Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:05:12 · Sarah Kocianski, Gary Turner, Anil Stocker
[00:05:12] S0: Yeah. It's... It is safe. I can use it. [00:05:14] S1: Yeah. And so I think that's helped. And so therefore, the people that come to ZeroCon in 2018 are similar to the the the early adopters in in in 2012, many more of them. And there are probably altogether more sophisticated now. And and there is there is no doubt that the cloud and cloud and modern integrated apps is the future. Maybe ten years ago, it was like, well, will that ever take off? Nobody's asking that question anymore. [00:05:43] S0: Yeah. I mean, I was gonna say as well, with that that sort of acceptance of of the Internet and cloud technology actually opens up you to support many other of the... More partner businesses because... And there's some seriously exciting businesses around here today. You know, how how important is that ecosystem to you? I mean, how you still be building that out presumably, like, that's kind of at the heart of what you do, I'm guessing. [00:06:03] S3: It it is. I have
00:06:03 · Anil Stocker, Gary Turner, Sarah Kocianski
[00:06:03] S3: It it is. I have [00:06:05] S1: to say... Do you know what? I I don't think we ever envisaged that would grow to the scale that it has. And we could always say, well, we knew and always do this, but we... I don't think we we did. I think when we when we we knew that we had to have an API, we knew that contemporary digital experiences and platforms were defined by a number of things, but not least you had to have a great and open API and lots of documentation because that's just how you should do that. And so there... Therefore, we've always had a great API and a great developer experience around Xero. And and and I remember when we had 10 apps, and that was kind of pretty cool. And then and then it became 50, and then it became a 100. And and now we have getting on, oh, 750 or something like that. It's insane. And and I think that's probably taken us a little bit by surprise, but you could map it back. And we've got a great API. We have a very open culture. We don't charge you to kind of develop against zero. We've got some great developer resources. We just wanna make it easy for you to do that. And and we've just seen some incredible partnerships emerge out of that. I mean, some of the people that we've... We have here that we're announcing deeper integrations with, so they'll go cardless. We've got Revolut, TransferWise, Tide, Starling. All those guys are here. [00:07:28] S0: The fintech superstars, actually.
00:07:28 · Sarah Kocianski, Gary Turner
[00:07:28] S0: The fintech superstars, actually. [00:07:30] S1: Yeah. And and because we share so many customers in common, and we actually share the same philosophy, I think, of this as the new world of openness and a product that doesn't talk to other products, that isn't responsive, that doesn't engage, isn't open, isn't gonna get very far. And and we were lucky, I think, that we we we we saw that we needed to do that, and what's happened is the the the the kind of ecosystem that's grown and clustered around that has just been incredible. So we're very lucky. [00:08:01] S0: And and presumably, it's also gotten easier to find those partners now, has it? Do people come to you? I mean, they do come to you because they can develop against you, but it it actually makes your life easier as well if people are...
00:08:01 · Sarah Kocianski, Gary Turner
[00:08:01] S0: And and presumably, it's also gotten easier to find those partners now, has it? Do people come to you? I mean, they do come to you because they can develop against you, but it it actually makes your life easier as well if people are... [00:08:10] S1: Yeah. And and and so it was much harder. I mean, I remembered, like, no... Nobody... I mean, not nobody, but it took a long time to go from five to to 10 to to 50. Because, of course, we probably only had, like, 4,000 customers in The UK. And so the currency that we had as a brand, as a as a kind of community of businesses was much smaller. So why would I integrate with Xero? Because nobody's ever heard of you and nobody's using you. And so every year that we grow and we've added over a 100,000 customers in the in the last twelve months in Xero, and we're benefiting from just more people using Xero, maybe a little ahead of Xero. The the... You know, it's like one of these great network effects. The more people you have engaging on the platform, the more attractive that becomes and the more people that come. Like a snowball effect. Yeah. So we definitely see that now. But, oh, we would go for weeks on end and the phone wouldn't ring in the early days because nobody had heard of you. Now we have... Like, there's a constant backlog of people building and engaging, and and and we're just very lucky that that's happened.
00:09:13 · Sarah Kocianski, Gary Turner
[00:09:13] S0: So, I mean, you know, we've talked about the the existing partner networks, I've been asking people this morning what's the most exciting thing you've seen here today. I mean, I imagine that you're the most thing that's happened on the mains day today. But aside from your keynote, what's the most exciting thing that that that you've seen or the the trend or the technology that you spotted that you think, yeah, that's gonna go somewhere. That's gonna be super [00:09:32] S1: Thank you very for the compliment about my keynote. It was okay. It was okay. Do know what? I think we... One of the things I noticed this morning was... And we... So we're now AISP registered with the FCA. Obviously, we've been working with all all of the the big banks in The UK for the last ten years. The old fashioned way, you know, like, kind of steam powered banking integration. You know, not quite... [00:09:56] S0: Somebody actually sits there and puts the wires in
00:09:58 · Gary Turner
[00:09:58] S1: the bank statement.... Stage on from, like, faxing bank statements. Not quite as bad as that, but we... We've been doing it for a while. And it's been hard, and we've been investing quite a lot of time and effort and doing them sequentially, and every bank's different, and every every kind of bank's appetite and ability to to innovate is different. But what's been really helpful for us is obviously with open banking coming in in the last few months. It's kind of like everybody else has woken up to the need to be open, certainly in the financial services industry. We've seen obviously a huge spate of new entrants in the last few years. I mentioned a few of those names earlier. And that's given us a great opportunity to kind of, like, upgrade and improve what was the way that the banking industry in The UK could only work, which was steam powered. Now it's digital, and we've we've launched our bank feeds API, which we think is the first of its kind in The UK, if not one of the first. And I think, you know, that that we we just spoke about the explosion of innovation we had around app development because of our core accounting API, and we... Well, as I said this morning, if we can even achieve half the success on our banking and financial services API strategy that we have with our core app strategy, then I think we see such huge explosion. And and many of them, as I say, are here. But it's still early days. Think you could argue that that that... How how many how many new banks will emerge in in The UK? How many new money transfer products and payment services products will emerge in The UK? I don't think I I don't think that community is gonna shrink. It's only gonna go one way. And therefore, the fact that we've now tooled up and kind of upgraded our ability to engage with many more of those players makes me truly optimistic about that. So that's what I'm excited about.