Everyone loves a list (even if it’s about the worst lists) and, after more than 1000 nominations, a number of New Zealand companies have managed to impress our neighbours and earn places and special awards in the Australian Financial Review’s Most Innovative Companies.
The entries are judged by innovation consultancy Inventium and highest of the New Zealand companies was Xero at third. It also won the Best Service Innovation category for its Xero Learn platform.
Xero’s Lifelong Learning Platform “is an online learning experience. It uses Xero as a tool to revolutionise the way you teach. Developed for the future of beautiful business, it’s accessible education for anyone, anytime … That means students have access to the latest technology, and educators have the most up-to-date tools. It’s a revolutionary way to teach financial skills, setting your students up for life.”
Pushpay was ranked 11th for its Payment Assurance system.
As it says in its entry: “An estimated US$145.9 billion in e-commerce sales are lost each year due to false bank declines. This is caused by processors, banks and their partners having transient issues processing payments. Payments cannot be made until the service resumes, resulting in reputational damage and lost donations. Pushpay makes it easy for people to give to the causes that they care about. Part of what we do is processing the payments. When we process payments, we rely on other companies to help us get the payments from the sender to the receiver. Sometimes those companies have issues, which means payments fail and we lose some payments. This is not good for Pushpay, the person trying to give or the receiver. Pushpay has found a way to hold payments when issues happen with the companies we rely on and complete the payments later when the issue is resolved.
TRA was ranked 28th and was also awarded Best Innovation Programme for TRA Labs, which was set up to develop and scale data-driven solutions and aims to provide New Zealand organisations of all sizes with the tools required to make effective decisions without the need for more expensive consulting services that are out of reach for many businesses.
So far two products have successfully launched out of the Lab. Paydar launched this year and seeks to solve a problem many retail and hospitality businesses face around a lack of insight into their customers, competitive performance and revenue drivers. And Zavy is a social media analytics platform that aims to reduce uncertainty about an organisation’s performance on social media and how their activity is working to grow their brand.
TRA has access to Callaghan Innovation funding of up to $15 million over the next three years to support its R&D ventures.
See the full list here.
This piece was originally published on Idealog.
