Gentrack and Vista Group: How New Zealand Builds Global Vertical Software

Vertical software, meaning systems built for one industry and sold to that industry everywhere, is the form of technology business that suits a small country best, and Gentrack and Vista Group are New Zealand’s clearest examples of it. This article explains how each company found its niche, how each makes money, what went wrong for both around 2020 and how they recovered, what the latest results show, and what their experience says about building global software from a home market of five million people. It is part of the New Zealand Company Stories hub.

What is vertical software and why does it suit a small country?

Vertical software serves the specific needs of one industry, such as utilities or cinemas, rather than a function common to all industries, such as accounting. It suits small countries because the niches are too small to attract giants yet global enough to sustain a company.

A horizontal product has to fight Microsoft, Salesforce or Intuit; Xero is New Zealand’s rare success of that kind, and it has required billions of dollars. A vertical product needs deep knowledge of one trade, a few hundred potential customers worldwide and the stamina to visit them. The total market may be worth only a few billion dollars a year, which deters large competitors, but a firm that wins a third of it has a durable business.

New Zealand offers two further advantages. Its industries were deregulated early and thoroughly in the 1980s and 1990s, so local software firms met problems, such as competitive electricity retailing, before their foreign peers did. And the home market is so small that exporting is not an option to be considered later but a condition of survival from the outset.

How did Gentrack and Vista Group start?

Gentrack began in Auckland in 1989, writing billing systems for power companies as New Zealand’s electricity market was opened to competition. Vista began in 1996 as a ticketing system for a New Zealand cinema chain and was soon sold to exhibitors overseas.

Gentrack’s timing was fortunate. When New Zealand split its electricity suppliers into competing retailers and regulated networks in the 1990s, the retailers suddenly needed software to switch customers, handle complex tariffs and reconcile with a wholesale market. Gentrack supplied it, then followed the same reform to Australia and to Britain. It added an airport-operations product along the way, originally built for Auckland’s airport, which has since become Veovo.

Vista’s origin was a commission from the local exhibitor Village Force, whose owners wanted a modern point-of-sale system. The founders, led by Murray Holdaway, kept the rights and discovered that cinema chains everywhere had the same requirements: sell tickets and popcorn, schedule films, and report box-office takings to distributors. By the 2010s Vista had become the default choice for large chains outside China.

Both companies floated within weeks of each other in mid-2014, listing in New Zealand with secondary listings in Australia, during a brief boom in local technology offerings.

How do the two companies make money?

Both sell software on recurring contracts plus implementation services. Gentrack charges utilities and airports licence, subscription and project fees. Vista charges cinemas per site or per screen, increasingly as a cloud subscription, and is adding a share of payment volumes.

Gentrack’s customers are few and large. Replacing a utility’s billing system is a multi-year project costing tens of millions of dollars, so revenue has two parts: recurring fees from installed customers, which reached NZ$85.3m in the first half of FY26, and lumpier project revenue from upgrades and new installations. Its newest platform, g2, is built on Salesforce and Amazon Web Services rather than entirely in-house, which shortens deployments. Customers include Genesis Energy at home, one of the generator-retailers described in the article on the gentailers.

Vista’s customers are more numerous and its revenue more granular. It counts thousands of cinema sites, and its Movio and Numero units sell marketing data and box-office reporting to exhibitors and film studios. The centre of its strategy is Vista Cloud, a subscription platform that replaces on-premises software and its maintenance fees with a higher monthly charge per site. Software-as-a-service revenue was NZ$43.5m in the first half of 2026, up 38%, and now exceeds half of group revenue.

Payments are Vista’s next layer. Its systems processed roughly US$3.3bn of transactions on an annualised basis in late 2025, and Vista Payments, which handled its first transaction in January 2026, aims to take a small percentage of that flow.

What went wrong around 2020?

Both companies suffered crises that had little to do with their software. Gentrack was hit by the collapse of small British energy retailers that were its customers. Vista’s revenue fell sharply when the pandemic closed cinemas worldwide.

