Earnings call transcript: WRKR Q4 2025 focuses on growth and innovation

WRKR Ltd (WRK) recently held its Q4 2025 earnings call, revealing a focus on product innovation and market expansion. The company reported net operating revenues between $10 million and $11 million, with positive cash flow driven by strategic partnerships and increased platform revenues. Despite a 3.7% decline in stock price, WRKR remains optimistic about future growth, particularly in the Australian superannuation market.

Key Takeaways

• WRKR reported net operating revenues between $10 million and $11 million.
• Positive cash flow from operations, notably $2.2 million from MUFG contracts.
• Stock price decreased by 3.7% following the earnings call.
• Company plans for international expansion and compliance service enhancements.

Company Performance

WRKR’s Q4 2025 performance was marked by steady revenue growth and strategic investments in technology and personnel. The company expanded its headcount by 20 people over the past year and enhanced its platform capabilities, including API integration with Zalaris for SAP. The focus on developing a small business clearinghouse and anti-fraud technologies positions WRKR as a competitive player in the Australian superannuation market.

Financial Highlights

• Net operating revenues: $10 million to $11 million
• Positive cash flow from operations
• $2.2 million in cash from MUFG contracts
• Increased platform-as-a-service revenues

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, WRKR aims to expand its member base to 7 million and prepare for the implementation of payday super regulations by July 2026. The company is also exploring potential markets in Hong Kong and the UK, alongside expanding its compliance-related services.

Executive Commentary

Trent Lund, CEO of WRKR, emphasized the company’s strategic positioning: "Whoever wins the lion’s share now will hold that share over the next nine to ten years." He also highlighted WRKR’s broader value proposition: "We’re not super-centric and just solving for the super payment, but actually bringing more broader value."

Risks and Challenges

• Implementation timeline: Six to nine months for superfunds could pose operational challenges.
• Competitive landscape: Key competitors include Westpac and Super Choice.
• Market expansion risks: Potential funding needs and scalability challenges in new markets.
• Regulatory changes: Adapting to new payday super regulations by 2026.
• Security investments: Continuous need to enhance security posture.

WRKR’s strategic focus on innovation and market expansion sets a promising path forward, despite current stock market challenges. The company’s commitment to enhancing its platform and exploring international opportunities positions it well for future growth.

Full transcript - WRKR Ltd (WRK) Q4 2025:

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: We’re up, and we’re going to launch. We have a few of you in already. Please announce a few minutes past. There’s just a couple I can see still logging in. If anyone can just let me know, make sure you can see our presentation.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Yeah, okay.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: There we go. Can you see it?

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Mm-hmm.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: All right, okay. I’m just going to change the... All right, I think we’re about ready as I just master this computer a little bit. I hope, thank you, thank you everyone for attending this morning. We put out the... We had our board meeting last week, put out our final quarterly result for the year, which was another fantastic result. Very proud of the Wrkr team. We’ve had many questions over the last couple of months, a few on the Investor Hub and a couple coming 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 roadmap that we have ahead. We’ll jump into a little bit of the financials and spend most of the time on Q&A at the back end.

For those wishing to ask a question, please feel free to raise at any time. We will certainly put those up as we go. Again, thank you very much for joining us. To my left or right depending on how it turns up on your screen, it’s Karen Gilmour, our CFO, and I’m Trent Lund, your CEO of Wrkr. Let me just jump right into it. As I say that, my screen will fail me. I will have to bring this slide back across. Apologies for the small momentary delay. There we go. Okay, jumping right in. What I wanted to just kick off on... If you’ll let me... Sorry. Bear with me one moment, I’ll just reshare.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Sorry.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: Oh, that is better. Let me put that to one side. Okay, yes. Promise I’ve got it now. Okay, so quick reminder to all, you know, obviously Wrkr. Our purpose is fairly clear: make compliance effortless. Obviously, our target is to do this for employers. The best way to do it for employers is through partnership with some of the biggest players in the ecosystem, specifically the superfunds. It’s one of the most regulated and complex payment compliance moments that employers have to do. Obviously, a compliance moment that’s going through a fair amount of change under the payday super regulations. That mission continues. Of course, while we’re central around superannuation and pay, Wrkr continues to stay abreast of and work on other compliance moments that are pertinent to onboarding an employee for the first time. We’re 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 stock of late. I just want to have one little, and this probably talks to the heart of making compliance effortless. Wrkr really does three things. We move money, we move messages, and we move credentials. We move superannuation payments from employer to the fund or self-managed super. We move the messages, such as the Superstream super messages from the employer into the Superstream network, into the fund, and then from fund to the ATO. We move credentials. Within that, it’s not just a banking or a financial platform. We move very complex credentials from tax file number and superfund all the way through to identity and other licensed credentials of individuals.

