We’ve returned from a jam-packed two days at Xerocon London, the annual cloud accounting conference that celebrates everything Fintech, accounting, and of course, Xero. As an event sponsor, WorldFirst welcomed delegates to our stand, got involved with Appy Hour and engaged in some fantastic conversations with financial experts from across the entire fintech and accounting spectrum.
Our Xerocon takeaways
Communities with purpose
The key theme of this year’s XeroCon was “Communities with purpose”, a mantra that rang true across the event’s many inspiring presentations and product announcements. Xero has always had a strong focus on solving the challenges of its customers over anything else, and that means supporting a broad ecosystem of accountants, bookkeepers and advisors as well as their end customers – small to medium-sized businesses. This customer-centric focus extends naturally to the wider Xero ‘community’ of partners and clients, and there was a clear emphasis on creating a sense of purpose within Xero – encouraging their partners and employees to find their ‘Why’, whether that’s supporting small businesses or driving positive change across the accounting industry.
Xero’s product vision is centred around reducing manual data entry at every possible point in its customers’ workflows. Making the collection, processing and reconciliation of payments is a crucial part of that focus. And with £474 billion worth of transactions processed on average through Xero in the UK alone, it is no surprise that Xero made it clear across the two days that they are committed to innovation in financial services and the fintech community.
Open banking
Open banking is intrinsically linked to Xero’s value proposition and product vision. A session of particular note for WorldFirst was led by Imran Gulamhuseinwala, the Head Trustee of the Open Banking Implementation Entity, on how Open Banking creates greater competition for consumers and businesses. Although Open Banking is only just starting to have an impact in the UK, at Xerocon it felt we saw a taste of the big things to come in the next 12 months.
The App Ecosystem
As the pioneer of the ‘App Ecosystem’ in cloud accounting, Xero remains firmly committed to its app partners, and this remains a crucial component of their value proposition. These partners are influencing global cloud adoption and transforming the wider accounting industry. At the same time, Xero is beginning to extend its core functionality by building deeper partnerships with partners and integrating new features directly into the Xero UI, ensuring that the customer’s workflow remains within the Xero platform.
To top it all off, Xero is continuing to extend their work surrounding the use of data to provide advisors and customers with actionable insights about their businesses. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning featured heavily in presentations and felt less like simple buzz words and more like tangible product features for their customers. These advances in technology are surely just a taste of things to come, and it’s exciting to see how AI continues to shape the wider fintech marketplace.
Why did we sponsor Xerocon London 2019?
WorldFirst recently completed its integration with Xero, the cloud accounting software that supports over two million small businesses around the world as part of our commitment to solving day to day problems for our business customers.
Once connected, Worldfirst account transactions are posted automatically to Xero every hour, meaning our customers don’t need to manually upload their bank statements, saving hours of admin work and streamlining the accounting process for small businesses by feeding the information directly into Xero.
Are you a WorldFirst and Xero customer?
Connect your WorldFirst global account to Xero today. Not an existing WorldFirst customer? Sign up here.