beneficial in two ways. We we mentioned a while ago that we were investing around that API. We have partnered with a a fantastic company, Solaris, who specialize in mid market for SAP. And in that work, we’ve we’ve both progressed the product very well, but actually progressed our in market sales.

So we have the first of six significant companies in that mid market coming on, and we feel that will be the start of many. But most importantly, we are co building with their support and integration into the into the SAP app store, which will make it much easier for us to continue to grow on the on the payroll end of the market. So all the orange boxes, and hopefully, we just keep seeing more of those, but this is significant market traction, which is what’s important to us. At the same time, with each large client, obviously, it pushes us to improve and and add more to the platform. The the good news is every time we add something, we add it to the entire platform, so it just improves our competitive position.

But one of the areas we focus very heavily on is any fraud enhancements with the partnership with Transmit, and that is particularly around the challenge the market is observing in direct debit fraud, and that we we believe that’ll be the start. It it’s an attractive market for fraudsters to pursue broadly in the superannuation market. And so we focus on bringing new technologies to bear that that ensure we’re doing, you know, full full facial liveness test and recognition, for example. A couple of other things. You will notice the new board member as we continue to expand our client base and and go deeper into compliance, making sure we’ve got even stronger financial experience on our on our board.

You will have seen the press coverage. I’m I’m still apologetic for it. It felt like a a, you know, just a a free kick for us. Thank you to the to the ABC, but we’re very tongue in cheek, but very serious about the need to move to payday super to avoid this nonpayment, particularly the most vulnerable employees out there. But that that opinion and the way we’re architecting our success with REST drew drew some great attention, which was very positive.

So we’ve we’ve been thankful for that. And then, of course, our talent growth, we continue to to hire. So, you know, pause for a second at from a quarterly update, this is really the culmination of many quarters of work. And there’s still more to come, but it it just shows the the speed and the the velocity that the business is now moving at. If I just jump to what I wanted to do was just focus for a second on well, let’s focus on super funds, where and why, and and hopefully this chart kind of gives you a bit of an understanding when we think about the members.

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: I don’t think people can see the chart, but it is now live on the ASX, so you can jump into it from there. And we’re on a building a compelling base in SuperSlide. Apologies for the tech issues this morning.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: How is it not coming?

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: I think it’s just because your screen’s frozen. They’ve just mentioned that they can’t see the slides either.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: Okay. Yep. That’s not very helpful, is it? Alright. Looks far better with pictures, but I’m going to I’m going to to give you to try and give you a I’ll use my words.

So, look, we did an analysis of the top 40 funds by members. It’s important for everyone to note this game is really won and lost at the top end of town. The top five funds represent 50% of members. The top 15 funds about 85% of members. If we look at the what we would call NUFG funds, that’s about 38% of members.

And Australian Retirement Trust is about 11 and a half percent. So Aussie super being being circa 15%, Australian Retirement Trust being about 11.5%. This comes off the APRA to 2024 report. Why it matters is right across the first three by volume are Australian super at 15 had had around 3,400,000 members. Australian Retirement Trust at around not including perhaps some of their additional acquisitions of recent, Australian Retirement Trust about 2.6 2,400,000.

Sorry. Rest at 2.2 hosts at just under 2,000,000 members, and then you jump down to CBUS at at just under a million members. So why that’s important is we are now with the success of Australian Super, with our license embedded in Australian Retirement Trust, with our success and continued you know, we expect the continuation to commercial inclusion with rest. That puts us alone in a position of of hitting around about, you know, 3030% thereabouts of of the market. So we intend we expect that to continue to grow if as we have success across the MEOG funds.

But what what’s important about that is we play a long game, and that has been a long well, a long investment. The reality is the requirements into our platform between just rest and Australian Super alone, it’s unlikely that we will have new feature requirements that that are unexpected to us as we go down through the rest of the marketplace. So so from that perspective, really, really good news.

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: Just before we move on, there was a question Yep. That what is the color coding for on the slides? So somebody found it on ASX, which is Yes. Good So the yellow is the funds that we already have and are working on. Australian Retirement Trust there in the lighter blue is the platform admin that we provide to BEAM and BUILT.