It really puts us in the center of an ecosystem between the employers, their banks, their HR and payroll systems, and their employees who interact directly all the way through across into those receiving entities around from be it an SMSF account or the ATO themselves, or of course the some 106 regulated APRA funds with over six members. That market in and of itself, just in Australia alone, is significant. Although when you look at the complexity, there’s about a million employers, there’s actually close to about 360 payroll companies, about 15 million active employees, so those who are in accumulation phase but also compliant with requiring super, about 19 million jobs in Australia, just to give you an understanding of the two. There’s 22 to 23 million super member accounts, about 620,000 SMSFs. Wages is the largest, which is 500 million pay events in Australia.

Of course, single touch payroll events match that. That’s the message that goes with pay. Then 160 million super events, which of course with payday super will move to 500 million. 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 repair of errors in data. That’s really something that is a core strength to Wrkr. Let me jump in with some of the quarterly highlights that we’re immensely proud of. I’ll jump into a bit on the implementation journey. First, you’ve seen the REST Super pilot success. That was substantive in a couple of measures. One, we’ve implemented in partnership with REST and MUFG. 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, and integration into the fund’s compliance requirements. An enormous amount of business activity was tested. The customer experience feedback was exceptional. Just to give you a sense, we marked up around in some areas around the 92%. That wasn’t just against other funds or other clearinghouse platforms. That was actually against technology, employer compliance technology more broadly. That was independently tested by a third-party company for REST and really gives us something we’ve believed in for some time. A real clear strength is the ease of use of the platform, which makes migrating customers onto it that bit easier, but also a lower cost to support because it’s much easier for people to understand.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: I’m trying to interrupt. I think we are frozen. I just want to 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, Wrkr: Okay, says all good.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Can hear you. We’ll keep going.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: It’s just my screen’s frozen. You can see me looking like I’ve had some kind of issue. Please do reach out if you can’t hear us. The Australian Super win, that mattered incredibly to our team and for a couple of reasons. Obviously, they are the largest player by a factor. They also are a very sophisticated organization and took a very different approach to REST. 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 known and major competitors. To win under a competitive tender, as well as to have such a large organization, we really feel that’s a great set of the domino in between Australian Super and REST.

Actually, what it does mean is we’ve got enough volume there to really set a standard and a benefit, a significant price benefit for any other funds who join that same industry fund or as MUFG or LUPRA employer platform. Australian Retirement Trust is undergoing a large transformation. We continue to do work for them, readying our licensed platform and technology to underpin their transformation. That will continue to increase some revenues with them on both the implementation side, but also shows that continued strength and long-term relationship with Australian Retirement Trust. At the same time, MUFG went live in the quarter, which is excellent. 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.

We are excited by that for two reasons. It increases our global relevance longer term. In the short term, it really does give another layer of credential for our platform. MUFG Retirement Solutions refer to the platform as the LUPRA employer platform. It is now fully market ready and they are active out with the rest of their funds, which is obviously making the partnership pay back for us, obviously with a much lower cost of sales as we move forward now. The API progress has been beneficial in two ways. We mentioned a while ago that we were investing around that API. We have partnered with a fantastic company, Zalaris, who specialize in mid-market for SAP. In that work, we’ve both progressed the product very well, but actually progressed our in-market sales. We have the first of six significant companies in that mid-market coming on.

We feel that will be the start of many. Most importantly, we are co-building with their support and integration into the SAP app store, which will make it much easier for us to continue to grow on the payroll end of the market. 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 add more to the platform. The good news is every time we add something, we add it to the entire platform. It just improves our competitive position. One of the areas we focus very heavily on is anti-fraud enhancements with the partnership with Transmit. That is particularly around the challenge the market is observing in direct debit fraud. We believe that’ll be the start.

