One million is just the beginning: How we’re going to help our UK customers thrive in the face of change

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Xero recently surpassed a huge milestone, adding the one millionth subscriber to our global accounting platform. Our UK business has played a significant part in reaching this landmark. It has served as a massive growth engine for our global organisation.

Xero’s growth in the UK market

Introduced to an under-served market with a thirst for fresh thinking and innovation Xero presented the UK’s small business community with an intuitive tool to run their businesses. Throughout this process we reshaped expectations of what an entrepreneur could expect from technology. We were also first to introduce some truly pioneering new technologies to the UK market. This included the UK’s first ever direct bank feed back in 2009.

Today, I am incredibly proud of all the work our UK team has done to secure Xero’s position today as the UK’s number one accounting software platform. Furthermore I am hugely grateful for all the incredible support and customer advocacy Xero has been shown in the UK.

But it really is just the beginning.

Xero can capitalise on the UK’s uncertain economic environment

>At Xero our mission is to rewire the small business economy around the world. In my view if this mission resonates it’s most applicable to the UK. In the next few years HMS Britain will sail into a perfect economic storm that combines:

Uncertainty as the UK negotiates its withdrawal from Europe by 2019
New HMRC filing rules; the equivalent of digital switchover for bookkeeping for millions of UK SMBs by 2020
The opening up of banking and digital payments with PSD2 next year
The universal mandation of workplace pensions among all UK SMBs in the next two years

Automation and Machine learning part of the bigger picture

The work we are doing today to bring automation and machine learning to accounting and bookkeeping is not only a desirable extension to Xero. It’s also part of a bigger picture. We believe the work will play an essential role in ensuring HMRC’s Making Tax Digital project doesn’t sink thousands of accountants and bookkeepers. It will support them as they attempt to mitigate the weight of millions of UK SMBs migrating from paper and onto digital record keeping systems over the next three years.

The march to the first million subscribers on Xero proved that the basic model of cloud accounting and connecting SMBs with advisors had real virtue. The next five years will be the making of this market in the UK as we prepare to step up and get behind thousands of British accountants and bookkeepers, banks and ecosystem partners and of course, hundreds of thousands of SMBs.

There really has never been a better time for us to step up and help our customers, and it’s an honour to have a front row seat as this next phase unfolds in front of us.

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