INSIDER SEPTEMBER 2026
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2
LETTER FROM THE CEO
3
KEY BUSINESS UPDATES
8
SUMMER PARTIES
9
Updates from: Voice of the Customer Engineering Quality GAP office Live Shipping Global Offices Search and AI Chairish and Proxibid updates Cybersecurity Reliability Germany Auction Partners
Pictures from the recent Summer Parties
CALL OUTS The recent call outs from All Hands. Use the new #ATGCallOuts slack channel for peer to peer praise as well!
A NOTE FROM OUR CEO Welcome to Edition 4 of the atgInsider. This quarter's edition is packed full of updates across many areas of ATG. As we finish Q4 of FY26, we are continuing to keep our focus on growing and serving our bidders and being the best possible partner to our auctioneers and dealers. During this month, many of you will get to experience these relationships first hand through Voice of the Customer month. This initiative is a first for ATG, and I look forward to hearing how you connect with our customers and clients, and what you learn along the way. In addition, I will continue to meet some of you as I travel or online through a number of employee listening sessions as we complete the calendar year. As I have said before, the last 12 months have brought a lot of change for ATG. I am very proud of how you have handled that change and continue to stay curious and agile about the work ahead of us. As we finish this financial year and look to the next, I am confident we have the people, the opportunity, and the focus to build a stronger ATG. Thank you for your continued support, and I hope you enjoy reading.
Duncan Painter, Chief Executive Officer
ONE TO WATCH
Each Newsletter will feature a lot that a member of our Exec team has their eye on Executive: Jenn Bouchard Item: Charles and Ray Eames for Herman Miller, Lounge Chair Marketplace: LiveAuctioneers Why has it caught your eye? This is my partner’s dream chair and I hope one day to get a good auction deal so I can surprise him with it (and the holidays are right around the corner).
KEY BUSINESS UPDATES VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER MONTH We've launched our first-ever company-wide Voice of the Customer initiative - a push to hear directly from the auction houses and bidders who use our platform every day. Over the month of September, employees will be meeting with sellers and bidders, in person and virtually, across our 10 brands. The goal is simple: listen first. We want to understand what's working, what's frustrating, and where we can be a stronger partner. Thank you in advance for your participation and for helping make this happen. Some pictures of the visits so far. Don’t forget to share your feedback and photos here.
ENGINEERING IS SHIPPING MORE THAN TWICE AS FAST — AND QUALITY WENT UP, NOT DOWN! "Lead time" (how long it takes a finished improvement to reach customers) is one of ATG's primary engineering health measures, and this year's goal is to cut the FY25 average of 4.39 days down to 2.2 by fiscal year end. Through August 24, the year-to-date average stands at 2.51 days (43% reduction) and each of the last three months has run under two days (June 1.80, July 1.88, August 1.95 so far), already beating the year-end goal. Along the way, engineering has shipped 7,092 production releases this fiscal year, about 22 every day. The Seller Experience team’s lead time is down 57% year over year, Chairish crossed the cut-in-half line for the first time (6.01 2.99 days), and the Proxibid Consolidation teams ran at under a day in July. The most dramatic example: search improvements used to take the better part of three days to release — after the team gave search its own release process in August, they now reach customers in about 15 minutes.
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What's behind it isn't one silver bullet but a set of habits spreading team to team: smaller and more frequent releases, AIassisted code review, and rolling changes out to a small slice of customers before everyone gets them. Crucially, speed hasn't cost quality, over the same period, both consolidation teams kept zero open bugs in production and never missed a service commitment. Wavebid now runs these careful, gradual releases as a routine team practice rather than a specialist's job. Faster, smaller, safer releases mean customers get improvements sooner and problems get fixed in minutes instead of days.
GAP OFFICE - ABOVE AND BEYOND CUSTOMER SUPPORT Scott and Hazel in the UK Operations team stepped up when Harper Field decided to move off their previous platform and move temporarily back onto GAP Office. They untangled a mess of undocumented data exports, fought through a broken import routine, and found a workaround to avoid thousands of duplicate records, coordinating daily with the auctioneer throughout and keeping watch during their live sale. They then fixed an unusable image format by self-teaching a scripting solution on the spot, and processing 4,000 images while also covering seller support solo. The support given by our Operational team ensured that Harper Field was able to continue listing and selling items with no back office downtime. This level of support has given them the confidence to migrate away from GAP office when it sunsets later this year, continuing to be a key client.
