Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS
00:00:10 · David M. Brear
[00:00:10] S0: Hello, and welcome to FinTech Insider live from Zerocon London twenty nineteen. I'm David DeBrier. How's it going, everybody? Wonderful. There are humans here as well. It's great. So it's the end of day one at Zerocon, and we know you guys are just about at that level where you were sort of deciding between do I get my fancy frock on to go to the party or do I come and listen to this weird Fintech Insider podcast thing. So thank you everybody for being here tonight. So for me and the Fintech Insider guys, it's really cool to be here at Zerocon. I mean, is our third year now, I think, producer Laura. So, you know, third year here. Every year this this event gets bigger and bigger and bigger, which is which is super, super awesome. And while it's really sort of billed as an accounting event, I'm not really sure why because actually it brings together much broader community in terms of what's happening with fintech, what's happening in technology, big banking organizations here and everybody's sort of in that ecosystem. So from the scale and quality of actually who has been here, again, it just feels like actually this is really becoming one of the sort of premier B2B FinTech events, which is fantastic. For those of you who don't know, I'm the CEO of ElevenFS. I do all sorts of weird and wonderful things which I'm not going to bore you with right now. One of the ways that we do connect with people is obviously through this podcast. So as I said, we're recording this podcast and now I'm recording it live like I said to you a minute ago, so you can't pretend that you didn't hear it later on. So what have we got in store for you tonight? Well, we generally with FinTech Insider have two shows. There's the new show, so we're gonna do a little bit of like announcements that have been made at at Zerocon today and then actually we get into like an insight show. So actually that's where we get into the the effing debate, which actually is always really good fun because basically I just like seeing people fund, which is good fun. So it's all gonna be very mild mannered. It's all gonna be about actually what we're doing in the industry rather than a real fight. Is that is that right? There's no actual fights taking... Okay. There might be an actual fight actually taking place, so we'll we'll have to see how that plays out.
00:02:21 · David M. Brear, Nilan Peiris, Ben Johnson, S3, Craig Walker
So first, what we're gonna do, so with the the debate, what the debate is actually gonna be about is what is the most important element of cash flows to SMEs? Now, flow with SMEs is the most critical thing. Having run a small business for the last three and a half years, I can really testify to the fact that cash flow in all of its weird and wonderful geysers and everything that actually, the decisions that you need to be making on a day to day base format actually are the beating heart of an organization but we're gonna drill down into really what it is that is the most important thing when you're doing it, and we have four amazing teams to kind of debate that. But first, let's get on with the announcements and so let's get on with the news side of things. So first up, should we bring up the first story? [00:03:11] S1: Where do we stand next to each other? [00:03:12] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. It's it's awkward standing around [00:03:14] S2: these blints, isn't it? [00:03:15] S3: I have [00:03:16] S0: to say. You don't know quite where you [00:03:17] S1: put your cocktail party without the cocktails. [00:03:19] S0: It is. Yeah. Know. [00:03:19] S4: I mean Can I if we could at [00:03:21] S0: that stage get some sort of hors d'oeuvres, that would be fantastic? [00:03:24] S4: Can I answer the the debate already? It's payments. Has that has that ruined it?
00:03:24 · Craig Walker, David M. Brear, S3
[00:03:24] S4: Can I answer the the debate already? It's payments. Has that has that ruined it? [00:03:29] S0: We'll get into that shortly. Okay? It's it's nice to see people eager though. So I mean, first first story that we had today was zero pay partners with TransferWise for bill and reconciliation payments. So to tell us more about this, have Craig Walker who is the co founder and executive GM of payments and billing solutions at Xero. How's it going? Good. And also we have Nilan Perez who is the VP of growth at TransferWise. How's it going? Great. I mean, this seems like a pretty interesting deal here. So you've literally announced this today at Xero. Xero is making it easier for small businesses and their advisers to pay and reconcile UK bills on the platform. First domestic bill pay solution from TransferWise in The UK. Right? [00:04:09] S3: Yeah. [00:04:10] S0: Tell us a little bit more about it. What what does this mean and and why you're announcing it here?
00:04:10 · David M. Brear, Craig Walker
[00:04:10] S0: Tell us a little bit more about it. What what does this mean and and why you're announcing it here? [00:04:14] S4: Yeah. So for the last few years, we've put a lot of investment in the ingestion of bills. So we've had bills management in Xero for a long time. It's about 7,000,000 bills that get processed in The UK every month, but we've never completed the the end of that, which is obviously the making of payments. So we talked a lot about today about the investments we've done with the acquisition of Hubdoc and the integration Hubdoc into our bills process, you know, our investments in AI and machine learning. But we really wanted to complete the end of that process, which is the actual making of a payment. Every small business, every business needs to process bills, needs to make payments. It's really slow and cumbersome to do that. You know, it's really hard, know, inconsistency between banks. Doing batches is hard. And so we just wanted to make it seamless like we try and do with every other part of our product. And so we partnered with TransferWise to deliver a domestic UK bill payment solution. So obviously TransferWise are known for the FX solution. But here they've they've helped us build out this this new pay with TransferWise feature, which is now integrated directly into our bill pay process. So you can easily set up a a... Set it up, connect your TransferWise account, and just start processing bills. It's really easy. And we've had some great feedback today from partners who are really excited about it.
00:04:14 · Craig Walker, David M. Brear
[00:04:14] S4: Yeah. So for the last few years, we've put a lot of investment in the ingestion of bills. So we've had bills management in Xero for a long time. It's about 7,000,000 bills that get processed in The UK every month, but we've never completed the the end of that, which is obviously the making of payments. So we talked a lot about today about the investments we've done with the acquisition of Hubdoc and the integration Hubdoc into our bills process, you know, our investments in AI and machine learning. But we really wanted to complete the end of that process, which is the actual making of a payment. Every small business, every business needs to process bills, needs to make payments. It's really slow and cumbersome to do that. You know, it's really hard, know, inconsistency between banks. Doing batches is hard. And so we just wanted to make it seamless like we try and do with every other part of our product. And so we partnered with TransferWise to deliver a domestic UK bill payment solution. So obviously TransferWise are known for the FX solution. But here they've they've helped us build out this this new pay with TransferWise feature, which is now integrated directly into our bill pay process. So you can easily set up a a... Set it up, connect your TransferWise account, and just start processing bills. It's really easy. And we've had some great feedback today from partners who are really excited about it. [00:05:43] S0: Cool. I mean, you guys have made a reputation of being sort of easy to integrate, you know. So is this a sort of a natural extension of that?
00:05:43 · David M. Brear, Nilan Peiris, S3
[00:05:43] S0: Cool. I mean, you guys have made a reputation of being sort of easy to integrate, you know. So is this a sort of a natural extension of that? [00:05:51] S1: Yeah. When we when we think about cross border payments and payments in general, we realized that not everyone in the world is gonna download our app. And we need to be where the payments are happening, either directly integrated into business, payment workflow, or with banks. And so today, I'm pleased to announce our integration into Xero, hot off the back of our partnership with GoCardless as well. And you can... You could see... We can imagine a world where 50% of the volume going through TransferWise is going... Is starting with the business and flowing seamlessly through that [00:06:27] S3: Yeah. [00:06:27] S1: Through their back end. [00:06:27] S0: And and what sort of impact do you think this will have then? Because obviously, do... Being able to do this, I mean, I'm... Again, I don't wanna make this as too much of a zero loving, but we're a zero customer. Thank you very from my perspective, being in a situation where we can do those things directly actually in it, just sort of changes that process quite dramatically. Right?