That’s Australian Retirement Trust’s administration platform and Clearinghouse. And then the ones in the pink color are the other MUFG retirement solutions administered funds.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: That are in the top top 30 funds. So but visible there. So the green just denotes yellow denotes it’s on our SaaS platform. The the red color denotes that they’re two b one but are part of the MUFG spread, and the green is for is that it is one under license. It’s not under our SaaS platform.

Obviously, that’s a a longer term plan for us is to convert them to our broader SaaS platform. Much, much harder. And it is if this if you can hear me, I’m going to assume the slides are not that we’re not frozen, and I might just reconnect them. Can anyone see the slides? No?

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: No.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: Well, I’ll be banned from this. And, hopefully, if you do if you can see it now, just let me know. Yep. There they are. Well, look at that.

My my skills are questionable, but they’re there. So so just so everyone is is aware that that last slide we were talking about is just the size of funds, and you can see it pretty clearly. We’ve concentrated ourselves up at the top end, and we really think that pays dividends for us long term. So a lot of people have asked questions around the implementation plan of a fund, and we just wanted to give you an idea of how that works. And then I’ll kind of show you where each of the funds are that we’re in discussion with where they sit, and in reality, what that means in terms of bringing bringing revenue.

So we it is a six to nine month implementation. It’s a faster implementation without employer rollout, obviously, if we’re just doing a back end in payroll. They it’s really just a a large switching across. But, really, six to nine months is the time frame we proposed with the super funds accepting that they need, you know, I need someone who can drive Zoom. I just saw that statement.

Thanks very much, Ian. So that that important element is it’s complex time period, but it is really less about platform readiness and far more around fund readiness to do their transformation. So pre go live, this is around developing comm strategy. This is around developing your employer transition content. You’re planning and staging that and testing how that content and how your branding is working across our platform.

So as you can imagine at this point, we’re really dealing with very much starting with a live platform. So there is opportunity to expedite this process, but we’re very conservative. We we still give guidance of six to nine months to the funds, but there’s increasing pressure to bring bring this forward. And then it’s an execution phase with hypercare, which then moves directly into the funds benefits. So let let me just explain how that rolls out in what we have right now.

So we have REST, and I’ve just put their member numbers because it is difficult to to highlight exactly who has what accumulation. Right? And I wanna keep those numbers sensitive for the funds. But rest, obviously, they have gone live. We have now concluded putting their new brand on, and they are really finalizing their transition and comms plans.

But we expect them by the end of q two. So by December, we would expect them from October through to December to have achieved go live subject to hitting that main retail time frame, which may push one or two of their of their key clients potentially into the start of of q three. Worker has our own click super transition that we’re migrating across to. Obviously, it’s an uplift, and we will decommission our our ClickSuper platform. That’s the current time frame.

There has been work done and a considerable amount of work done by Karen to go back historically all the way through and ensure all the reconciliations, ensure that we’re we are in a position to archive and close that core platform. Australian Super announced a couple of weeks ago, and they had fairly aggressive time frames. Q three is their go live, but we expect to be doing platform testing with live customers hopefully around the end of q two. So so they are they would be more aggressive, and they have a fairly large internal workforce. We have extra features to build, which will be across the whole platform, BI, and and actually a funded data migration program for them as well, which adds a fair amount of additional work for us, but we believe that helps expedite the implementation.

We get transactions earlier. The second the second element is then we have a large payroll in our pipeline, and we have proposed that slot which would have them live at the latest by mid mid q four, which puts them on track for for PayGo Super. In addition, our team working on the additional features for workers’ small business clearinghouse. We don’t know what share we will get of that market. However, we we know that we are very competitively priced, and our solution is is well and truly fit for that market.

The two things that we do need to still conclude on an investment is the accountant uplift. So that’s that 240,000 employers is actually predominantly input, about 80% by accountants, and then a digital go to market, which we’ve not had to do prior. We need an increase in. The SEH funds are slotted. There is a little pressure to bring them back earlier.

We will deliver them as one group package, but there is still commercial considerations for each of them. So we’ll work through that with MUFG. And MUFG have indicated two more large fund slots, which you’ll see below. And in between those, we have a further set of managed payrolls that we are we’ve been in that we’ve we’ve been in conversation with to increase it. We already serve them today.

