Digital SME banking initiatives are not about adding convenience to daily banking operations anymore, but helping entrepreneurs to develop their businesses. The building of the ecosystem is becoming a key competitive advantage.
To win SME customers, banks should meet their real business needs. For example, unlike large-scale companies, smaller businesses feel more significant pressure when undertaking their administrative and financial activities (like payments to suppliers, payroll, and paperwork) on their own. Owners and managers struggle to navigate several platforms for banking, ERP (enterprise resource planning), and human resources, trying to gather essential data in one place.
Business rationale for banks to provide non-financial services to SMEs:
- Each bank must create its own business case and value proposition in a market. Non-financial services (e-invoicing, accounting, BFM) is a part of the value proposition
- Cross-selling opportunities. Banks can offer new bundles of packaged services under combinations in which established traditional and new e-invoicing services are deployed together. Factoring and financing solutions contribute to revenues from lending
Business rationale for SMEs to have non-financial services from banks services (e-invoicing, accounting, BFM etc) from banks:
- Automation of SMEs’ everyday job. Banks are able to integrate e-invoicing with payments in many creative ways. (e-banking, file transfer, authentication and call centre etc.). Due to the growing habit of electronic banking there is an automatic economy of re-use and repetition. This facilitates reconciliation processes and reduced errors.
- Banks deploy a range of trusted e- channels that can easily support e-invoicing at minimum cost for a customer.
- Banks can make availability invoice financing, factoring and credit enhancement facilities.
- The banking channel can meet legal compliance and authenticity/integrity requirements
So, all these services, connected into the ecosystem, brings new value to SME customers.
The beginning of the Open Banking era provides new opportunities to connect with banks-challengers, multi-bank platforms, and fintech companies.
Let’s discuss why & how banks can build the ecosystems for the SME segment and how they can benefit from it, and also the range of the following questions:
- Why building an invoicing ecosystem makes sense for banks? Context of e-invoicing
- How long does it take to put together an ecosystem?
- How long does it take to get results from an ecosystem?
- When is an ecosystem successful? What are the success criteria?
- How do you ensure cooperation among various participants?
- What will be your role in an ecosystem, if you are not a big bank?
- If an ecosystem is a product, what do you think the ingredients would be?
- Can you try building an ecosystem risk-free?
Join us on December 05 in Prague at the Rountable devoted to the topic building of a productive ecosystem for SME customers, organized by SME Banking Club (Poland) and hosted by Charlie-India (Hungary).
To register for the event and read more details, please go to: https://smebanking.events/event/new-view-on-ecosystems-roundtable/
