Hi Rod, sorry I was not there to celebrate the growth of Xero first hand, but some of your thinking resonates with what I am trying to achieve through my new company, UnifiedVU.

1. Streamlining workflows: There is an on-going effort by every SaaS provider to integrate with as many services as possible, which in the future may cause a problem, due to heavily cluttered user interfaces. But right now, its helping businesses to become more productive.
2. Single version of the truth: This is the holy grail everyone is trying to achieve. This is also hampered by the UI constraints but, the single truth as you see could be split across a number of differing platforms, e.g. in your case, the financials. In Salesforce’s case, perhaps the sales information. In our case, customer records from all the software you use, as we start with a clean sheet of paper (UI).
3. Integrations: Cannot wait to use Barclays auto feeder when it goes live, as I just went through the pain of manually syncing. Services, such as Cazoomi, Zapier and others are making data exchange a reality today. Not sure, you tried, but Mondo’s, the new tech bank’s first prepaid card service work’s amazingly, reporting transactions in real time. Incumbents have a long way to go, but we had the pleasure of playing with Barclays dummy APIs last year and Visa recently opening up developer platform means only one thing — there will be an explosion of new financial services.
4. Bringing it all together: UnifiedVU was founded to achieve this vision in a novel way, removing all the constraints of the past. We call this integration on the glass, the next evolution in how systems talk to each other, whilst delivering significantly higher productivity, without storing data. Now for the first time, you can begin to re-imagine and recreate your software world.

Looking forward to engage later in the year, one we have few more Xero Apps in our Single Customer View product..

Best regards

Manoj