They’ll come across in the click super transition, but, actually, there’s some features that may increase our total coverage of that market. So all bodes well. This does not include funds coming directly to us that are outside of MUFG. And interestingly, since the announcement of Australian Super, we’ve we’ve seen a couple of funds show show immediate interest. So that timeline, the most obvious thing that you’ll see is not everybody’s going to make payday super, and that is actually in part a probably one of the biggest challenges that we are we are foreseeing we will be put under a little bit of pressure to to be able to deal with multiple programs simultaneously.

And and to be honest, a lot of this is possibly driven by uncertainty from the government on when payday super will be rolled out. In all meetings wherein, the indication is it is an expectation that certainly the funds and the gateways will be ready on time by by July July, so at the end of q four. So that’s the background on on timing. So we wanted to just be clear with everyone. The the good news is we’re we’re seeing a lot of success.

The the challenge is that success means we we’re going to have more work to do. And as I’ve explained earlier, the this work is, you know, not not always cash flow positive. We tend to have to make a level of investment as you do as a SaaS platform to then reap the rewards on the longer life life beyond worth of transactions. So that’s the that’s the key background. I I thought we’d jump into financial performance, and then I’ll come back and and rip through the questions.

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: Thanks, Trent. Hey. So the cash flow results are up there. I just wanna talk through the key key points from the year and the quarter. As Trent has spoken through, you can see that it’s been a busy year.

We’ve been talking about a lot of things that we’ve been doing, but it’s really culminated in q four with the Australian Superwin and the go live with Rest and Hong Kong, as well as lots of conversations also on the pipeline and continual development in our feature set for payday readiness. And that’s around making sure that we have the APIs for our payrolls, integration that was built for Aspire. So, yeah, I guess what the screen is showing is that we have a lot of investments. If you look at the investing activities, we had a lot of investment into the platform, and that’s really setting us up for Payday Super and when we can get the funds onboarded and going because that’s where our commercials become profitable. Just to break it down a little bit more, we had net cash, positive cash from our operating activities.

Now within that, we had 2,200,000.0 in cash from our MUFG contracts around that development and implementation of the digital platform, workers’ digital platform. We had an increase in the float income through the clearinghouse. Part of that is because of the yearly increase that we’ve seen in the superannuation guarantee rate. So there was another half percent last year. There was another half percent this year.

That’s then up to 12%, at which point it will stabilize. So just that means more superannuation contributions, more float going through the clearinghouse. We had our platform as a service revenues increase. That was due to both, one, renegotiation of our Australian Retirement Trust contract that saw an an increase on our support and maintenance and license fees. We saw and then we have renewals on our other platform as a service license contracts that just saw an increase in CPI.

We also had our existing click sweeper business remain fairly stable, which it has done year on year. We’re looking forward to the transition of that onto the worker platform in the next kind of six months, and we hope to see traction of our other products that we can that we can offer at that time when we bring people across. So it’s not just a clearing house. There’s the onboarding and stapling moments as well that and other compliance moments that we’ll be able to roll out to them and hopefully capitalize on. In terms of the, cost base, so the the largest, increase in cost base is around our resources, so our people, our staff costs.

We had, extended the team by 20 people in a year. So quite a significant increase in our resource, and that also means in our skill and abilities, across the board from product managers, business analysts, engineers, solution architects. And, yeah, I think that’s probably the main areas that we brought those resources on. We’ll continue to see that resource requirement as we move into next year, but I’ll talk about that a bit when we get to the next slide. And also in our security posture.

So we’re continually investing in that security posture at Worker, and that’s not something that we just stop. It’s it’s it happens every day, but most importantly, just around protecting, you know, the increasing fraud environment within which we work, which you’ve all seen in headlines, in papers around super funds, and just making sure that we’re we’re protecting ourselves as things continue to evolve in that in that space.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: It it’s it’s worth saying that many of you will have seen in the news reports there was considerable fraud across the network for particularly focused on direct on direct debit. There’s an increasing push from funds and payrolls to step away from their liability and pass that liability on to the clearinghouse. Our view is that’s that’s an opportunity as much as a challenge. So we’ve we’ve invested considerably, so we’d be in a position to take on that that accountability, which we think will differentiate against our against our competitors. And, obviously, that liability would be only only taken on where participants are going through our formal verification processes.