It’s an attractive market for fraudsters to pursue broadly in the superannuation market. We focus on bringing new technologies to bear that ensure we’re doing full facial liveness tests 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 go deeper into compliance, making sure we’ve got even stronger financial experience on our board. You will attend the press coverage. I’m still apologetic for it. It felt like just a free kick for us. Thank you to the ADC. We’re very tongue in cheek, but very serious about the need to move to payday super to avoid this non-payment, particularly to the most vulnerable employees out there. That opinion and the way we’re architected and our success with REST drew some great attention, which was very positive. We’ve been thankful for that.

Of course, our talent growth, we continue to hire. Pause for a second from a quarterly update. This is really the culmination of many quarters of work. There’s still more to come. It just shows the speed and 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, will this focus on Superfunds, where and why? Hopefully, this chart kind of gives you a bit of an understanding when we think about the members.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: I don’t think people can see the chart, but it is now live on the ASX. You can jump into it from there. We’re building a compelling base in SuperSlide. Apologies for the tech issues this morning.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: How’s it not coming up?

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: 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, Wrkr: Okay.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Yeah.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: That’s not very helpful, is it? All right. It looks far better with pictures, but I’m going to give you a... I’ll use my words. Look, we did an analysis of the top 40 funds by members. It’s important for everyone to note this gain is really won and lost at the top end of town. The top five funds represent 15% of members. The top 15 funds, about 85% of members. If we look at what we would call MUFG funds, that’s about 38% of members. Australian Retirement Trust is about 11.5%. Aussie Super being circa 15%, Australian Retirement Trust being about 11.5%. This comes off the APRA to 2024 report.

What matters is right across the first three by volume are Australian Super at 15% at around 3.4 million members, Australian Retirement Trust at around, not including perhaps some of their additional acquisitions of recent, but Australian Retirement Trust at about 2.6, 2.4 million, sorry, REST at 2.2, Host at just under 2 million members, and then you jump down to CBUS at just under a million members. 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 conclusion with REST. That puts us alone in a position of hitting around about 30% thereabouts of the market. We intend we expect that to continue to grow as we had success across the MUFG funds.

What’s important about that is we played 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 are unexpected to us as we go down through the rest of the marketplace. From that perspective, really, really good news.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Just before we move on, there was a question that what is the color coding for on the slides? Somebody found it on the ASX, which is what it is. The yellow is the funds that we already have and are working on. Australian Retirement Trust there in the lighter blue is the platform that we provide to BEAM and BILT. That’s Australian Retirement Trust’s administration platform and clearinghouse. The ones in the pink color are the other MUFG Retirement Solutions administered funds.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: That are in the top 30 funds. The green just denotes, yellow denotes it’s on our SaaS platform. The red color denotes that they’re to be one, but a part of the MUFG spread. The green is for, is that it is one under license. It’s not under a SaaS platform. Obviously, that’s a longer-term plan for us is to convert them to our broader SaaS platform. Much, much harder. If you can hear me, I’m going to assume the slides are not, that we’re not frozen. I might just reconnect them. Can anyone see the slides?

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: No.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: Hopefully, if you can see it now, just let me know.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Yep.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: There they are. Look at that. My skills are questionable, but they’re there. Just so everyone is aware, that last slide we were talking about is just the size of funds. 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. A lot of people have asked questions around the implementation plan of a fund. We just wanted to give you an idea of how that works. 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 revenue. It is a six to nine-month implementation. It’s a faster implementation without employer rollout, obviously, if we’re just doing the back end in payroll. It’s really just a live switching across.

Six to nine months is the timeframe we propose with the superfunds, accepting that they need, you know, I need someone who can drive Zoom. I just saw that statement. Thanks very much, Ian. That important element is it’s a complex time period, but it is really less about platform readiness and far more around fund readiness to do their transformation. Pre-go live, this is around developing comms 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. As you can imagine, at this point, we’re really dealing with very much starting with a live platform. There is opportunity to expedite this process, but we’re being conservative. We still give guidance of six to nine months for the funds, but there’s increasing pressure to bring this forward.

