Our Story

International Private Investigations LTD was founded in late 2015 by Nicholas Kerr after spending 10 years as a credit management consultant to some of the largest organisations in NZ and Australia. Over this career there was an apparent lack of ethical, intuitive investigators that understood the needs of modern business. Quickly, International Private investigations LTD (IPI) gained a reputation for being able to find even the most reclusive subjects both in NZ and around the world, helping locate endangered children, estate beneficiaries for trustee companies and debtors that multiple agencies had unsuccessfully attempted to locate at great cost to their clients.

In 2017 Karl Wards was introduced to IPI as a logistics and strategic recovery specialist. Karl's planning, logistical and intuitive ability was a perfect fit for the company and he was brought on as the operational director. Under Karl and Nicholas' direction IPI grew exponentially and soon acquired a local Repossession company incorporating it into the organisation, on the recommendation of a finance company owner who was sick of getting invoices for no results from complacent repossession service providers. Since this event IPI has enjoyed an unrivalled success rate using a combination of intuitive investigation, best practice logistics and behavioural analysis. Completing over 4000 successful asset recoveries, investigations and subject locations between 2017 and 2022, IPI has become the go-to agency for top tier finance companies, insolvency practitioners and law firms alike.

In 2022 IPI Dispute Mediation Services (IPI DMS) was created to meet the growing demand for an ethical commercial dispute resolution provider to lessen the burden on the disputes tribunal and mediate debts resulting from a breakdown in communication and business relationships. Not only has this resulted in millions of dollars in disputed debts being settled but many more millions of dollars of trade in resurrected business relationships.

Early 2024 saw IPI Credit Consultancy being brought under the IPI umbrella and a rebrand to IPI Group Limited, providing best practice debt recovery and commercial credit consultancy in addition to our other core offerings. Having a unique understanding of the causes of debt and credit defaults through our mediation, asset recovery and field work with debtors, has allowed IPI Group the opportunity to reverse engineer these situations. We are now able to consult on how credit providers can mitigate many of these factors before they start to appear as defaults and Debt. IPI Group now consult to many businesses from SME to large corporates conducting training, system analysis and credit policies to encourage safe lending in an increasingly unsafe market.

IPI Group Limited pride ourselves on the mantra " he mea nui ake te tapatahi i te moni " Integrity is more important than profit ”. Respect and integrity are our non negotiable core values. IPI Group conducts all work with these values in the forefront of mind and this extends to our clients, suppliers and all that we come in contact with as we carry with us the integrity of our ancestors, our clients, our industry and our licensing body and these are not things we take lightly.