Invenco more than delivering

Sir Peter Maire, founder of Navman, is chairman of Fusion Transactive, a company that produces technology for petrol stations. Photo / Richard Robinson

Secure pay tech company on track to again double revenue.

Peter Maire - who co-founded global GPS company Navman before selling up in 2007 - says his new tech business doubled its revenue last year and is on track to double again next year, "easily".

Secure payment technology company Invenco is one of several fast growing local companies in the financial services technology sector along with the likes of Xero and Vend.

In the past year the company, which provides payment technology for petroleum companies, has doubled its revenue to $39.4 million, substantially increased its profitability and expanded its international presence with strong sales growth in its Asian and European markets.

Maire said the company was set to continue this growth with major opportunities globally, including a recent partnership with US company NCR, which has around 25 per cent market share of all of the petroleum retail business in the US.

"I would expect we will at least double again next year - easily," Maire said. "Just looking at the potential of [our next deal] alone it's well north of US$500 million and the US is a mammoth opportunity for Invenco. There's years of opportunity ahead of us in that market."

Invenco was formed in 2009 by Maire and chief executive Dave Ritten, after Maire bought the Invenco portion of the bankrupted Provenco Cadmus business. The company was this week ranked 47th in the 2015 Technology Investment Network (TIN) report, which tracks the progress of New Zealand's technology companies as well as the sector as a whole. The company also made the top 10 companies-to-watch list, which ranks companies by highest dollar revenue growth.

Maire said the success of Invenco was a reflection on the industry as a whole, adding that the payments space in New Zealand was quite well developed.

New Zealand has been at the front edge of adopting secure payments technology from the very early days. I guess it's because we are small and isolated and certain banks chose to fund developing product in technology in New Zealand instead of buying it offshore, and now there's a good platform in New Zealand and there's very good depth of experience in payments here.

Peter Maire

Invenco is just one of a group of companies in the financial services sector that are fast growing and increasingly globally focused. This growth has been led by the big names like cloud accounting provider Xero and point-of-sale company Vend.

According to this year's TIN100 report, the financial services sector is the fastest growing in the technology industry, employing 812 more people in the past year. The 11 financial services companies in the report grew their revenue by $129 million, or 58 per cent, in the past year.

Xero topped this list with revenue of $123.9 million - growth of 76.7 per cent for the year.

Most of the $9 billion revenue generated from the top 200 companies came from high-tech manufacturing firms including medical device manufacturer Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, electric fencing and animal management company Gallagher Group and fruit sorting machinery company Compac Sorting Equipment.

According to TIN managing director Greg Shanahan, this year was the first in which revenue growth had occurred across all regions although growth was still predominantly led by Auckland and Wellington companies.

This year's report also showed a record 19 companies that had revenue of more than $100 million each.