Xero board panhandling for Singh Cassidy

One of the more odious tasks for company chairmen is asking jittery shareholders to approve a bump in the CEO's pay. The primary goal is to entice querulous fund managers to take a kick in the shins with the promise of being invited to a banquet a few years down the road.

 The most unlikely person for this task is David Thodey, the mild-mannered chairman of accounting software group Xero.  But that is where Thodey finds himself today, asking big funds in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland to give the nod to yet another rejig of the salary package of Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Xero's California-based tech sis CEO. Should Thodey ever write a tell-all tale on the life of a tech company chair, he should entitle it Panhandling for Suki. It would be an instant best seller.

The need to boost Singh Cassidy's pay packet stems from the artificial intelligence-induced collapse in the equity valuations of software-as-a-service companies, dubbed by Wall Street wits as the SAAS-pocalypse. It is estimated that more than US$1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) has been wiped off the enterprise software sector market since the start of the year. 

Xero is one of the smaller victims of the phenomenon but the carnage is real, nonetheless, for a bevy of Australian and New Zealand fund managers who own most of the stock. Xero's share price fall from its peak of $193.77 this time last year to current levels below $75 has wiped out more than $20 billion in market value.