It’s an execution phase with Hypercare, which then moves directly into the fund’s benefits. Let me just explain how that rolls out in what we have right now. We have REST, and I’ve just put their member numbers because it is difficult to highlight exactly who has what accumulation, and I want to keep those numbers sensitive for the funds. 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. We expect them by the end of Q2. By December, we would expect them from October through to December to have achieved go live, subject to hitting that main retail timeframe, which may push one or two of their key clients potentially into the start of Q3. Wrkr has our own ClickSuper transition that we’re migrating across to.

Obviously, it’s an uplift, and we will decommission our ClickSuper platform. That’s the current timeframe. There has been work done and a considerable amount of work done by Karen Gilmour to go back historically all the way through and ensure all the reconciliations, ensure that we are in a position to archive and close that core platform. Australian Super announced a couple of weeks ago, and they have fairly aggressive timeframes. Q3 is their go live, but we expect to be doing platform testing with live customers, hopefully around the end of Q2. 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 actually a funded data migration program for them as well, which adds a fair amount of additional work for us. We believe that helps expedite the implementation.

We get transactions earlier. 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-Q4, which puts them on track for payday super. In addition, our team are working on the additional features for Wrkr’s small business clearinghouse. We don’t know what share we will get of that market. However, we know that we are very competitively priced, and our solution 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. That’s that 240,000 employers. It’s actually predominantly input, about 80% by accountants. 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 are still commercial considerations for each of them. We’ll work through that with MUFG. MUFG have indicated two more large fund slots, which you’ll see below. In between those, we have a further set of managed payrolls that we’ve been in conversation with to increase. We already serve them today. They’ll come across in the ClickSuper transition, but actually, there’s some features that may increase our total coverage of that market. All bodes well. This does not include funds coming directly to us that are outside of MUFG. Interestingly, since the announcement of Australian Super, we’ve seen a couple of funds show immediate interest. That timeline, the most obvious thing that you’ll see is not everybody’s going to make payday super. That is actually in part probably one of the biggest challenges that we are foreseeing.

We will be put under a little bit of pressure to be able to deal with multiple programs simultaneously. 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 we’re in, the indication is it is an expectation that certainly the funds and the gateways will be ready on time by July, start of July 2026, at the end of Q4. That’s the background on timing. We wanted to just be clear with everyone. The good news is we’re seeing a lot of success. The challenge is that success means we’re going to have more work to do. As I’ve explained earlier, this work is 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, like beyond with the transactions. That’s the key background. I thought we’d jump into financial performance, and then I’ll come back and rip through the questions.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Thanks, Karen. Hey, so the cash flow results are up there. I just want to talk through the 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 we’ve been doing, but it’s really culminated in Q4 with the Australian Super win and the go-live of REST and Hong Kong, as well as lots of conversations also on the pipeline and continual development in our feature set for payday readiness. That’s around making sure that we have the APIs for our payrolls, integration that was built for Aspire. I guess what the screen is showing is that we had a lot of investment.

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 $2.2 million in cash from our MUFG contracts around that development and implementation of the digital platform, Wrkr’s 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. There was another 0.5% last year. There’s another 0.5% this year. That’s then up to 12%, at which point it will stabilize. 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 increase on our support and maintenance and license fees. We saw, and then we had renewals on our other platform-as-a-service license contracts that just saw an increase in CPI. We also had our existing ClickSuper business remain fairly stable, which it has done year on year. We’re looking forward to the transition of that onto the Wrkr PLATFORM in the next kind of six months. We hope to see traction of our other products that we can offer at that time when we bring people across. It’s not just a clearinghouse. There’s the onboarding and stapling moments as well, and other compliance moments that we’ll be able to roll out to them and hopefully capitalize on.

In terms of the cost base, the largest increase in cost base is around our resources, so our people, our staff costs. We had expanded the team by 20 people in a year, quite a significant increase in our resource. That also means in our skill and abilities across the board from Product Managers, Business Analysts, Engineers, Solution Architects. 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. I’ll talk about that a bit when we get to the next slide. Also in our security posture, we’re continually investing in that security posture at Wrkr. That’s not something that we just stop. It happens every day.

Most importantly, just around protecting the increasing fraud environment within which we work, which you’ve all seen in headlines, in papers around superfunds, and just making sure that we’re protecting ourselves as things continue to evolve in that space.

