COVID-19, SMEs, and SmartBusiness

This post is sponsored by UOB Malaysia.

In recent years because of the business environment created in the wake of the pandemic we have seen the advent of new technological advances, which businesses have adopted to ensure their businesses stay afloat.

Due to the new normal of working from home, small businesses have had to invest in new digital tools to digitise what were previously manual operations to ensure their business could continue to run while having limited mobility because of the lockdowns.

UOB Malaysia developed SmartBusiness in 2018 as a “beyond banking” initiative to enable small and medium businesses to adopt the right digital solutions. UOB SmartBusiness helps SME business owners make the transition to digital and take away the hassle of managing complicated operational tasks manually, empowering them to focus on their core business models, and drive business outcomes.

In the beginning before the arrival of COVID-19, SMEs highlighted that making their accounting and HR payroll systems more efficient was a priority in their digitalisation journey, and so SmartBusiness was initially developed to enable businesses to streamline and digitise their back-office processes such as accounting, payroll and business management through a secure and integrated digital solution.

The SmartBusiness platform allows users access to a comprehensive complement of tools that will allow them to perform tasks such as manage purchases and schedule payments for those purchases, receive and organise incoming payments, keep track of finances, get an overview of their entire inventory, and tax computations.

The platform also includes a full human resources suite that allows business owners to centralise employee-related tasks, along with features such as automated payroll management and easy tax filing.

The platform is now available to anyone with a UOB business current account and a subscription for Direct Bank Feed, with paid versions also available for businesses that would like to access more advanced features with a 30-day complimentary trial.

For full details of the various packages please visit: https://www.uob.com.my/business/digitalise/index.page.

In 2020, COVID-19 arrived on Malaysian shores affecting the trading of businesses. The SMEs concentrated their focus on how to keep their businesses afloat during the extended period of lockdowns.

During the pandemic, the SMEs came to the realisation that business could continue online, and the necessity to have online sales channels and payment collections grew. The pandemic prompted these businesses to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, as they had to operate with strict standard operating procedures within physical restrictions.

To develop and enhance their digital capabilities this came at a cost to the SMEs, funds that they would rather use to ensure the survival of the business. Despite government assistance, about 50% of SMEs in Malaysia cite funding as a key hindrance to digitalisation, while 60% of SMEs are unaware of their financing options, exacerbating this problem, according to Huawei's Accelerating Malaysian Digital SMEs study in 2018.

To support the SMEs’ need to digitalise during this period, UOB Malaysia assisted to link SME business owners with government agencies for digital grants, helping them to restructure their loans and provide working capital loans.

During the pandemic, the SmartBusiness programme shifted its focus to support the digital requirements of the SMEs. Customers needed front-end solutions to facilitate contactless transactions and payments.

The SmartBusiness team connected customers to eCommerce platforms, giving them access to point of service (POS) terminals and introducing them to online payment systems to help the SMEs to quickly adapt and change the way they do business to adjust to the new business environment brought on by COVID-19.

During this time, SmartBusiness onboarded five new digital partners which covered areas that businesses would find useful during the pandemic period: cloud accounting, eCommerce, POS and food commerce. The platform partners are all market leaders in their field to ensure better reach and availability to the user, no matter where the SMEs are located in Malaysia.

The SmartBusiness programme now has nine partners with more to be onboarded to better serve the SMEs’ digital transformation needs.

In 2021, the SmartBusiness team launched digital campaigns via social media and webinars to help educate businesses on how to apply for a digital grant from the various government agencies and to demonstrate how digitalising their businesses would make them more efficient and generate more revenue.

The statistics show that SMEs that choose to undergo the process of digitalisation are likely to see a 30% improvement in productivity. Additionally, these SMEs can also expect to reduce time spent on manual administration processes by as much as 30%, according to Fintech News Malaysia. During the three-month campaign period, the SmartBusiness programme generated significant interest in the form of enquiries and usage of the platform in the years 2020-2021.

UOB SmartBusiness offers all the necessary solutions you need to automate core business processes. Contact us today to discover more about how our comprehensive range of services can help you forge ahead in your digital-transformation efforts. For more information, please visit https://www.uob.com.my/business/digitalise/index.page.