I went to Xerocon last week in Brisbane, here's a summary of the...

I went to Xerocon last week in Brisbane, here's a summary of the key points I stood out to me:

• 5,000 Australian accounting firms are now using Xero Tax, I tried to find out the number of firms in Australia but couldn't easily find it.
• Xero Connect https://www.xero.com/au/xero-connect/- uptake seems very slow to me, only Australian businesses now using this are Reece, Caltex and BP. The key issue here is that it relies on other businesses to want to provide this feature to their customers. I spoke to a Xero employee who agreed uptake is slow but he also thought that in 12 months time some of the bigger retailers might have connected, seems an obvious thing that Bunnings should do, I would have thought. I went to the Reece AGM last year and the CEO said that integrating to Xero Connect (and MYOB I think) was one of his highlights of 2018.
• NAB payments will live in December, this has taken 2 years, clearly there have been big issues with internet banking security: https://www.nab.com.au/business/online-banking/xero I spoke with the NAB tech guy at Xerocon who explained that this feature really needed plenty of effort from NAB, I asked whether it would be rolled out easily to other banks, he thought not easily and it would be highly dependent on the other banks capabilities, he thought Westpac had almost no chance but CBA was a reasonable chance.
• Hubdoc seems to be operating well and improving in my opinion.
• A fair few other minor announcements eg. Xero now intergrated with hubspot, mailchimp, trello etc.
• Xero now connected to 800 other apps / programs.
• From an overall perspective I think most of the major product features have been built for Australian users, there is nothing on the horizon that will make a dramatic difference to users, small incremental improvements. Payments is probably the next big feature but it looks like it will be a very slow rollout.

All of the above is relevant to Australian accountants but obviously the thing that is going drive the share price movement going forward is success in America, Asia and rest of the world, or the lack thereof. Xero is now operating in 46 of 48 asian countries, I have no idea how extensive the use is in certain countries but it’s impressive stat. According to Xero there are 1.5 billion small businesses in Asia, no doubt most of them operate in the cash economy now but probably not in the decades to come.

I think I’ll skip the next Australian Xerocon, for me it wasn’t worth the effort, what would be really interesting is to speak to US accountants using Xero, that could provide some really great insights. Share price has run very hard and I find it very difficult to value but after some consideration I am going to follow @mal85 lead and just hold for the long, long term.

I'll also be hoping that this trend continues:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=7&date=all&q=xero,quickbooks