Bank feeds are a great way to import transactions from your financial institution directly into Xero, so you can easily complete the reconciliation process. But the US is a pretty challenging market when it comes to providing high-quality bank feeds. There are more than 4,000 financial institutions, each with their own capabilities and nuances.

To address this and help you get transactions into Xero more easily, we’ve been focused on improving the coverage and quality of our bank feeds. In fact, we’re calling it 2024 ‘the year of the US bank feed’. Here’s an update on all the exciting progress we’ve made in this space recently.

We’ve extended our reach with direct bank connections

We’ve given you improved access to more reliable bank feeds with better data quality, and a better customer experience. 

Over the past 12 months, we’ve increased our high-quality direct bank feeds in the US from around 20 to more than 600 (which includes both Xero-built and aggregator-supplied). These include US Bank, TD Bank, Charles Schwab, Capital One (sub brands), USAA Bank, banks powered by Jack Henry, SouthState Bank and NFCU.

As other major banking platform suppliers make secure bank feeds available, we are optimistic that this number will increase in the coming year. Check out our complete list of all bank feeds available (including direct feeds).

We’ve partnered with bank feed aggregator, Flinks, for US and Canadian feeds

We’re expanding access to reliable bank feeds with our new Flinks partnership. Having an additional bank feeds aggregator is already helping us increase the number of high-quality bank feeds, as well as expanding our additional network of credential-shared feeds.

This will allow us to select feeds with the best available reliability, data quality and customer experience. We went live with our first aggregator-supplied direct bank feed from Flinks in March 2024, which was a huge win.

We’ve made it faster and easier to find your bank

There’s a new regional search filter and a mechanism to recognize acronyms and typos in the search bar. We’ve also added additional bank URL information for extra comfort that you’re choosing the right bank, with fewer steps needed.

“We’ve always understood how important bank feed data ingestion is to the customer experience, and are excited about how much progress we’ve made just in the past year. But we aren’t stopping there — we have a number of key advancements in store for the remainder of 2024 that will fuel efficiency and accuracy within the process.”

Ben Richmond, US Country Manager at Xero

We’re building stronger partnerships with our bank feed partners

We’re working closely with our bank feed partners to identify disruptions to their bank feeds as early as possible, and proactively resolve them with minimal inconvenience to you. We closely monitor the time taken to resolve all customer questions posed to Xero, have made many changes to our processes and will continue to make improvements going forward. If you do have any issues, don’t forget to raise a case in Xero Central so we can get right on it.

You can now upload PDF statements and extract data quickly

In addition to being able to import bank transactions using CSV, QIF, OFX, QBO and QFX file formats, we now offer PDF statement imports directly into Xero. This means access to faster data import for PDF statements, since third-party software isn’t required and the import can be done in one place. 

The data extraction is also faster — on average, data is extracted from the PDF in 35 seconds compared to other extraction software solutions, which can take up to 24 hours. This is ideal if you don’t want to use a bank feed (or can’t for some reason) and want to save time and reduce errors.

There’s plenty more we want to tackle in this space, but we’re excited about all the progress we’ve made so far and the benefits it offers you. If you haven’t set up bank feeds in Xero yet, I encourage you to give it a go. It’s really easy and can help you simplify your admin in your business or practice.

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