CROSS FUNCTIONAL LIVE SHIPPING IMPROVEMENTS Shipping is a key driver of customer satisfaction... and customer dissatisfaction. Improving the LiveShipping experience for our auctioneers and buyers alike is a key crossfunctional initiative. Lowered costs, increased transparency, and simplified operational processes are core to improving our offering. What We've Done: Reduced Full Service Packing & Insurance Costs: 6-10% total shipping cost reduction on Full Service shipping Elevated the Auction House: We re-branded eLabel shipping with the Auction House name. Auctioneers appreciate the visibility, and bidders feel more confident accepting the quote. Announced Mandate Exemption: Auctioneers can now apply for exemption from our LiveShipping program, without sacrificing our bidder experience. What We're Doing Next: More, and Better, Carriers: Bring on the right carriers for the right segments at the right price, and give our ops team greater flexibility to assign them correctly. Shipment Transparency: Revisit key information access points across the site & email so buyers know where their item is and when to expect it. And, more proactively monitor for & communicate delays.
GLOBAL SHUTDOWN An ATG Global Shutdown between 24th December and the 4th January was announced at the most recent All Hands. This paid time off is in recognition of the work and resilience shown by our global teams. If you have any further questions about this time off, please discuss them with your Manager or the People team.
AI MOVED FROM EXPERIMENT TO EVERYDAY ENGINEERING TOOL Over the summer, AI-assisted engineering crossed from pilots into daily practice across ATG. AI reviewers now automatically check every proposed code change against ATG's design and security standards before a person ever looks at it. Teams used AI to more than double automated test coverage on key services - shipping went from 30% to 63% and payments reached 79% - and to trim a suite of bidding tests by 18% while making it run in six minutes instead of over an hour. The plan to rebuild EstateSales.NET was drafted by a team of AI agents working in parallel: over 1,000 well-scoped, linked work items loaded into Jira with a live delivery dashboard. The Hammer-UI Claude plugin now builds a real working application from a plainEnglish request - ATG's design team and a product manager built their first apps this summer without writing code. An AI-driven development workflow was handed from its creator to another developer, who has more than doubled the amount of work she completes since adopting it. And a new AI-readiness score rates any codebase on nine criteria, turning "is this codebase ready for AI?" into a repeatable measurement. The common thread: AI adoption at ATG is becoming measurable and transferable, not dependent on individual enthusiasts.
GOOGLE MIGRATION IS CONFIRMED - 5TH OCTOBER! The countdown is on! We'll be fully live on Google Workspace from Monday 5 October, with a short freeze window over the weekend before (Friday 2 – Sunday 4 October) while we complete the final data migration and transition over. Missed a training session? All our live training sessions have been recorded and are available to watch back any time, covering everything from Drive and Docs fundamentals through to Gemini. Catch up here Quick reminder Your primary email address is now @auction.tech, your old address still works as an alias, so nothing gets missed. Need a hand? Drop your questions in #Help or the Google Migration Slack channel, IT are here throughout the transition.
SMARTER SEARCH IS PAYING FOR ITSELF — MILLIONS IN MEASURED IMPACT The Search & Discovery team ran a steady drumbeat of improvements this summer, each one tested against a control group - so the results are measured, not estimated. June's wave, home-page recommendations and reranked trending items on LiveAuctioneers, smarter category shortcuts for Art shoppers, search-quality fixes on Chairish, and better auction ordering on Proxibid, added up to roughly $1.7M a year in extra sales for LiveAuctioneers, a 29% sales lift for Chairish, and 4.5% more GMV (the total value of goods sold) for Proxibid. In August, a rebuilt AI ranking model beat both alternatives decisively - 16.8% more sales value from search - and rolled out to all LiveAuctioneers traffic. A new fairness experiment launched August 18 tackles a longstanding imbalance where two or three big auction houses could dominate category pages, re-ranking instead by how likely each item is to actually sell. The machinery underneath caught up too: the outdated search index behind June's slowdowns was switched off for good, cutting alerts to engineers by 95%, and the servers powering visual search ("similar items" and search-byimage) were upgraded with zero downtime to 4× the computing power at half the response time. A new guard stopped automated scrapers from digging hundreds of pages deep into old results (a pattern that had caused roughly 679,000 failed searches for real shoppers over four days ) without spending an estimated $157K a year on extra servers. Better results for buyers, better exposure for sellers, and a steadier platform underneath.
$1.7M | $4.1M | $5.8M | Incremental value add per Marketplace GMV = Gross Merchandise Value ALV = Average Lot Value
+8-11% ALV +16.8 GMV
INCREASING OFFERS ON CHAIRISH The Chairish Buyer team has run several tests on Chairish to boost offers on items and offer payment completion including exposing the offer panel directly on the page and improving the checkout flow for offers. We've seen a significant increase in offers initiated (+65% YoY) and offer payments completed (+16% YoY). Offers also drive higher AOV because our buyers tend to make offers on higher priced items. This work has contributed to the substantial growth we've seen on Chairish over the last quarter.