Gentrack had grown quickly in Britain, partly through the 2017 purchase of the billing firm Junifer Systems, by selling to the dozens of challenger suppliers that had sprung up under light regulation. From 2018 those suppliers began to fail, and a price cap squeezed the rest. Gentrack booked bad debts and impairments, issued profit warnings and saw its shares fall by roughly 90% from their peak. A new chief executive, Gary Miles, arrived in 2020 from the telecoms-billing firm Amdocs.

Vista’s shock was more abrupt. In March 2020 almost every cinema on Earth shut. Revenue tied to ticket volumes vanished, customers asked for fee relief, and the company raised emergency equity of about NZ$65m, cut staff and pay, and waited. Its largest customers included chains that later passed through bankruptcy.

Neither company lost its core customers. That is the hidden strength of vertical software: a utility cannot stop billing and a cinema cannot stop selling tickets, so the system of record is the last thing to be switched off.

How did each company recover?

Gentrack rebuilt its product on modern cloud platforms and pursued larger, sturdier utilities. Vista committed to moving its whole customer base to a cloud subscription. In both cases a new chief executive narrowed the strategy and spent heavily on research.

Mr Miles’s plan at Gentrack was to stop depending on fragile challengers and to win established utilities facing the energy transition. Smart meters, solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles make tariffs far more complicated than legacy billing systems can handle, which gives incumbents a reason to replace them. Revenue roughly doubled from its trough to NZ$230.2m in FY25, the shares recovered many times over, and in June 2025 Gentrack entered the S&P/NZX 20 index.

Vista’s recovery was led from 2023 by Stuart Dickinson. The company sold or closed peripheral ventures and concentrated on Vista Cloud. The transition depresses revenue initially, since a one-off licence is replaced by a subscription, but lifts the lifetime value of each site. By the end of 2025, 1,557 sites, about 35% of enterprise customer sites, were live on the cloud platform; by mid-2026 the figure was 44%.

What do the latest numbers show?

Vista is accelerating and Gentrack has paused. Vista’s first-half 2026 revenue rose 12% to NZ$86.3m and it upgraded guidance. Gentrack’s first-half FY26 revenue eased to NZ$110.1m from NZ$112.0m, and EBITDA fell to NZ$7.9m as investment rose.

Vista’s 2025 was its best year: revenue up 10%, EBITDA up 31% to NZ$28.2m, a margin of 17.2%, and a return to net profit, albeit only NZ$2.6m. In 2026 it has re-signed Cinemex across more than 300 sites, won a commitment from Cinépolis to deploy Vista Cloud across 504 sites in Mexico, its largest single-country roll-out, and added Cineworld and Cineplexx. Its contracted share of the enterprise cinema market rose from 46% to 48%.

Gentrack’s half was weaker on the surface. Project revenue declined as large implementations finished, though recurring revenue grew from NZ$76.4m to NZ$85.3m. It signed Pennon Water Services as its first British water customer on g2, went live with Genesis Energy and a Philippine energy company, and Veovo added Nav Canada and a large Asian airport. Guidance for FY26 is revenue of NZ$229m to NZ$238m and EBITDA of NZ$13.5m to NZ$20m, below FY25. The company holds NZ$73.2m of cash, has no debt and has announced a buy-back of up to NZ$20m.

Who owns and governs the two companies?

Both are public companies listed on the NZX with secondary listings on the ASX, and both are owned mainly by New Zealand and Australian institutional funds. Neither has a controlling shareholder, though Vista has an activist-minded private-equity investor on its register.

Vista’s founders have largely retired from the business, and the Australian technology investor Potentia Capital built a substantial minority stake from 2023, prompting periodic speculation about a takeover. Gentrack’s register is institutional, with local fund managers prominent; KiwiSaver providers, whose rise is described in the article on KiwiSaver’s fund managers, are significant holders of both.

The two firms matter to the local exchange out of proportion to their size. With Xero gone and Rocket Lab listed in New York, they are among the few technology companies of any scale left on the NZX, whose difficulty in retaining growth companies is examined in the article on the shrinking stock exchange. Both have nonetheless kept their primary listing at home, which gives them index weight and a loyal domestic shareholder base.

Who are their competitors?

