Craig Walker is Founding CTO and Executive General Manager Payments & Billing Solutions for Xero. As EGM, Craig leads a global engineering and design team that builds and oversees invoicing, billing, and payments infrastructure and workflows. Having spent the first half of his career leading Xero’s technology strategy and building out Xero’s core accounting platform, he is now building the company’s next-generation fintech products, leading the Payments and Billing Solutions team.
Craig has a history of operating as a virtual CTO for entrepreneurs & start-ups, offering strategic technology advice and expertise. Craig leads Xero’s software development team and technology infrastructure. Craig has spent his career building mission-critical Internet applications, including co-founding software-as-a-service provider Viatx and working for leading Microsoft consulting firm Glazier Systems.
What is Xero’s vision for Canadian small business owners?
Small business is the heart and soul of the global economy, and that’s definitely true in Canada, where small businesses employ approximately 64% of the total labor force.
Our vision is for small businesses in Canada to return to where they were pre-pandemic, which will be a major driver towards economic recovery. Xero’s role is to provide small businesses, and their accountants and other trusted advisors, with the digital tools to help them thrive.
Why is there a need for small business owners to adopt advanced technology like automation, AI, and the cloud?
Keeping track of finances on spreadsheets and stuffing shoeboxes full of receipts doesn’t cut it anymore. Business owners need real-time access to an accurate, up-to-date picture of where their business is at so they can make decisions about cash flow and where to rein in spending. Digital maturity can make or break a business—especially in the sort of challenging times we have all lived through for the past year and a half. The data speaks for itself; digitally mature businesses—including ones that have embraced cloud-based accounting—have had higher levels of resiliency throughout the pandemic.
How are small business technology advancements in Toronto, one of North America’s most prominent tech hubs, driving the country’s economic recovery?
Toronto is a connected, business-friendly city, and the size and diversity of its tech talent pool are second to none. As global technology companies like Google and IBM invest in Toronto and expand offices, that draws even more top-notch engineers and software developers to the city. That helps drive innovation and stimulate economic activity that benefits small and medium-sized businesses as well, and that’s good for the Canadian economy as a whole.
Can you tell us a bit more about the revolutionary updates behind Xero’s new bank reconciliation capabilities? And how do you expect these changes to impact SMEs and their advisors?
The first thing you’ll notice is an all-new design and interface. It makes bank reconciliation more beautiful, but also easier and smoother. We’ve leveraged artificial intelligence to deliver smarter matching algorithms and memorization for transfers between accounts. Also coming soon—and currently, in beta with some customers—we’ll be able to offer new bank-rule search capabilities and suggested contacts and account codes for new bank-statement lines that customers haven’t reconciled before.
For business owners and their advisors, these updates will transform bank reconciliation into a simple and seamless workflow instead of the time-consuming task it used to be.
Since you joined Xero, 15 years ago, what has been the most significant change you’ve seen within the company? And, where do you see Xero 10 years from now?
The most significant thing to me is not what has changed, but what hasn’t. Over the past 15 years, Xero has grown into a global company with more than 2.7 million subscribers, but our vision has remained the same—we want to make life better for entrepreneurs and their advisors and communities worldwide. Additionally, we have really stayed true to our values which create our special culture and the ‘Xero magic’ that we want to foster and maintain as we scale and grow at speed. Xero truly lives its values such as #human which is about treating each other and our customers authentically and with kindness and respect that we’d want to be treated.
At Xero, I like to think we’ll be around to support multi-generational businesses with cloud-based tools not only in 10 years’ time but well into the future. This long-term thinking is really important and being embedded into the way we work, and also the technology that underpins our platform as we continue to scale globally as a company. We will continue to invest in developing our platform so we can meet not only our customers’ needs now, but our future customers.
This has been an especially difficult time for small business owners; what tips do you have for SMEs that are finding it hard to pull through right now?
Never forget that, as a business owner, you’re part of a community. Your fellow entrepreneurs are struggling with the same things you are. Don’t be afraid to ask what’s helping them get through, and share what’s working for you. As the saying goes, we’re all in this together, and that’s how we’ll get through it—together.
