This week I have been traveling in the UK. Yesterday I met with Duane Jackson, CEO KashFlow, RIchard Anning, who runs the ICAEW IT Faculty and André Kwakernaat, co-founder Twinfield.
I was delivering the Gapingvoid ‘Awesome’ prints for Duane and Richard which they both agree make great talking points. It was also an opportunity for them to meet for the first time and for me to quiz Duane about KashFlow’s current performance and future plans.
He confirmed that the company has doubled 2009′s revenue to reach the magic £1 million mark and is bearing down on 10,000 users. Duane confidently expects to more than double both numbers and revenue in 2011. On the product side he’s looking to venture into relatively simple HR and is talking about a slew of KashFlow orchestrated integrations. This creates fresh challenges for the company (as it does for all vendors) looking to expand their footprint and will test the company’s ability to attract the right development talent.
After our meeting, Richard and I chatted about KashFlow’s performance and we both agreed that while the company as done very well, its real challenge lays in how it scales up while retaining its mind share leading position. To date, the company has not been willing to consider taking investment beyond the initial seed funding provided by Lord Young and I question whether its strategy allows it to scale as rapidly as this market is growing.
Last call of the day was with Twinfield’s co-founder André Kwakernaat and ‘G-J’ the company’s marketing whiz. Again we talked plans. Among other things, Twinfield is building out its own integration platform for bank feeds and the like. Interestingly, the company told me that in the Netherlands ING Bank is promising customers funding decisions for loan requests of up to €1 million, conditional upon the customer providing accounts formatted with XBRL
XBRL formatted accounts that use ING’s taxonomy allow the bank to fast track decision making. This happens because the bank can easily analyse the results against other data, allowing it to both assess and minimize its risk. Benchmarking of this kind is one use of XBRL that I predicted several years ago.
Almost as a throwaway, André told me that the company recently blew past 100,000 companies using its system. While he is no longer involved in operations, concentrating instead on development, he said: “This was a surprise to me. I thought we were still tracking 85,000 users. The point is that our systems didn’t even notice the growth..I mean we can just cope with this level of scale with no problems.”
While Twinfield has stopped publishing its revenue numberss, a move I believe is a step backwards, André told me the company grew the top line around 30% last year. During a recent meeting with the company the company’s executives told me they are now concentrating on growing top line revenue at the expense of bottom line profit and so are accelerating marketing spend.
The last few weeks, Twinfield has been running XBRL roadshows in the UK. The company says they’ve been moderately successful but bemoan the fact the UK is ‘three to five years behind’ the Netherlands in adoption of new technologies. No surprise there given the Netherlands and Nordic region has been much faster at adapting to economic change than other parts of Europe. That’s a trend that has been ongoing since the introduction of the euro and the loss of significan finance industry related revenues derived from foreign exchange handling.
Comments on this entry are closed.
Get into the conversation
It’s very worrying that the UK is three to five years behind in the adoption of new technologies. Mind you when >10% of the attendees at the iXBRL course still use Word and excel to prepare accounts it’s not hard to believe!
Is anyone willing to say specifically where we’re lacking?
It's very worrying that the UK is three to five years behind in the adoption of new technologies. Mind you when >10% of the attendees at the iXBRL course still use Word and excel to prepare accounts it's not hard to believe!
Is anyone willing to say specifically where we're lacking?
@GoodmanJones re “Will future bank loan funding be conditional upon providing accounts formatted with XBRL? ”
Why would you put such an importance on XBRL that you would even consider for a moment penalizing economic recovery and extension of credit simply because a particular approach to financial reporting were not yet implemented ? XBRL is neither a risk mitigator, a capital adequacy requirement, nor a consideration for loan and credit quality. It is not a financial solution, simply a method of reporting accounting condition — please don’t elevate to the position of holy grail, for God’s sake !
from the article: ” Netherlands ING Bank is promising customers funding decisions for loan requests of up to €1 million,conditional upon the customer providing accounts formatted with XBRL”
Wow. So *customers*, most of whose experience with computers amounts to using e-mail, doing web searches, and possibly posting pics online, now must become adept at formatting their loan applications in XBRL ?? Or, perhaps … be required to purchase a software package to do so !
@GoodmanJones re “Will future bank loan funding be conditional upon providing accounts formatted with XBRL? “
Why would you put such an importance on XBRL that you would even consider for a moment penalizing economic recovery and extension of credit simply because a particular approach to financial reporting were not yet implemented ? XBRL is neither a risk mitigator, a capital adequacy requirement, nor a consideration for loan and credit quality. It is not a financial solution, simply a method of reporting accounting condition — please don't elevate to the position of holy grail, for God's sake !
from the article: ” Netherlands ING Bank is promising customers funding decisions for loan requests of up to €1 million,conditional upon the customer providing accounts formatted with XBRL”
Wow. So *customers*, most of whose experience with computers amounts to using e-mail, doing web searches, and possibly posting pics online, now must become adept at formatting their loan applications in XBRL ?? Or, perhaps … be required to purchase a software package to do so !