Gentrack competes with the utility-billing products of SAP and Oracle and with newer platforms such as Kraken, owned by Octopus Energy. Vista’s rivals are regional cinema-software suppliers and in-house systems; it has no global competitor of comparable reach.

Gentrack’s contest is the harder one. SAP and Oracle are entrenched at the largest utilities, and Kraken has grown explosively by licensing the system that runs Britain’s biggest energy retailer to other suppliers worldwide. Gentrack’s answer is that g2 is modular and built on widely used platforms, so that a utility is not locked into one vendor’s stack, and that it also serves water companies. In airports, Veovo competes with specialist units of aviation-technology firms such as SITA and Amadeus.

Vista’s position is closer to a natural monopoly. It claims 48% of contracted enterprise cinema sites, excluding China, and over 90% in Mexico. Its competitors are smaller regional vendors and the internal software of a few very large chains. The threat to Vista is less a rival than its customers’ own industry.

What are the biggest risks?

Gentrack’s risks are lumpy project revenue, concentrated customers and a formidable rival in Kraken. Vista’s are the long-term health of cinema-going and the execution of a mass cloud migration. Both face the question of whether AI lowers barriers to entry.

Gentrack’s FY26 guidance illustrates the first risk: a few large projects ending is enough to turn growth into a flat year and to halve EBITDA. Its medium-term target of revenue growth above 15% a year depends on winning new utilities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, each of which takes years to sell. Two acquisitions announced in May 2026, an airport-technology business with a Middle Eastern presence and an energy forecasting and pricing specialist, broaden the product but add integration work.

Vista’s dependency is on Hollywood’s release schedule and on audiences. Global box-office takings remain below their 2019 level. Cinemas also carry heavy debts, which limits what they can spend on technology. Vista’s counter-argument is that its software helps exhibitors earn more per visitor, and that pressure makes them more, not less, likely to modernise.

What can founders and CFOs learn from Gentrack and Vista Group?

The two companies show that a small-country software firm can lead a global niche, that the niche’s concentration is both the moat and the hazard, and that platform transitions must be financed and explained with care.

• Pick a niche large incumbents will ignore. Cinema management and utility billing are too small for the giants to prioritise and too specialised for generalists to enter casually.
• Use the home market as a laboratory, not a business. Early deregulation gave Gentrack a product years ahead of foreign demand. Domestic revenue is now a small part of both groups.
• Screen customers for credit as well as revenue. Gentrack’s British episode shows that fast growth from weak customers is borrowed, not earned.
• Hold a balance sheet for the bad year. Vista survived 2020 because it could raise equity quickly; Gentrack now carries net cash and no debt.
• Build on other people’s platforms where it speeds delivery. g2’s use of Salesforce and AWS trades some margin for shorter implementations.
• Report the transition honestly. Publishing recurring revenue and migration metrics buys patience from shareholders while earnings lag.

For chief financial officers there is a specific point about revenue quality. Each company now leads its results with recurring revenue rather than total revenue, because that is what a buyer or lender would value. The contrast with a services firm such as Datacom, which earns far more revenue but much less per dollar, is instructive.

What happens next for Gentrack and Vista Group?

Vista aims to finish moving its customers to the cloud and to make payments a meaningful revenue line. Gentrack needs new g2 wins to restore growth after a flat FY26. Either could attract a bid.

Vista’s upgraded 2026 guidance of NZ$179m to NZ$184m in revenue, with an EBITDA margin of 18% to 20%, implies continued momentum, and with fewer than half its enterprise sites migrated there are several years of conversion ahead. The larger prize is payments: even a small percentage of several billion US dollars in annual transaction value would add materially to a company of Vista’s size.

Gentrack’s full-year result, due in November 2026, will show whether the first-half dip was a pause between projects or something more persistent. Its pipeline of utilities replacing legacy systems is long, and the buy-back signals management’s confidence.

Consolidation is the shadow over both. Global private-equity firms prize vertical software for its recurring revenue and have bought many comparable businesses abroad. Mid-sized companies on a small exchange, with open registers, are natural targets, and a takeover of either would remove another technology name from the New Zealand market.

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