Ecosystems and embedded offers are the best way to sell financial products to SMEs at the right moment and place, when and where customers might need them. Ecosystems are key to bank profitability in the future.
The discussion on creating this experience and banks’ role in SME ecosystems was insightful at the CEE23 SME Banking Conference in Krakow last year.
Katalin Kauzli (PartnerHUB) highlighted examples of closed and open SME banking ecosystems, emphasizing their inevitability. Banks are urged to proactively decide their role in this transformation – whether as ecosystem orchestrators or participants.
We have great examples of banks in the CEE region that started to build their ecosystems for SME customers (closed ones). OTP Bank in Hungary was the first to launch an SME Ecosystem – OTP eBIZ – in the region in 2017. Hungarian Bank Holding with their BUPA solution also started building an ecosystem offering. Banca Transilvania in Romania as well. mBank in Poland enables on one single platform crucial services for SMEs starting from registration of business to online accounting and e-invoicing. Erste Bank Group launched their George Business app first in Austria and later in several network banks.
The questions we’d like to discuss in detail this year:
- Whether this is the bank’s interface should be a dashboard for the SME Ecosystem? For some reason, it’s better to have business services such as e-invoicing and online accounting on the dashboard. Because invoices and payrolls drive the payments and not vice versa.
- Ecosystems are about partnerships, better seamless integration, and fulfilling customers’ needs by all the participants of the ecosystem, not only by the bank. Building a network of partners is essential for creating a comprehensive SME ecosystem.
- Monetization of the ecosystem. It’s not enough to only integrate partners/participants into the ecosystem but to have shared KPIs to make the ecosystem work and effective for all the participants.
- Future of ecosystems. It is an open ecosystem which will be possible with open access to data due to Open Banking regulations.
Banks can greatly identify the needs of their customers and then define whether they have internal capabilities to cover those needs by themselves or if it would be best sourced through partnerships. In today’s interconnected landscape, fostering an ecosystem strategy is crucial for long-term survival.
