Xero, which was founded in New Zealand in 2006, produces cloud accounting software and its Xerocon summit is sometimes dubbed “Coachella for accountants”. The company used its flashy event to announce a range of new AI features and detail its plans to grow in the lucrative US market, thanks to a $US2.5 billion acquisition of payments platform Melio. Xero has long struggled to crack into the US, where rivals like Intuit remain dominant.
Xero’s chairman, former Telstra chief executive David Thodey, told Xero’s AGM that remuneration was a “complex issue” but that the current structure was the right one for the company.
If Xerocon is “Coachella for accountants”, Singh Cassidy is its headline act.
“I feel like my primary job is to drive value for Xero,” she told this masthead.
“And you know, we worked with the board and shareholders to drive a package that’s highly aligned with shareholder value. And I think like an owner. I wake up every day, I think like an owner, and I feel like my package reflects that same alignment of interests.”
At the AGM last month Xero director Susan Peterson, chair of the people and remuneration committee, said that she and chairman, former Telstra chief executive, David Thodey had held more than 50 meetings with investors and proxy firms to discuss its new remuneration approach.
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Some 96 per cent of Singh Cassidy’s pay package is performance-based or linked to share price performance, she said, which is in line with Silicon Valley norms. She argued the package was necessary to attract and retain global-calibre leadership in a highly competitive market.
“Long-term equity is tied to tenure, and is a standard and widespread component of remuneration in the US technology sector,” Peterson told investors.
“The ultimate value of [the equity] is tied to Xero’s share price performance, which makes it meaningfully aligned to long-term shareholder value creation.”
“In the past we have tried to secure global talent on remuneration structures that have been tied to Australian pay practices … It is mission-critical to pay local market rates if we want to secure a grade talent with the experience needed to prosecute the strategy.”
Thodey, told the meeting that remuneration was a “complex issue” but that the current structure was the right one for the company.
The bulk of Singh Cassidy’s pay package is performance-based or linked to share price performance.Credit: Oscar Colman
“As one of the few truly global SaaS [software-as-a-service] companies on the ASX, securing leadership in a competitive international market is essential to creating long-term shareholder value,” Thodey said.
“This framework … is necessarily different from many ASX-listed entities and is a deliberate consequence of our strategy and global ambition.”
In Brisbane, Xero showed off JAX, its so-called “financial super agent” which launched in prototype earlier this year. JAX stands for ‘Just Ask Xero’.
‘We worked with the board and shareholders to drive a package that’s highly aligned with shareholder value. And I think like an owner. I wake up every day, I think like an owner, and I feel like my package reflects that same alignment of interests.’
Xero chief Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
Initially limited to creating invoices and answering basic support queries, JAX will now extend into automated bank reconciliation – the painstaking matching of customer transactions with bank feeds that sits at the heart of the Xero product – and users will be able to ask financial questions inside Xero thanks to a partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Asked about the risks of businesses becoming too reliant on algorithms for critical financial decisions, Singh Cassidy stressed that customers would always remain “in control.”
“Yes, we can give you the idea that we’ll do it all for you, but often customers want to check what’s been reconciled,” she said.
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“It’s about control, and ensuring customers know when something is being done on their behalf.
“We know customers need to trust us. That means minimising hallucinations, ensuring transparency, and always giving them an audit trail so they can see what the AI has done.”
Xero says 73 per cent of its customers already use some form of AI on the platform, and the executive acknowledged a portion remain hesitant.
“We don’t force it on people – they can choose,” she said.
“Our job is to keep exposing features in the product so they become familiar, while respecting that adoption has its own curve.”
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