US business neobank Bluevine has partnered with Xero, allowing its customers to consume financial services directly inside Xero (The Paypers). According to the announcement, business owners who use Bluevine can now use Xero to track expenses, analyse financial performance, and manage cash flow. This is arguably more of an open banking feature than an embedded one, but that’s not what I want to focus on here. A quick search of Xero’s banking activities shows me they have partnerships to leverage open banking, embedded banking, and tight relationships with (neo)banks like Bluevine.
Many of these approaches are in different markets and not directly competitive with each other. However, doesn’t this still show that Xero is exploring various concepts and seeing what works best? In the end, banking and accounting services are tightly connected; in the long term, there will probably be only solutions covering both. Which approach will win? I guess nobody knows, but perhaps trying all of them like Xero does is probably the right strategy to find out.