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

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: All right, thank you, Trent. Yeah, 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 12 months. If I move on to the next slide about financial outlook, we’re working through the audit at the moment, we’re in the second week of audit, with our net operating revenues projected to be between $10 million to $11 million. 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 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 us. 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 million target on board, and then look at where those higher compliance moments are going to come from as well. There are strategic decisions to happen there. We also know that that payday super date is there. There is mounting pressure from the payrolls, from the DSPs, from the HR systems, and obviously the remaining MUFG funds to want to do something about their current systems and positions. 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 12 months.

I guess I’ll pass that to Trent, but happy to answer any questions that pop up.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: Given the slides are working, I thought I’d jump to this one because this is where most of the questions are based. There’s a couple of questions here I’ll pick up. Just starting 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. That’s a risk 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 kick off. The good news is the timeframe is tight for any of those participants to make a decision.

We know where we stand pretty quickly, and there’s a lot of active conversations. We will need to be in a position to serve up those two options. Either we’re saying no and letting it push out, or we’ll seek to look for alternatives to fund them to bring them forward. In terms of what is covered in our work to date, obviously, the two major funds being REST Super and Australian Super, which I’ll be honest, is two funds’ worth of both size and effort for us. The team are well positioned to deliver those as well as our own transition. Of course, we have all those started and technologically a platform, the API work has started, which positions us well for a large fund. There’s still a fair amount of onboarding for a significant cloud-based fund, payroll, sorry.

The small business clearinghouse will require a level of digital go-to-market activity that we’ve not yet done. They’re not skills we have in-house. That just gives people an understanding of where we sit. Better to have a basket of opportunities and then figure out how we prioritize. Let me go through. Ian, you’ve picked up on that same victim of your own success. You know, will you need to raise funds to take all these to market? Don’t let the competitors win. I share your view. I think we do need to think about there are different methods available to us for funding, but we definitely, it is my view and the board’s view at this point, as well as Karen’s. Karen’s just got to figure out the how, but that 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’d had more time, and they’ve taken lengthy periods looking. Now the time’s here, and now we’re running out of time. 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 share, we think, over the next nine to ten years. That’s important to us to make sure we win. I agree with you there. I think, John, that picks up your question on the same. There was a question back on, Ken, apologies, my eyes are following me. Could you speak to the international scalability and what Hong Kong development gives?

Hong Kong for now gives HSBC serve about 300,000 users, and they’ll, in the corporate area, continue to expand into rolling them out. There are another couple of, there is a large fund manager or pension manager of the same size as HSBC that there are discussions with. There is the what’s called the MPF, which is the basic super in that market. We think longer term, Hong Kong represents a great opportunity. It was one, 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 MUFG. 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 pension modules we’ve built are definitely the same that the UK market requires.

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 checking system market in some respects, but they are starting to transform. We’re not pushing it because we don’t have the manpower, but once we’ve finished the Australian expansion, that would be the next logical market for us with MUFG. Just picking up, did Australian Super provide any specific reason for their feedback for why you beat the competitor challenges? Were those competitors the same? Same as what you have covered before? Yes, the main competitors, Westpac, Super Choice, and others. The main reason, I think, is Wrkr’s the one-stop shop vision, actually. A cornerstone of what they were looking to do is they’re trying to help their employers.

That means putting software in front of them that may also bring, they may buy other services directly with us. They really felt that not being super-centric and just solving for the super payment, but actually bringing more broader value and introducing value was a key competitive strength of ours. That was some of the feedback. So far, we have very much a shared vision on we care about customers and we’re not, it’s not money first and contract first. It’s what can we do and partner together. That’s the sense, I think, the feedback we’re getting across the board is we’re culturally a good business to partner with. Michael, I hope that answers 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 its QuickSuper employers in September.

CBUS was one of the clients who’ve done a pilot. If CBUS does not take up the Wrkr PLATFORM, how does that fit? 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 our plan. If we need to make up numbers, we still think we’re well on target because REST 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. We already do the real-time clearance. I think the challenge is there’s a lot of enthusiasm from the major banks to say that they have a solution for doing real-time payments now.