PROXIBID CONSOLIDATION: FROM BLUEPRINTS TO CUSTOMERS' SCREENS Edition 3 covered the first timed auction on Seller Portal and the new Proxibid pages. This summer, the consolidation program hit its most visible milestones yet. On August 13, the four rebuilt Events pages replaced the old pages for every Proxibid customer, after a two-week live comparison across 23,610 customers showed behavior on the new pages matched the old within 0.19% (anything under 2% counted as safe), and clicks to join an auction actually rose. It's the first complete set of pages migrated on the strength of a live comparison, and that test-first, then-switch pattern is now the method for everything that follows. The new My Account area also shipped its Watchlist page in a single sprint, kept in sync both ways — remove a lot on the new page and it disappears from classic Proxibid too. The biggest open design question - how to rebuild live bidding - was answered and turned into working code within weeks: the new Proxibid live bidding experience builds on GAP Live's proven code, with decades-old database logic rewritten on a modern platform and LiveAuctioneers' existing videostreaming setup reused instead of building a second one. Live bidding represents roughly threequarters of the live marketplace business, so this decision de-risks the heart of the program. The payments foundation landed too: a new invoicing service is live as the single source of truth for invoices, and a customer's card can now be saved and used end to end with the new payment provider — the piece that registration, deposits, and international-bidder work worth roughly $49M in sales had been waiting on. Single sign-on also reached all five GAP marketplaces, so bidders move from marketplace to live sale without logging in twice.
QUIETLY SAFER, MEANINGFULLY CHEAPER Security work this summer was defined by speed and follow-through. When attackers slipped malicious code into open-source software components used across the industry in August, ATG contained it within days — and the lasting outcome is automated security scanning now running continuously across the systems that build and ship our software, replacing manual scrambles with standing visibility. An attack that racked up roughly 29,000 fraudulent text-message verifications (a scam that bills us per message sent) was shut down within 18 hours, and a wave of login attempts using passwords stolen from other websites was blocked at the firewall, with a new monitoring dashboard to catch the next attempt faster. Deeper hardening landed too: browsers now always use the secure connection to ATG sites, every system's cloud access was trimmed down to only what it actually needs, and the payment-card security (PCI) work reached 76.5%, on track for the September deadline. Meanwhile, engineering kept taking cost off the table. An entire legacy analytics platform was switched off for good - about $240K in annual savings - and the shared bidding services finished consolidating from two cloud providers down to one, saving another $25K a year. Smaller wins compound: monitoring costs for the search service dropped from $215 to under $3 a month, and AMY cut its automated build-and-test minutes by 61% with a targeted cleanup. Same platforms, better protected, running leaner.
FASTER PAGES, STEADIER AUCTIONS: THE RELIABILITY WINS BUYERS NEVER SEE
STRENGTHENING PARTNERSHIPS ACROSS GERMANY Commercial Director James Nickless-Allen and Chairman of Auctions Richard Lewis recently travelled to Germany for a two-day visit with several of Lot-tissimo’s key auctioneer partners. The trip provided a valuable opportunity to meet face-to-face with the teams at Grisebach, Mehlis Auctions and Wendl Auctions, to hear directly about their priorities, challenges and plans for the future, and to explore how ATG can continue to deliver greater value as a partner. Across all three visits, discussions covered a broad range of topics, including ATG’s digital and commercial offering, bidder and auctioneer support, technology integrations, marketing opportunities, regulatory developments and opportunities to drive future growth. The conversations also generated a number of follow-up actions, with ATG teams now working on areas including Single Sign-On and API documentation, bid handling, marketing performance, timed auctions, accessibility and changes to regulations. A key theme throughout the trip was the importance of listening to our auctioneer partners and continually improving the support and services we provide. The open and constructive feedback from Grisebach, Mehlis and Wendl will help shape the next steps in these partnerships.
Some of the summer's best engineering is invisible until you notice nothing went wrong. GAP's lot pages - the busiest pages on the marketplaces now load right-sized images first and full resolution only when a buyer zooms in, cutting a typical page from 26MB to 422KB and making it about 2.5× faster, and cheaper to serve. The GAP sites were also re-engineered in how they handle thousands of simultaneous requests, ending a long-running pattern of crashes under peak load: the same automated-scraper traffic that used to knock servers over is now absorbed with zero crashes, on a third of the servers. And placing a bid, the moment that matters most, got over 60% faster, from up to 2 seconds down to around half a second. Live auctions got sturdier too: GAP Live video streams now reconnect themselves on both the bidder's and the auctioneer's side, so a network blip no longer halts a sale, a failure that once stopped an auction at Sworders mid-sale. AMY rebuilt its database upgrade process so the upgraded system is prepared alongside the live one and swapped in at the end: the latest upgrade finished in under an hour with zero customer outage, versus the previous three-hour maintenance windows. AMY also moved its first large group of client websites onto infrastructure that heals itself when a server fails, rather than waiting for a person to notice. Individually these are small stories; together they're why busy auction days keep getting less eventful.
