Airtasker IPO delayed a day due to ASX processing blunder

Airtasker’s Tim Fung was trying to shrug off an ASX listing delay in a LinkedIn post on the weekend.

The sharemarket debut of Airtasker will be delayed by a day due to an ASX “processing omission”, which adds to the exchange’s woes following an embarrassing trading outage last year.

Airtasker executives were expecting to ring the ASX bell on Monday, for a company listing with a market capitalisation of $226.9m and debuting at 65c per share.

But post on LinkedIn, by Airtasker’s founder Tim Fung over the weekend, cited an ASX “internal glitch” which would delay the initial public offering until Tuesday.

“While I’m a little surprised, apparently these internal glitches happen even for platforms as established as the Australian Stock Exchange,” Mr Fung said. “As fellow marketplace builders, I guess we need to cut them a little slack.”

His post – which included a meme of Will Ferrell in the movie Elf – likened the delay to Christmas being delayed to December 26, but went on to say “good things come to those who wait”.

The ASX’s listings executive general manager Max Cunningham replied to the post apologising for the delay, noting it related to a “processing omission”.

Mr Fung told this publication on Sunday he had fielded calls from ASX chief executive Dominic Stevens and Mr Cunningham on the issue on Saturday.

“In the significance of what I think Airtasker – the impact we can have on the world and the positive impact we can have on the future of work – my view is that an extra 24 hours is water off the duck’s back from our perspective,” he said. “But I do think as an overarching ASX, the integrity of the overall sharemarket, it’s incredibly important the ASX is accountable.”

Mr Fung also said the ASX were “owning it” and dealing with the problem and the delay, although in the broader context of the exchange’s responsibilities they had to be accountable.

An ASX spokesman on Sunday said: “The (Airtasker IPO) postponement is due to an ASX internal processing delay – human error, not technical or system related. Airtasker did everything it needed to, and has satisfied ASX’s conditions for admission and quotation.

“ASX has apologised to Airtasker, regrets the disruption and has taken steps to address this as quickly as possible.”

Official trading on the ASX will now start at 11am AEDT on Tuesday, 24 hours after originally scheduled.

Sydney-based Airtasker, which allows users to outsource tasks ranging from house cleaning to queuing up to buy a new iPhone, has become a household word in Australia and is eyeing growth Singapore and the US. The company is already up and running in the UK, New Zealand and Ireland.

It has, however, been a tough six months for the ASX. Financial regulators are probing what went wrong in November when the ASX experienced a technology meltdown, that impacted trading.

At the time, the ASX was forced to apologise for the outage – its worst in decades – which was blamed on a software issue relating to a system update that crippled its entire trading platform.

The Airtasker float was oversubscribed and institutional investors in the company as part of the IPO are said to include Firetrail Investments, L1 Capital and Regal Funds Management. Stockbroker Morgans was managing the listing process for Airtasker.