Two of the biggest global brands in SMB fintech have joined forces to solve a common pain point for small businesses — getting their money on time.

SaaS accounting giant Xero and payments platform Stipe announced a partnership at the recent Xerocon San Diego conference for the two companies to develop tools to help small businesses get paid faster while also drawing more insights out of their payments data.

The companies have already launched two new features through the new partnership. The first is to pull comprehensive transactional data from Stipe into Xero, which will make reconciliation easier and allow for more insights from the data. The second is a new autopay featured where SMBs can set up and receive recurring payments from regular customers through Xero.

Poor cash flow is among the leading causes of small business failure, so this partnership addresses a real need in the market. It also shows how important alliances, partnerships, and M&A are becoming in the very hot and very competitive fintech space.

This partnership comes on the heels of H&R Block’s acquisition of Xero’s rival Wave Apps. H&R Block needed to bulk up to stay competitive with rival Intuit. H&R Block had attempted to level the playing field through a partnership with Xero, but the company clearly felt it needed to achieve its goals through an acquisition in the end.

The LSA’s proprietary Modern Commerce Monitor™️ survey shows that SMBs are moving steadily into cloud-based accounting, invoicing, and payments solutions. According to the latest wave, 36% of SMBs use SaaS tools in the “finance and operations” category. Another 20% say they are planning to move these activities into the cloud, with about two-thirds saying they will do so within the next year.

The market is highly competitive, and fintech companies are under pressure to have a complete solution for SMBs. If not through acquisitions, then companies will achieve this via partnerships and integrations.