Xero and TransferWise: A better way to bill pay

Pay with TransferWise makes it easy for SMBs in the UK to make payments — so they can focus on their business, not their bills

There are over 500,000 small and medium-sized UK businesses that use Xero accounting software. Xero lets them manage their books from anywhere in the world, as long as there’s an internet connection. They can monitor their bank and credit accounts, reconcile transactions, send invoices, and take care of virtually any other accounting, and it’s all backed up and protected in the cloud.

But there’s one thing that hasn’t been so easy for those businesses to do: pay suppliers and other bills through Xero. In many cases, they had to download a batch payment file from Xero, upload it to their bank, check on the payments in their online banking and, back in Xero, manually mark the bills as paid. In other cases, where the bank didn’t accept batch payment files, they had to manually enter payment details for each bill in their online banking.

But that’s about to change. Because Pay with TransferWise — a bill payment solution that will let Xero customers pay suppliers through Xero with their preferred bank account — is about to come to life.

Simple, fast, secure bill paying

Pay with TransferWise will let Xero customers in the UK pay their bills in a few streamlined steps. Here’s how it’ll work:

1. Enter your bills into Xero, and select the ones you want to pay.
2. Choose to pay using Pay with TransferWise and enter the payment details — they’re sent directly to TransferWise.
3. Transfer money from your preferred bank account to TransferWise, using the payment reference.
4. Once TransferWise receives your funds, they’ll pay all of the bills. You can see the status of the payments in Xero, and bills will automatically be marked as paid.

Pay with TransferWise will plug into TransferWise’s API, which will offer SMBs many advantages. They’ll be able to pay multiple bills in one transaction, which should save a lot of time and money over the long haul. Within Xero, they’ll also see the status of all payments in almost real time, be alerted to potential errors before a payment is processed, and be able to reconcile payments in one click — which we hope will save peace of mind.

Pay with TransferWise will be available for selected customers, as part of a beta program, starting in February. See below for more info.

A beautiful friendship

Xero and TransferWise form a natural partnership, both spiritually and physically.

Both companies are passionate about giving smaller organisations the financial power that large ones have. TransferWise lets them send, spend, and receive money quickly, conveniently, and at low cost. Xero lets them track their accounts and manage their books simply, conveniently, and at low cost.

While this is the first time TransferWise has explicitly focused on domestic bill payments, it’s always focused on building faster, more efficient networks between banks and payment providers. Opening those rails up to Xero makes perfect sense.

Besides, TransferWise lets millions of people and businesses around the world send money to over 70 countries, so we’ve already been processing payments to and from businesses for years. We hope to bring our API to more partners like Xero in the future — letting more and more businesses manage their money with the same privileges as large corporations.

Join the beta

If you’d like to be a part of beta, you can register your interest at xero.com/uk/pay-with-transferwise. To participate, you’ll need a TransferWise account, which is free.

To learn more about our API, go to https://transferwise.com/gb/business/api.