Sorry. Yeah.

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: No. Think it’s Trent. So yeah. So lots of capital investment, lots of increasing in resources. It’s all trending in the right direction in terms of looking at what we need to achieve over the next twelve months.

So if I move on to the next slide of our financial outlook, we’re working through the audit at the moment or in the second week of audits with our net operating revenues projected to be between 10 to 11. And, you know, next year, we’re going to continue to balance our investment between this short term revenue generation and long term growth. As you could see because you could see at that point, the slides of Trent with the kind of funded and unfunded pipeline, we have there’s a lot of opportunity in front of front of us, and we are quite bullish on that opportunity. We won’t be able to do it all at the same time unless we bring on more resources and we have a look at what is strategically the best option to bring forward the revenue growth that we want and to get that member base, that 7,000,000 target on board, and then look at where’s those higher compliance moments going to come from as well. So there’s strategic decisions to happen there.

We also know that that payday super date is there, so there is mounting pressure from the payrolls, from the DSPs, from the HR systems, and, obviously, the remaining MUFG funds to want to to want to do something about their their current systems and positions. So with that being said, we are keeping on growing, keeping on investing. We’ll see some more investment in the platform, obviously, over the next twelve months. And, yeah, I guess I’ll pass back to Trent, but happy to answer any questions that pop up.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: So so given the slides are working, I I thought I’d jump to this one because this is where most of the questions are based, and there’s a couple of questions here I’ll I’ll pick up. Just starting with with funded, in reality, we can roll our teams on the implementation side and adding those extra features. We can roll from one to the other, but we think that will push us out into willing to post payday super. And that is a that’s a risk we’ll we’ll we’re looking to manage on how we manage it at the moment. There are two options.

We push the opportunities and risk them finding an alternative, or we look to self fund and be more aggressive and bring those opportunities back closer and start them sooner so that they they kick off. The the good news is the the time frame is tight for any of those participants to make a decision, So we we know where we stand pretty quickly, and there’s a lot of active conversations. But we will need to be in a position to serve up those two options. So either we’re saying no and letting it push out, or or we’ll seek to to look for alternatives to fund them to to bring them forward. But in terms of what is covered in our work today, obviously, the two major funds being rest and and Aussie super, which I’ll be honest, is two funds worth of both size and effort for us.

But the team are well positioned to deliver those as well as our own transition. And, of course, we’ve we have all those started and technologically, the platform, the API work has has started, which positions us well for a large fund. We’ll still there’s still a fair amount of onboarding for a a significant cloud based fund payroll. Sorry. And and the small business clearinghouse will require a level of digital go to market activity that we’ve not not yet done, so so they’re not skills we have in house.

So that just gives people an understanding of where we where we sit. Better to have a basket of opportunities and then figure out how we prioritize. So let me let me go through. So, Ian, yeah, you you picked up on on that same victim of of your own success. You know, will you need to raise funds to take all these to market?

Don’t let the competitors in. I I I share your view. I I think we do need to think about there are different methods available to us for for funding, but we we definitely it is my view and the board’s view at this point as well as Karen’s. Karen’s just gotta figure out the how, but but we don’t let competitors in. I think this is I’m frustrated because the funds have had a lot of time, but they’ve sort of sat back a little feeling they had more time, and they’ve taken lengthy periods looking.

Now the time’s here, and now we’re running out of time. So there’s a little frustration, but the reality is this is a once in a generation for the super industry. Whoever wins the lion’s share now will hold that that share, we think, you know, over the next nine to ten years. So that’s that’s important to us to to make sure we win. So I agree with you with you there.

I think, John, that picks up your your question on on the same. There was a a question back on can apologies. My eyes are failing me. Could you speak to the international scale ability and and what Hong Kong development gives? So Hong Kong for now gives HSBC serve about 300,000 users, and now in the corporate area, they’ll continue to expand in into rolling them out.

There are, though, a another couple of there is a large fund manager or pension manager there of the same size as HSBC that there are discussions with. And then there is the what’s called the EMPF, which is the basic super in that market. So we think longer term, Hong Kong represents great opportunity. Again, it was one we we had to be there at the time. Otherwise, the risk was we would have introduced another payments provider or another solution provider to work with NUFG.

