Jamie Sutherland, president of Xero U.S., will report to Karpas while Karpas reports to company CEO Rod Drury. Xero also got more U.S. talent when it named former Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell as company chairman. Liddell replaces Sam Knowles who resigned from the Xero board and from the chairman's job. Liddell was more recently CFO and vice chairman of General Motors and held the Microsoft financial spot from 2005 through 2009. Xero also added Bill Veghte, based in San Francisco, Calif., to its board of directors. Veghte is EVP and GM of Hewlett Packard's Enterprise Group. You'd have to think installing an American chairman is an acknowledgment of the important of this market to Xero's worldwide plans. Well, the U.S. is a bit bigger than Australia and New Zealand, which are the accounting application vendor's strongholds.
XERO NAMES U.S. CEO Featured
Xero has named its first CEO for its North American operations and the New Zealand-based cloud software company and also added some board-level talent to its operations on this continent. The company has hired Peter Karpas as CEO. Karpas was most recently VP and GM for PayPal's North America Small and Medium Business. Karpas had held that post since September 2012 he held a Canadian VP position with Paypal from September 2010.
