About vSure - its people and products

In 2012, Mark was a part of a consultation process by the Department on the legislation. Mark made a submission that he felt the VEVO system would require enhancement to make it easier for employers to meet the compliance burden the legislation would impose.

When it became clear that VEVO would not be changed, the idea for vSure was born. Mark approached Immigration about accessing the VEVO system and the underlying visa information.

He was able to sign a licence agreement with the Department that provided his company the access to the data he needed. He then proceeded to register an innovation patent for automating visa checking.  

Holding an Honours Degree in Mathematics, Mark had learned to code and set about building the first version of vSure in 2012.

The early years proved tough. vSure was a great product that no-one knew existed and in fact, for the most part, the target adience didn't even know about the compliance obligation vSure was helping to streamline.

With only a handful of customers such as Sydney's Doltone House and Queensland's Wesley Mission (and of course Acacia Immigration), Mark had invested a lot of time and money trying to educate with little success over the first few years.

Mark Sells Acacia

In 2015 Mark sold his Acacia Immigration firm to CIBT, the world's leading provider of short-term visa services. This allowed Mark the capital to continue to invest in commercialising the product and the business.

But whilst providing the capital to invest, the sale of Acacia presented Mark with a problem - a 2 year work out clause. Mark wouldn't be able to work on vSure, drive the company, manage the team and fulfill his obligations to CIBT. 

Having experienced compliance / regulation technology when at Attache, Matt was drawn to the "carrot and stick" nature of vSure and the broader #RegTech industry. If a company was aware of its compliance obligations, vSure was a no brainer - the efficiency gain (the carrot) was obvious. But if the organisation was not familiar with their compliance obligation, then the product sale would be driven by educating the prospective customer of the risks of non-compliance (the stick) and the easiest path to compliance was...vSure, which had practically no competitors.

2016-2019

vSure progress was steady. The business was winning some major customers, such as Baiada and Target. But sales cycles were long and deals few and far between as the market remained uneducated about the compliance obligation and vSure's ability to streamline the process.

One strategic decision Matt took was to separate the IP that connects vSure to the VEVO system (IP that is protected by a license agreement with Home Affairs and an Innovation Patent), from the web application. This enabled vSure to sell a "headless" API that allowed other software developers the ability to embed visa checks into their own applications.

This led to vSure signing deals with market perceived competitors, such as Equifax, CV Check, InterCheck, Checked.com.au, VerifyNow etc to be able to build their own Work Rights compliance solutions.

The API also opened up new markets outside of Work Rights signing major financial institutions such as Revolut, who leverage the API to verify non-citizen identity.

On completion of his work out clause with CIBT, Mark asked Matt to stay on so that he could take a career break, spending most of the next 18 months travelling the world. At the same time, Matt invested in the business becoming a minority shareholder.

It was whilst on sabatical that Mark invested time in researching technology and he became particularly interested in Quantum Computing. Fascinated by the mathematics driving the underlying operating system layer, Mark had an idea that he felt could revolutionise the future of global computing. 

So on returning from his travels, Mark decided Matt was best placed to continue to steer the vSure ship and enrolled in a PhD in Quantum Computing, dedicating the research time to test his hypothesis on quantum error correction. 

Management Buyout

In August 2019, Matt Paff led a management buyout, acquiring all but 10% of the business from Mark and bringing in software industry legend Bruce Carr (owner of Web Ninja and former owner of Exonet now MYOB Exo) as an investor.

From Left to right: Matt Paff, Dr Mark Webster FMIA, Bruce Carr and Dr Paul Huack

Matt officially took the reins of Managing Director and major shareholder, with both Mark and Bruce being Directors and making up the board (to this day).

The COVID Years and beyond

It was only a matter of months after Matt and Bruce acquired the majority of the business that COVID struck. Borders were closed and things looked very grim for vSure's futre. A business whose revenue was tied to the number of visa checks being performed, didn't seem to have bright prospects when the number of visa holders was plumetting...

But then, March 2020, vSure signs a deal with Woolworths. They needed vSure post haste, because they had 22,000 QANTAS staff to onboard and their existing manual work rights checks were not possible in the short timeframes.

Then vSure signs AusVenueCo - one of, if not the largest hospitality groups in Australia. They desparately needed the visa reporting vSure offered in order to get the data needed for Job Keeper. And ALDI. And Inghams. And a raft of major, household brands. What appeared an existential risk to vSure became the inflection point.

Crossing the ditch

It was 2022 when Kmart approached vSure about being able to streamline their work rights compliance in New Zealand like vSure had done for them in Australia. An onboarding solution specific to NZ was developed and rolled out mid 2022. 

After many attempts to obtain a similar licensing arrangement for NZ VisaView, similar to its arrangement with Australia's Home Affairs VEVO service, New Zealand was parked as an aspiaration beyond onboarding.

In 2023 vSure was approached by Revolut to expand the Australian visa checking contract to include New Zealand. vSure had already begun development of its V2 API solution and Revolut provided the impetus to get NZ visa checking done. 

vSure launched its V2 API starting with New Zealand Visa Verification checks in January 2024. 

By the end of March 2024, the API had been expanded to offer both NZ Visa Verification and VisaView checks. 

After almost 18 months of design, development and testing, the vSure WebApp was officially launched in New Zealand in August 2025. 

Blessed with some amazing trans-Tasman clients such as Robert Half, Oscar Wylee and Ryman Health, vSure's NZ WebApp maybe young, but is already very much tried and proven, market fit and growing very rapidly in New Zealand.

Partnerships

Partnerships are key in vSure's continued success. Partners like TANDA, MicroKeeper, Entire OnHire, First Advantage, Kinatico, Humanforce and many more continue to help vSure be the dominant work rights and visa checks provider in Australia and New Zealand.