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. That’s a one-off payment to cover up, if you’re Woollies, 150,000 employees. Woollies is not going to make 150,000 one-time 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 want to pay out real-time, you will get real-time fraud, particularly where people are paying out into self-managed super. What you get is payment into self-managed super that doesn’t meet the legal requirements or may not be active from an ATO perspective. That’s two of the issues. 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 an income. We want them as soon as plausible into the system, but accurate. We want them, and we do them in batch, and we do them in daily batch. 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 million pay events. We’d like to get the share of that. In some ways, there’s noise in the system. We’re talking to all of those funds. We’ve got a pretty good understanding of what they feel about what’s noise and what’s valued.

I don’t want to 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 given. That’s our view. We’ll see. Arrogance can always be met by a loss. Let’s watch those last couple of funds, but we continue to invest very closely with them. Westpac is not the only one. ANZ and others are pitching the same proposed solution. 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, detailed date of birth. That information doesn’t sit in a payments reconciliation. That’s just to give people a bit of backdrop there.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: 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. A lot of people’s superannuation payments are, a lot of employers are higher than that. We are really working closely with our bank and working through the limitations that that poses for employers at the moment. Yeah.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: Ian, working backwards, who should bear the responsibility of the onboarding? The reality is it’s a tripartite, which is what makes it lengthy. Wrkr takes 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. We are, if you like, we take a more active role in implementation than what is perhaps necessary or what we’re funded for. We just know it’s necessary for our long-term play. Nick, could you give a competitor landscape description? Yeah, Nick. Competitors now, Westpac’s still present across a bunch of funds, but obviously, Australian Super has come from there. That really does do some damage to their total numbers. It would be interesting to see what their strategy is in light of a Host and a CBUS if they’re saying they’re going to move.

Super Choice is definitely the other larger competitor. It goes Westpac, Super Choice, and then us for now. That’s starting to shift. A bit of a difference in model and a difference in Westpac are with lowest price and least amount of features. Super Choice, comprehensive service, no onboarding, but highest price. We sit in the middle with increased features for the same dollar value and close to Westpac on transaction and price. We’re in a fairly unique position. I try to describe us as Aldi, where we’re best value for money in the slot. Hopefully, that helps. Outside of that, it’s a pretty small network of players. There’s one last one here for Karen. Karen, does your headcount include those that are for project work and therefore temporary in engagement?

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Yeah, thanks for 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 shape once we move from this really development and implementation phase into that operational phase. We 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 projects and feature enhancements, more compliance moments, and things like that. We do want to create a workforce that then where there is something that’s quite project-based and funded by a client, 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 an Australian digital service provider, we need to make sure the engineering capability is onshore in a lot of the areas around the clearinghouse. We are looking at ways over the next kind of 12 months to make sure that we’re set up for that right kind of development, operational, organizational chart. Yeah.

Trent Lund, CEO, Wrkr: I think we’re down to our last question, which was pipeline organically looks solid. Well done, well done to the team. Has management got sights on possible acquisition for scale? I would say, yes, we’re always looking forward. We won’t seek acquisition in the superfund, obviously, space, just because those clients are really there to be won through best value proposition. However, the compliance moments or window is creeping up for us. I use the example of Australian Super and REST combined looking to roll out software, which we’ll touch. Probably, let’s say a net 300,000 businesses will get to onboard onto our portal, see our experience, see our other services. We think that is a really powerful opportunity for us to be able to display additional working, from working with children’s checks and upper medical checks all the way through to more detailed licenses, visa status.

They’re much more profitable checks, but obviously not as ubiquitous to the market. Being there in front of those employees and making it easy for them to buy the handful is going to be key. We are looking at some of those now, not for immediate acquisition, but there is definitely opportunity to accelerate that revenue in line with go live. It would need to be available for us, and this serves to a greater challenge. Before, as we go live for REST and Australian Super, we need to be introducing subscriptions. Over time, we can introduce more depth and breadth of those subscription services. That is the focus, but we haven’t made any immediate decisions, but there is definitely a group that’s forming. I think that is all of the Q&A, and I’m sorry we’ve overrun. I do apologize for my poor 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 try another method. Again, thank you very much. We’re available. We have lots of meetings with different people this week. If you have questions, please put them on the Investor Hub. I’ll commit to answering them as soon as possible. Thank you very much.

Karen Gilmour, CFO, Wrkr: Thanks.

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