In 2020 we commissioned some research with Lonergan to check in with our ecosystem community to see what challenges, and opportunities, they saw in the market, and how we could better support them.

Our community numbers more than 70,000 users of our API, and over 1000 apps connected to the Xero platform. The Xero ecosystem community surveyed included 1,435 app partners, developer partners, enterprise and financial services partners, alongside accountants/advisors and SMBs that have developed their own integrations or apps in-house.

What struck me instantly about these results was two things (both of which I’m extremely proud of):

1) The resiliency of our ecosystem community, during once-in-a-generation negative market conditions;

2) Just how much innovation took a front seat, when our partners could’ve regressed into their shells to ride out the storm.Xero’s ecosystem community seized the opportunity to do business in new ways. 78 percent of the ecosystem cited ‘being better able to adapt than competitors’ as crucial to success in 2021, while 64 percent of those surveyed felt they had innovated more in 2020 than previous years.

Innovation is at the heart of our ecosystem community, and our community has shown remarkable resiliency. Almost three-quarters (74%) of the Xero ecosystem community believe they have identified new business opportunities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 72 percent saw the development of tailored solutions for their customers as a key opportunity area going forward.

I especially love the fact that four out of five (79%) in our community feel well equipped to help their clients in difficulty grow again post-pandemic. I interpret all these results positively, that our Ecosystem team has (hopefully!) done their jobs well and put in the hard yards to support our community.

Coming from developer partnerland myself (at Vend) the boffin in me particularly loves this stat: Xero ecosystem community members most commonly describe the relationship between API/platform providers and developers across the industry as positive (33%).

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This increases to 43% among Xero developer partners and 41% among Xero app partners.‍

This is something we’ve worked so hard on, so thank you for that recognition.

52% of those surveyed said access to the Xero platform has been critical to achieving their goals, 39% of partners say the Xero ecosystem represents ‘critical automation’ to them.

We’ve worked hard to instil that kind of trust, and hopefully our transparency has also provided the needed insights to keep our app partners innovating. So thank you to all our partners who took part in the survey, and an extra special thanks also to our partners Syft, Tradify and A2X for providing their own anecdotal case studies for this report, highlighting some of their key wins in 2020.

We plan to do this survey every year, and if you would like to put your name down for the next round — please email api@xero.com.