Lack of talent slows growth

Serge Van Dam of M-Com. Photo / Getty Images

Kiwi technology success story M-Com says the biggest handbrake on its plans for growth is a lack of skilled staff.

The Auckland-based mobile-banking start-up was bought by giant United States financial services technology company Fiserv for an undisclosed sum two months ago.

The deal with Nasdaq-listed Fiserv gave it the green light to grow exponentially, said head of marketing Serge Van Dam.

M-Com provides mobile-banking services to more than 200 financial institutions around the world. One of its latest clients is the US' fifth-largest bank, US Bank, which has 18 million customers.

It is also about to set up a British/European operation.

It has about 100 Auckland staff, but needs to hire at least 50 more in the next three months, Van Dam said.

"We're looking at a run rate of pretty close to 20 people a month for the foreseeable future," he said.

The firm needed a range of staff from software developers to testers and business analysts, and there weren't the people available, he said.

"I never thought I'd be in a business where our biggest constraint to growing would be finding and recruiting talented people. I always thought the constraints would be to do with the market."

M-Com was founded in 2000 by chief executive Adam Clark and others. It was a graduate of the University of Auckland's Icehouse business incubator.

Its software enables bank customers to check their balances, transfer money and pay bills using their cellphones.

Van Dam said the founders were excited about the challenge and their aim had always been to become the world's leading provider of mobile-banking software.

"There's no market-driven reason we can't continue that growth year-on-year for the next five years," he said.

Because it was an export-led business it was not as well known locally and it planned to build its New Zealand profile to attract staff.

So far it had not seriously explored the possibility of outsourcing and it was not the company's preferred path, Van Dam said.

"But that clearly is a possibility if we're unable to grow at the right rate."

Martin Barry, the Auckland general manager of technology recruitment specialist AbsoluteIT, said it was a tough market in which to hire at present. "We're back in a skills-shortage situation," he said.

"A lot of projects were put on hold [during the downturn] and you can't keep them on hold forever."

M-Com was not the only company in Auckland looking to expand but numbers of IT graduates had been declining, he said. "Hopefully the young people who see this will realise IT really is an industry they should be considering."

Cherrie Wheeler, director of Radius Recruitment, said it was particularly difficult to find key development people.

"We are a pretty small market and our candidate stock is light. A lot of them will stay put."

Radius specialised in sourcing people from overseas and its biggest headache was Immigration NZ, she said.

It could take anything from six weeks to three months for the paperwork to be sorted out and most employers couldn't wait that long.

She said that once a firm had proved it wasn't able to source anyone locally for a role, an application for an overseas candidate should be fast-tracked.

Immigration consultants Radius had dealt with said it had been an ongoing issue "for I can't tell you how long".