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The world's largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace Freelancer (ASX: FLN) achieved a record gross payment volume of $204.3 million in the first quarter, representing year-on-year growth of 25.6 per cent.
In an announcement today, the company highlighted cash receipts also hit a record of $14 million after rising 15.8 per cent, with the period marked by optimism surrounding a partnership with Arrow Electronics and major development work.
The ongoing works involve deploying a new front-end technical stack as Freelancer aims to improve user experience, the velocity of product development and site speed.
"This is a substantial amount of work and has continued into 1Q19 with pages in the new stack starting to be shipped to the live website," the company said.
"The effort pays off a large amount of technical debt that has accrued over the years and will bring the front-end architecture to the state of the art, which should improve the user experience and retention.
"Once this work is complete, the engineering team will be able to focus on growth initiatives of acquisition, funnel optimisation and retention."
The company also highlighted strong contribution from payment service provider Escrow.com which it acquired for just under $10 million in 2015.
Escrow's business outside China notched a 45.1 per cent uplift in gross payment volume to $107 million, with licensed coverage in more US states with the total now at 46.
The company expects two more money transmission licences in the second quarter and other applications are also underway in the US, while efforts continue to improve coverage in other markets.
"The licence application for the United Kingdom is under internal review and we expect to lodge in 2Q19. As previously reportd we are also currently working to launch in Canada," the group says.
Escrow.com is currently live on more than 13,000 listings on BestCarFinder, and the company expects to close another car marketplace deal in North America this quarter.
Meanwhile, the payment service has been busy expanding its scope on other fronts as well.
"In the quarter we also closed Hillco Streambank IPv4 Global Brokerage, which is the largest IP address space broker in the world," the company says, adding the service has transacted more than US$300 million in volume to date and will now be powered by Escrow Offer.
"Other examples of integrations include WatchPayer, a watch purchasing website and YClas, a marketplace as a service platform."
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