New Zealand rates highly with Nasdaq-listed Fiserv, a global multibillion-dollar company which specialises in innovative technology and mobile payment solutions.
Jim Tobin, the company's senior vice-president and general manager of mobile solutions, was in Auckland recently to visit the Fiserv office, which has grown quickly to meet the company's demands as it becomes a global mobile centre of excellence.
Fiserv bought New Zealand company M-Com in February 2011 and immediately started increasing staff numbers, recruiting skilled local and international designers and developers.
''We are combining top local talent with the best in the world. We want to be a worldwide centre of excellence and we are now starting to look like the world with the people we employ,'' Mr Tobin said in an interview.
With 220 staff in Auckland, the operation made up a significant proportion of the company's personnel costs. Apart from New Zealand, staff came from Russia, India, Southeast Asia and China.
''We've even been known to hire an occasional Australian. I can say that now I am in New Zealand. The great thing is that these people bring their skills and family to the region. They tell their friends and more skilled people start wanting to come here and work. We are a magnet for regional talent.''
Asked why the company had decided to set up in New Zealand, Mr Tobin said the country had everything a centre of excellence required. It was an easy place to do business.
Also, New Zealand was an early adopter of technology, having led the world in the use of eftpos. Mobile banking, used extensively in New Zealand, was only now being adopted elsewhere in the world.
And New Zealand was leading in the use of debit/credit cards in ''pay wave'' technology.
Kiwis were interested in joint ventures between telecommunications companies and financial institutions to do contactless payments, he said.
''You are adopting here faster than the rest of the world. This is the situation why we decided to build a centre of excellence. We have an opportunity to develop innovative solutions that can be used elsewhere.
''Even with the growth we have had, we are not keeping up with the growth that is taking place.''
Mr Tobin, who joined Fiserv earlier this year after serving as a senior executive at BlackBerry, was enthusiastic about the success of Fiserv technology in partnership with ANZ to provide banking-type services to people in Papua New Guinea who normally did not have access to a bank account.
While they did not have a bank account, most people had a cellphone, which they could use to get cash, transfer money and pay bills. Security features on the phone meant that activity had to be authenticated before the money transfers would be approved, he said.
The money was stored in similar way to a prepaid value card, only without the card. An employer, for instance, could set up a prepaid account for a worker which was accessed only through the phone. Money could be withdrawn from an ATM with the right technology.
''There is huge potential for mobile banking payments.''
There were now two billion cellphones in use worldwide, the number growing exponentially every year. By 2016, about 75% of cellphones would be smartphones with the computing power to handle mobile payments.
Mobile payments were set to grow from $1 billion to $30 billion in the next three years as the technology spread around the world, Mr Tobin said.
There was a ''real buzz'' in the Auckland office, which had a youthful environment where younger staff were keeping older staff on their toes, he said.
Many of Fiserv's products gave financial institutions the ability to take control and make the changes they needed for their own respective operations - SDKs, or self development kits. SDKs allowed people using multiple devices to shift data across those devices.
The latest product release from Fiserv was named Invercargill, but not in honour of Mr Tobin's first visit to the country.
