The past year has been an eventful one for former PushPay chief executive Chris Heaslip.
In May, he surprised investors by announcing he was handing over the reins of the NZX and ASX-listed company to former chairman Bruce Gordon. He remains a non-executive director but in July sold almost half his shares for just over $45 million.
The move followed the abrupt resignation of his fellow co-founder, Eliot Crowther, last year.
The pair founded the software-as-a-service company in 2011 to help people make regular donations to their churches in a more modern way. In 2015, the pair were named joint winners of EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year award.
What began as three staff operating above a gym in Glenfield quikcly grew into a company that now has more than 100 staff in New Zealand and nearly 300 in the US. By the time Crowther exited the company, citing family reasons, it had contracts with 7000 churches around the world.
The changes in the company’s stewardship appear to have unsettled investors, and its share price has been fairly volatile over the past 12 months. Nevertheless, it still has a market capitalisation of almost $1 billion, and its outlook for the next year remains bullish.
In the year to the end of March, the company processed more than $US4 billion of donations from more than 7600 customers, mostly in the US and Canada. Its annual revenue was just under $US100m – a 40% increase on last year – and it expects that to increase to more than $US120m next year.
Heaslip has a master’s degree in taxation accounting from Auckland University, with one of his first roles as a taxation inspector with the IRD, which he credits with giving him a thorough grounding in business.
2018: $120 million