WiseTech’s Richard White gets $43.5m Kyckr out of acquisition

WiseTech CEO Richard White says there’s too many small technologies on the ASX as he completes acquisition of once-listed Kyckr.

WiseTech founder Richard Wise

Richard White, the businessman behind ASX-listed logistics software outfit WiseTech, has spent $43.5m to acquire private verification provider Kyckr.

Headquartered in Sydney, Kyckr provides financial companies with know your customer tech solutions, helping banks and other businesses meet their anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering requirements.

The business was founded 12 years ago in Ireland and helped facilitate the sending of corporate registries to emerging countries in Europe. In 2016 is listed on the ASX before it was de-listed in December, five months after it entered into an agreement to be bought by Mr White in July.

Mr White said Kyckr was one of several smaller technology companies that didn’t belong on the public market and would benefit from remaining private.

“I’ve come to realise that Kyckr is a great company with some fantastic potential, but it’s really too small to be on a public market,” Mr White said.

“I think there’s a lot of very small technology companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and other exchanges that shouldn’t be there; that should be free to remain private, supported by strong investors.”

Kyckr chief executive Ian Henderson said the acquisition would open doors and “in some respects, it is partly a weight of my shoulders”. “We’re a tiny business in the grand scheme of things compared to WiseTech and being listed did eat up a lot of my time in terms of the ... reporting the various engagements,” he said.

Mr White has made the purchase via his personal investment arm RealWise, which in July entered into a scheme of agreement to purchase Kyckr at 8c per share. The offer, which represented A 63.3 per cent premium on then share price, was unsolicited.

Prior to the acquisition, Mr White owned 122,346,906 shares in Kyckr, or about 22.76 per cent of the business, which he bought 2019, causing its share price to jump 90 per cent in one day.

Kyckr chief executive Ian Henderson.

Mr White, a former guitar technician, was most recently ranked 14th on The List – Australia’s Richest 250, with an estimated wealth of $5.94bn. He founded WiseTech in 1994 and today owns 40 per cent of the business.

“It’s very difficult for a technology company trying to sell to the major banks and global financial institutions when it to report quarterly and has the capital constraints of a small business … that’s not necessarily profitable,” he said. “When it’s owned by someone like me, who has a long track record of investing for the long term ... that gives Kyckr the ability to talk confidently to its customers and potential customers in a way which would be much more difficult had it still been listed and not owned by me.”

Kyckr’s core capability lay within being able to “to unpeel or unwrap complex corporate structures” which, when manually done, was a long, drawn out process, Mr Henderson said.

It also helped “to enable businesses to navigate highly complex and dynamic compliance and counterparts risk management challenges”, he said.

Mr White’s WiseTech was one of few Australian technology companies to escape the pandemic largely unscathed.

Originally published as WiseTech’s Richard White gets $43.5m Kyckr out of acquisition