So us being able to sort of shoulder up as a true partner was important. I don’t think Hong Kong itself will be the biggest opportunity, but the pension modules we’ve built are definitely the same that The UK market requires. And I I think they have that UK market needs a lot of work. They’re, I believe, a long way behind Australia. There’s still a check a checking system market in some some respects, but they are starting to transform.

So we’re we’re not pushing it because we don’t have the van valve, but once we’ve finished the Australian expansion, that that would be the next logical market for us with with NEWFG. So just picking up, did Australian Super provide any specific reason for their their feedback for why why you beat the competitor? Challenges, were those competitors the same same as what you have covered before? Yes. So the main competitor is Westpac, Superchoice, and others.

But the the main reason, I think, is workers’ the one stop shop vision, actually. The cornerstone of of what they were looking to do is they’re trying to help their employers, and that means putting software in front of them that may also bring they may buy other services directly with us, but they they really felt that not being super centric and just solving for the super payment, but actually bringing more more broader value and introducing value was was a key competitive strength of ours. So so that was some of the feedback. So far, we’re also we’re we have very much a shared vision on we care about customers, and we’re not we’re we’re not it’s not money first and contract first. It’s it’s what can we do and partner together.

So that that’s the sense. I I think the feedback we’re getting across the board is we’re a culturally a good a good business to partner with. Michael, I hope that answers your your question. There’s one here, which is a great question. I’ll just read it out.

Westpac announced rolling out real time super payments to all of its Quicksuper employers in September, and CBUS was one of one of the clients who’ve who’ve done a pilot. If CBUS does not take up the worker platform, how does that how does how does that fit? So we we’re we’re confident that we will still be successful across that slot, but we have alternatives. We’ll turn that energy to there are a couple of other funds that we would work a little bit more diligently towards that are outside of the MUFG space actually is is our plan if we need to make up numbers. We still think we’re well on target because REST and and Aussie are such a meaningful contribution.

What I would say is our platform is already set for real time payments. It’s just another payment method. So we already do the real time clearance. I think the challenge is there’s a there’s a lot of enthusiasm from the major banks to say that they have a solution for doing real time payments now, so everyone should pay in real time their super. I have three answers to that.

One, real time payment of super coming into an employer. No problem. That makes sense. But that’s a one off payment to cover if you’re Woolies, a 150,000 employees. Woolies is not going to make a 150,000 onetime payments and then try and manage that.

It needs to be reconciled and managed in line with your other requirements for super. You can’t just pay if you wanna pay out real time, you will get real time fraud, particularly where people are paying out into into self managed super. So what you get is paying it into self managed super that doesn’t meet the the legal requirements or may not be active from an ATO perspective. So that’s two two of the issues. And three, the overall system is not set for real time receipt.

We don’t start collecting someone’s performance in real time because that’s not how we allocate the funds to earn earn income. So, actually, we want them as soon as plausible into the system that accurate, and we want them and we do them in batch, and we do them in daily batch. So the reality is these are great initiatives, but I don’t believe they’re from the same traditional competitors. I believe they’re more coming out of the transaction banking world who have heard payday super equals 500,000,000 pay events. We’d like to get the share of that.

So in some ways, there’s noise in the system. We’re talking to all of those funds. We have a pretty good understanding of what they feel about what’s noise and what’s valued. So I I don’t wanna be arrogant, but I think we’ve done we have invested appropriately, and we understand what they’re trying to achieve more so than throwing a product at them at this stage in the game. So that’s our our view.

We’ll but we’ll see. Arrogance can always be be be met by a loss, so let let’s watch those those last couple of funds that we’re we we continue to invest very closely with them. And that Westpac is not the only one. ANZ and others are pitching the same provider solution. One just one other thing to note, payments can’t send PII related data, and the entire SuperStream network is about sending PII data such as your tax file number, your employer ID, employee ID, your full name, detail, date of birth.

That information doesn’t sit in a payments reconciliation. So there’s a just to give people a bit of backdrop there.

