Xero

Xero is the leading digital accounting platform for small businesses around the world. Their platform sits at the heart of many small businesses’ operations. In a bid to widen the value that it offers to its customers, it was looking for opportunities to embed new financial services into its core product. 

‍

With so many potential routes to diversify Xero’s product offer, Class35 was engaged to uncover unmet customer needs and unearth opportunities to meet them with new lending products. Having conducted 1:1 research with businesses up and down the UK, we quickly identified that the challenge for most small businesses lay in the mental and emotional barriers to taking on a lending product. Having identified the different modes and scenarios for lending, we prototyped and validated a series of service concepts with customers built around their workflow, before laddering these into an overarching product strategy for lending. 

‍

Outcome

• Lending roadmap currently in development 
• First deployment with NatWest as RapidCash 
• Strategy formed core tenet of Xero’s M&A strategy

‍

“Class35 really helped us make sense of the opportunities we had to help our customers, created highly innovative new service propositions and then worked with us to bring them to market.” -- Philip Gardiner, Head of SMB Credit & Data Product

‍