Lot-details page weight, representative Saleroom lot
The visits were extremely well received, with all parties finding the discussions valuable and beneficial. Beyond the commercial and operational conversations, the trip also provided an opportunity to strengthen relationships and gain a deeper understanding of each auction house and its ambitions. James and Richard would like to thank Ludger and Angelika at Grisebach, Jens, Josephine and Suzanne at Mehlis, and Julia and Graciela at Wendl for their time, hospitality and continued partnership with ATG. A great example of how strong partnerships are built through collaboration, listening and working together towards shared success.
SUMMER GATHERINGS Our teams got together to connect at the start of the summer - check out some pictures of our US, UK and Mexico team at parties and our Bay Area team volunteering through OnHand!
TEAM CALL OUTS CUSTOMER FIRST Jason Neiheisel: finished #1 in both April and May for Closed Won units within the A&A New Business Dept. Jason closed 17 new auctioneer customers in each of April and May against a team average of 6.5. Jose Luis Dias: ramped fast on gaplive-bidder and gaplive-ingest, driving resiliency fixes that keep live bidding stable for auction houses under real event pressure. Fabricio Ruiz Segura: built our new Watchlist feature end to end in a single sprint, letting buyers save and return to items they love. James Iuliano: Built a safer release process for Wavebid that protects live bidding during deployments and allows changes to be reversed quickly. He also drove cross-team dependencies to resolution. Celeste Miller: in Chairish logistics for identifying a need for and designing more proactive management of VIP shipments.
CAPABILITY Edgar Pacheco: taking on new duties around UK payroll and Global Shares. He has also been instrumental in cross-training the payroll team driving stability and efficiency in a complex multijurisdictional area of the org. Oliver Landeros: had been with us only 3 weeks and made a significant impact, building automation that connects our HR system, identity platform and ticketing system so new joiners are set up automatically from day 1, plus security policies that protect company data and response to threats in real time. Amanda Rowe: for leading the Chairish Zendesk consolidation – migrating 5 million tickets and 1 million customer records into a single unified platform. This was a complex, high-stakes project, and her attention to detail kept it on track every step of the way. James Perrett: for leading our Treasury and cash management activities, implementing rigorous forecasts by day and by week, the first time we have had these disciplines. This has delivered a genuine step change in visibility of our cash position. Alongside this, he has steadily built strong working relationships with our banking partners. Sergio Virgen: discovered that a critical performance check was not working, even though it appeared to be. He fixed it before it created customer issues, closing a hidden quality risk.
COLLABORATION UK Office for quick and efficient compliance with clear desk policy! It is all of our roles to care for our office spaces. Also, to Roman Degtyur and Chad Impey for installing better wifi and technology in the meeting rooms. Austin Kim: stepped into ESN support with no runway, self-onboarding and coordinating across teams to keep the current platform ready for customer-impacting fixes. Jolyon Terwilliger: built a reusable component for another team, cleaned up shared analytics events across products, and spiked a feature for a different squad. Global Ops team: for coming together to understand how to best support our customers during a security incident that brought our entire Tier 1 team offline.
TEAM CALL OUTS
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COMMITMENT Juanita Yoakum: has been the driving force behind resolving payroll tax issues and has shown determination in working through complex issues and bringing the right people into the room to get to an outcome by the deadline. Georgina Mordue: led the delivery of 10 sets of statutory accounts. She showed huge tenacity and commitment to work through - including simply and confidently describing some very material one-off changes. She is a true expert in her field. Kevin Mui: Leads interconnectivity and security across our AWS and Azure environments, while driving meaningful cost savings alongside Engineering and SecOps. Jenn Pangan: for her leadership of our Tier 1 seller team during this period of much change. IT, Security & DevOps teams: for their work and dedication through the recent security incidents. Finance Reporting Team: for identifying and implementing efficiencies, reducing month end timelines by 2 days. Priyanka Govan: for going above and beyond to ensure work continued smoothly, the People team was supported, and employees were cared for.
CURIOSITY Abdullah Kareem & Charles Snelgrove: built a marketplace-agnostic subscription service POC in two weeks, with Charles's architecture input extending the opportunity beyond LiveAuctioneers. Giovanna Velloso De Oliveira: Deeply demonstrated curiosity by researching new approaches, asking hard questions and identifying opportunities to improve how the HR team works. John Coyle: He consistently finds hard problems and aims to solve them. Two recent examples include establishing ways of working framework and creating more clarity for teams to work together and providing an opportunity for the team to come together as one.
PASS IT ON Call out a colleague in the new #atgcallouts Slack channel.
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