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: Yeah. I think the one other thing to mention there as well is the limit that the banks are currently putting on the amount of the same time payments, which is currently $25,000. And a lot of people’s superannuation payments are a lot of employers are higher than that. So we are really working closely with our bank and working through kind of the limitations that that poses for employers at the moment. Yeah.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: And and working backwards, who so who should bear the responsibility of the onboarding? Reality is it’s it’s a tripartite, which is what makes it lengthy. But worker worker take a very much hands on approach because we’re the recipient of the data, we’re the recipient of the processes, and that talks to our longer term cost to serve and quality. So we are if you like, we take a more active role in implementation than than what is perhaps necessary or what we’re funded for, but it’s we we just know it’s necessary for our long term long term play. Nick, could you give a competitive landscape description?

Yeah, Nick. So competitors now, Westpac’s still present across a a bunch of funds, but, obviously, with rest has come from sorry. Australian Super has come from there, so so that that really does do some damage to their total numbers. Obviously, would be interesting to see what their strategy is in light of a a host and a and a sea bus if if they were to move. Superchoice is definitely the other larger competitor.

So it goes Westpac, Superchoice, and and then us for now. That’s starting to shift. A bit of a difference in model and a difference in Westpac, lowest price and and least amount of features. Superchoice, comprehensive service, no onboarding, but highest price. We sit in the middle with increased features for the same dollar value close to Westpac on transaction and price.

So we’re we’re in a fairly unique position. I I’d rather describe this as Aldi, We’re we’re we’re best value for for money in the in the slot. Hopefully, that helps. Outside of that, it’s it’s a pretty small network of of players. And there’s one last one here for Karen.

Karen, does does your headcount include those that are for project work and therefore temporary in engagement?

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: Yeah. Thanks that question, Ian. At the moment, we have a few contractors. The headcount that I mentioned doesn’t include those. We are looking at the engineering team.

It will change in its in its shape once we move from this really development and implementation phase into that operational phase. We know with you know, we’re looking at the shape of that and how we’re going to most efficiently manage that cost and then continue to invest in additional project projects and feature enhancements, more compliance moments, and things like that. So we do wanna create a workforce that then where there is something that’s quite project based and funded by a client, then we can we can bring on a team and remove a team. We just have to be careful with where that comes from and how much that costs because as a an Australian digital service provider, we need to make sure the engineering capability is onshore in a lot of the areas around the clearinghouse. So we are looking at ways over the next kind of twelve months to make sure that we’re set up for that right kind of development operational organizational chart.

Yep.

Trent Lund, CEO, Worker: And I think we’re down to our last question, which was pipeline organically looks solid. So well done well done to the team. Has has management got sights on possible acquisition for scale? And I I would say, yes, we’re always looking forward. We won’t seek acquisition in the in the super fund, obviously, space just because those clients are are really there to be won through through best value proposition.

However, the compliance moments are creeping window is creeping up for us. You know, if you use the example, Australian Super and Rest combined looking to roll out software, which we’ll touch probably, let’s say, net 300,000 businesses will get to onboard onto our portal, see our experience, see our other services, and we think that is a really powerful opportunity for us to be able to display, you know, additional working you know, from working with children’s checks and upper medical checks all the way through to more detailed license licenses, visa status. They’re they’re much more profitable checks, but obviously not as ubiquitous to the market. So so being there in front of those employees and making it easy for them to buy buy the handful is going to be key. So we are looking at some of those now, not not for immediate acquisition, but there is definitely opportunity to to accelerate that revenue in line with go live.

It would need to be available for us, and and this serves to a greater challenge before as we go live for for a rest in Australian Super, we need to be introducing subscriptions. But over time, we can introduce more depth and breadth of those subscription services. So that is a focus, but we we haven’t made any immediate decisions, but there is definitely a group that’s that’s forming. So I think that is all of the q and a, and I’m sorry we’ve had to run. I do apologize for my full use of the tech today.

The next one may not be on Zoom because I don’t think we have a Zoom expert. We’ll we’ll we’ll try another another method. But, again, thank you very much. We’re available. We have lots of meetings with different people this week.

But if you have questions, please put them on the investor hub. I I’ll commit to answering them as soon as possible. So thank you very much.

Karen Gillmor, CFO, Worker: Thank

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