Xero Innovation, Technology & Agility

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025, and what is particularly compelling about this work for you?

I am starting a zero-to-one initiative in 2025 that will create a new paradigm on how consumers, particularly small business owners, are engaging with and served by fintech technologies. Leveraging Xero’s strong foundation of accounting platform and its ecosystem of fintech services, we are creating a layer of product that will serve as an infrastructure to applications and platforms, seamlessly enabling fintech capabilities to their customers. Incorporating new advances in technologies and Xero’s continued focus on bringing AI and machine learning into business systems, we expect to drastically simplify how small businesses are served by fintech systems.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? Who will you collaborate with, and what challenges do you anticipate having to overcome?

We are expecting to build the foundation of the new system in the first half of 2025, launching a minimum viable product later in the year. We will be working closely with our industry partners to create an integrated system that we will continue launching new services through for the next two years. In order to drastically simplify the user experience with the fintech system, we are expecting innovations around business data services, information security and AI/ML capabilities that serve day-to-day business activities. Our goal will be consolidating system technologies and AI capabilities to create value in the daily life of small businesses.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

I led fintech engineering at Uber, creating systems that bring AI/ML into real-time fraud detection on Uber’s platform, as well as financial intelligence that enables mission-critical business decisions, in addition to basic financial services around tax, invoices, accounting and planning domains. Prior to Uber, I led computing, storage and data infrastructure areas at VMware, Microsoft and Facebook, with an industry-leading edge to innovate in cloud computing and big data spaces. With the new zero-to-one initiatives, I hope to bring my past technical and business experience to create a new way consumers conduct their daily financial management.