Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
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.
00:11:50 · Sarah Kocianski, Gary Turner, Christoph Rieche
[00:11:50] S0: So just to just to be clear, that bank feeds API, and that allows any new bank to to connect to you. Is that how it works? What... How how does it work? [00:11:57] S1: So pretty much the same way as our our app developer API. So we have a kind of published API with a whole... A number of calls and requests that you can engage, whether you're a payments provider or whether you're a bank or whether you're some other kind of alternate lender. And it's really just that kind of... One of the beauties of an API is that you... It just cuts out a whole load of custom development, and everybody builds to the same standard. And we can bring products to market much more quickly. Therefore, we'll... We we... I think we'll see an acceleration in the number of established banks as well as the new players engaging with that zero community, which is now the largest community of of of small businesses on accounting software in The UK. But I think, like, this network effects snowball thing, I think we'll see an... Rapid increase in that in the next one. So we just launched it, and we've already got, like, six on the platform at [00:12:48] S0: the beginning. So...... Stalling's one that [00:12:50] S1: we did. [00:12:50] S4: Yeah. Yeah. [00:12:51] S0: Yeah. So... You know? So having watched it, you know, having watched in the problems we will have with banks and then, you know, all the innovation you're doing, would you ever get down the route of doing some of those banking services yourself, or are you happy to sit at the center of this ecosystem and let other people
00:12:51 · Sarah Kocianski, Gary Turner, Caroline Plumb
[00:12:51] S0: Yeah. So... You know? So having watched it, you know, having watched in the problems we will have with banks and then, you know, all the innovation you're doing, would you ever get down the route of doing some of those banking services yourself, or are you happy to sit at the center of this ecosystem and let other people [00:13:04] S1: Right now, it's not it's not something we would we would have in our plan. [00:13:08] S0: I know somebody will be very disappointed to hear that. I spoke to a lady in New Zealand. She was desperate. [00:13:12] S1: But but you know what? Think I think my kind of like smarty pants answer to that one is, like, what is a bank in five years anyway? [00:13:19] S2: Yeah. [00:13:20] S1: You know what I mean? I I think this traditional... Like, are you guys gonna become a bank? [00:13:26] S0: But they're doing all the services a bank does anyway?
00:13:26 · Sarah Kocianski, Gary Turner, Caroline Plumb
[00:13:26] S0: But they're doing all the services a bank does anyway? [00:13:28] S1: Yeah. Or or I mean, so you've got Starling, you've got Tide, you've got Coconut, and I I... You can do invoicing and their banking apps. You can do expenses management. Does that mean they're gonna become accounting software? I I I don't know, but I think there is definitely a convergence. And and at the moment, what that means is we have no aspirations to become a traditional or even kind of a new new bank. But I think we're really interested in where the innovation... Where there's a shared customer. So there's a customer of HSBC or a customer of Tide or Starling or whoever it is, and they're also on zero. Then what we are most interested in is how can we be... Just make them... How we blow their mind about how easy that world can be? And and so who knows what a bank will be in five or ten years? Who knows what an accounting software brand will be in five or ten years? There's definitely convergence. But I think that's the world we're in now. I think we're in this open world where we're just gonna have to learn to bump into each other a bit more and be cool [00:14:29] S2: with that. [00:14:30] S0: Get on with each other [00:14:30] S1: a bit more. Absolutely. [00:14:31] S0: Yeah. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time. I know you're a very busy man. And are you sticking around for for the party later? [00:14:40] S1: I will be. [00:14:40] S0: I've... Yes. I'm very much looking forward to it.