War stories from the digital front-line

Businesses embracing the digital opportunity are looking to the future with confidence.

In addition to her legal practice, Hunter Law director Jane Hunter is now also a director of digital start-up, Phoenix e-file. The name is significant.

A phoenix is a bird of Greek legend. It rises, reborn, from the ashes of its predecessor.

Hunter had seen a colleague’s office burn to the ground and realised business disruption comes in many different forms. She didn’t want to face a disruption like that.

‘‘I went looking for an electronic filing system that could be backed up either to the cloud or a hosted environment,’’ she explains. ‘‘I couldn’t find one, so I developed the business from there out of a need to be able to protect documents and have them available forever in a safe and secure way.’’

Then the Christchurch earthquake struck.

‘‘We saw for a lot of businesses there, the real challenges was around loss of original documents,’’ she says. ‘‘Thinking about lawyers, for example, what about all those wills that were in the red zone that were never able to be recovered.

‘‘Some of those wills, unfortunately, related to people that died in the earthquake.’’

Now, clients can interact through the portal using online client meeting and the ability to sign documents online. Quite apart from selling the service to other businesses, for Hunter Law, the opportunity is to deepen its relationship with clients.

Mark Todd, founder of housing developer Ockham Property, is disrupting the city apartment market and online is a key tool.

The high-density apartment sector is notorious in its marketing strategies, withholding information to make people pick up the phone, he says.

‘‘We take a completely contrary approach. You can use our website to download a to-scale floorplan. You can see a floorplan for every floor of the building. You can see the price of every apartment, which ones are sold, which haven’t sold, what they are made of.’’

Bruce Gordon is a director of NZXlisted digital payments app company Pushpay.

He calls it a ‘‘classic NZ disruption story’’ aiming at a ‘‘deep vertical’’ – US churches. The cashless society meant donations were dropping away. People were queuing for threequarters of an hour to give at a kiosk.

Pushpay addressed that painpoint with an app allowing the faithful to give straight from the pew. The company employs 200 and is targeting $100 million in income by 2018.