Member Article

Xero's partnership with a US payments firm part of a wider push for SME automation

London-based accounting platform Xero has announced a new partnership with US payments firm Stripe that it claims will help SMEs get paid faster and automate menial busy work.

Xero’s small business subscribers, which total over one million according to the firm, will now be able to automatically reconcile Stripe payments coming through their bank feed thus automating a previously onerous manual process.

The accounting business claims that its software can automatically reconcile multiple transactions to a statement line, meaning payments and fees are matched with the corresponding Stripe payment.

The new feature, which builds upon Xero’s automation of Stripe fees which it introduced last year, will be music to the ears of small businesses who rely on the US digital payment firm’s platform for their ecommerce and invoice payments.

Bigger than that, the new integration highlights the manner in which machine learning techniques are already being put to use automating some of the more onerous tasks for businesses.

In London alone there are a raft of tech firms already applying artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to a wide array of business processes and workflows.

Putney-based Phrasee is using AI to generate more effective email subject lines for marketers while Snap.hr has already convinced the likes of Tesco and TransferWise about the benefits of its AI-powered recruitment platform.

There is also Previse, the FinTech startup which is using proprietary AI tech which scores corporates based on the likelihood of an invoice being honoured and offers funders such as banks and asset managers to pay the supplier instantly in exchange for the full invoice when it is eventually paid.

Xero Chief Technology Officer, Craig Walker said that a core part of its efforts was to utilise similar technologies to automate as many of a business’s manual workflows as possible.

He commented: “We’re constantly focused on designing beautiful experiences and automating as many manual processes as we can.

“Last year, Xero began automating Stripe fees, and now we’ve completely automated the matching work for you, eradicating what was a largely manual process to reconcile payments.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Stripe to deliver seamless online payments for our mutual small business customers.”