Speaking at the Roadshow in Singapore, Xero’s Regional Director - Asia, Kevin Fitzgerald said, “By focusing on small businesses and their trusted advisors - accountants and bookkeepers, we aim to help increase SMEs’ economic resilience and competitiveness. In our interactions with SMEs, late payments was flagged as a main pain point, with 9 out of 10 small business owners saying they have clients who do not pay on time. Our expanding partnership with banks and financial institutions is part of our strategy to diversify our platform’s services and allow businesses to run more seamlessly, from gaining oversight of their financial status, managing cash flow to obtaining quicker access to capital.”

This comes off the back of Xero’s recent capital raising activity which saw the listing of US$300 million five-year Convertible Bonds on Singapore Stock Exchange. The funds raised will be used to build additional capabilities in Xero’s small business platform.

A more comprehensive small business platform providing up-to-date view on business financials

By the end of 2018, Xero’s platform will have the ability to offer its customers and partners bank feed integrations with all the local SME banks in Singapore - DBS, OCBC and UOB. With these bank feed integrations, SME owners will be able to receive automatic daily statements and transactions flowing from their banks directly into Xero, making it easier to access their true daily cash flow position and eradicate the need to wait till the end of the month to reconcile their statements.

“Having up-to-date financial data from banks at our fingertips is very powerful. It allows us to become more effective strategic business advisors to our small business clients and aid them in making well-informed business decisions based on actual data,” says Elaine Lim, Managing Director at Agere Accounting & Advisory, a Xero Platinum Partner.

Accelerating the digitalisation of the payment landscape

Xero has also partnered with NETS to enable businesses to issue e-invoices and get paid quickly and easily online via NETS PayCollect.

Mr Ricky Lim, Managing Director of NETS Solutions, said, “This collaboration with Xero will allow us to reach into the B2C space to address one of the key pain points for small businesses - payment collection. By integrating PayCollect with platforms such as Xero, we are able to offer a seamless process, an end-to-end solution that effectively solves the last-mile collection problem for businesses by moving their entire billing cycle online and providing their customers with the convenience of making payments directly from a mobile device. This partnership is an important step toward helping our customers go fully digital and improve their business efficiency.”

In addition to that, small businesses can choose to integrate their Xero platform with over 20 payment service providers which will present themselves as payment options when they issue e-invoices via Xero.

Come early 2019, there will be enhancements to the Xero-DBS integration where small businesses will experience a more streamlined payment with the ability to send payment instructions directly from Xero into DBS IDEAL. This will bring about a better user experience and real-time payment status notifications which will significantly improve cash flow management for existing Xero-DBS customers in Singapore.

“By expanding our payment options, we have witnessed how a mere investment of S$40 per month per business in Xero’s accounting software has helped our customers in Singapore receive payments 32% faster, from 43 to 30 days from 2015 to 2017,” says Fitzgerald.

Improving access to working capital

According to The Singapore Working Capital Study 2017, medium-sized companies (with turnover of S$10 million to S$100 million) struggle the most in managing their working capital. Getting access to capital at the right time is a huge pain point for small businesses, with the unmet financing gap that SMEs face to be estimated at S$20 billion. To plug the gap, Xero has partnered with three lenders - InvoiceInterchange, Moolahsense and Validus to provide small businesses with easier and faster access to working capital. Small businesses can grant these alternative lenders access to a real-time view of their finances within Xero. Integrations between Xero and lenders mean that lenders can access the financial information they need to make a faster credit decision, and small businesses can enjoy a simple easy application process that gives them access to capital faster. The integrations between Xero and the three lenders are currently underway and will be available to SMEs in Singapore this month.