Capital needs loom for on board Wynyard Group

Fast-growing intelligence software company Wynyard Group is considering its capital needs, but newly appointed chair Murray Horn is not commenting on whether that might include a New Zealand stock exchange listing.

Wynyard's owners, Christchurch-based software systems developers Jade Corporation, have appointed a seven member board headed by Horn, a former Treasury Secretary and head of the ANZ Bank in New Zealand, and which includes NBR RichLister Guy Haddleton, a San Francisco-based software guru.

Haddleton was an adviser to Xero, the New Zealand online accounting system with global ambitions, for its listing on the NZX and is pursuing his own global play with Anaplan, an enterprise performance and planning system.

Horn would not be drawn on whether stock exchange listing was an option for Wynyard, which has attracted a suite of top global banks and defence, police and intelligence agencies as customers.

"We are a company with growth prospects so we are considering all our capital options," he said. "We will need to fund the growth ambitions one way or another."

Managing director Craig Richardson, who was recently appointed to the board of the government's new smart-growth business agency, Callaghan Innovation, rounds out the seven member board.

Richardson told BusinessDesk in January the company was seeking multi-million dollar deals in the US during 2013 and 2014, and would need capital support to support such fast growth.

Jade's total revenue last year was around $35 million, with Wynyard around half of that and growing fast since launching its latest suite of intelligence-sifting software, which looks for patterns in vast quantities of data at speeds impossible for human investigators.

By Pattrick Smellie - BusinessDesk