Frequently asked questions

Non-disclosure agreements

The confidential nature of discussions and engagements with financial institutions is of paramount importance to Xero, and we’ll enter into a mutual NDA before any in-depth discussions.
 

Protection of customer data

We’re committed to the security of your customer data and provide multiple layers of protection for the personal and financial information you trust to Xero. To help you understand how we protect and secure data, we encourage you to read our policy on security at Xero. It includes the option to request Xero’s Service Organization Control (SOC 2) report for formal reviews of compliance obligations and for evaluating controls relating to security, availability and confidentiality.
 

Xero’s privacy policy

Xero’s privacy policy dated April 2016 is available on the web.

Data feed coverage, quality, and onboarding automation

We’re responsive to customers’ expectations around access to their data. We know they’re demanding frictionless, up-to-date access to all of their bank transactions. So we work with our banking partners to build accurate, consistent, quality data feeds for all bank account products via an easy automated online setup process. Discussions about how we can help you meet customer expectations will be core to our engagement with you.
 

An open non-exclusive approach  

Removing the friction between small businesses and financial institutions means not limiting the choices available to our small business customers.

Bank feeds: We want to offer our customers direct bank feeds from any bank with a simple on-boarding process, so bank feeds are not exclusive – in fact we currently integrate with over 100 banks globally.

Financial services innovations: Many banks are moving beyond bank feeds to faster, automated, safer payments services for small businesses and simpler processes for accessing capital. Whilst no two solutions in a market are identical, we can't guarantee product exclusivity.

Building the business case for bank feeds

Bank feeds, which are at the foundation of every financial web integration, require investment and resources. We’ll engage with the right stakeholders within your bank to communicate the benefits of working with Xero, and we can support you to quantify the outcomes for inclusion in your business case.  In addition, we can help your stakeholders understand our approach to two-way reciprocal data sharing.
 

Support for first movers

Although our approach is non-exclusive, we do offer a comprehensive launch plan to support the first movers in each market who offer our joint customers full feed coverage, payments and lending solutions. Together, we educate our small business, accounting and bookkeeping channels as well as our own frontline teams to advocate for the new product.
 

Marketing support

The marketing launch plan depends on the integration. Where both parties are adding value for our mutual customers and/or building innovative solutions within the financial web, we’ll promote the partnership to our customers and the market. The structure of any go-to-market strategy will be discussed as part of the overall partnership negotiations.

Two-way reciprocal data sharing

A two-way reciprocal data share enables a bank to access Xero accounting data where a Xero customer has opted in to request a financial services product, such as a lending solution. Financial institutions who have direct bank feeds for small business accounts can access this data via the Xero API. When we reach this stage of the financial web journey, we enter into a standard data exchange agreement to enable two-way data share between your bank and Xero.
 

What data Xero shares

Xero works with banks with both direct bespoke integrations, and via the Xero API. The Xero API enables banks to both read Xero data, and write to Xero where needed to create innovative products or services.

A bank needs permission from the customer to access the Xero API. Once they give that permission, you’ll be able to access the Xero data needed for the product or service that you have created. See the kind of integrations you could build using the rich and powerful data available in Xero.
 

Use of individual customer data

Xero uses transaction and subscription data to help automate small business administration. Xero does not sell raw transactional data to any third party. Xero only allows banks to access customer data where the customer has given permission, and only for purposes that have been approved by Xero as being of benefit to our mutual customers.

Xero’s goal is to drive financial services innovation for our joint small business customers. This means our focus is on in helping to solve their everyday pain points. We:

• have no plans to aggregate and resell banking data

• don’t intend to become a price comparison site