Helping SMEs grow their businesses, not their administrative workload

ADMINISTRATIVE tasks take up a significant amount of time from running a business. Especially for small and medium enterprises (SME), those precious minutes can mean servicing more customers.

In Malaysia, United Overseas Bank (UOB) and business software provider SAP, launched UOB SmartBusiness to help simplify administrative workloads for SMEs.

The cloud-based solution is designed to help SMEs save costs and improve operating efficiency.

Built on Google Cloud, UOB SmartBusiness helps SMEs streamline and digitize processes such as accounting, payroll, and business management.

“We know that managing costs while raising productivity is a challenge and a concern for SMEs in Malaysia. While SMEs are keen to reap the benefits of digital technology, it can be costly to implement such technology,” said Raymond Chui, Executive Director and Country Head of Business Banking, UOB Malaysia.

To help ease the burden of costs, UOB Malaysia is offering the basic package of UOB SmartBusiness for free. Paid options with more advanced features are also available to help users scale their business.

The softwares are integrated directly with the bank, so financial data is automatically synced between a customer’s current account and accounting software.

For businesses, integrated solutions like this means having all the key data on a single platform, while juggling fewer applications.

The collaboration marks the first time SAP is offering its enterprise software, SAP Business One, through a bank. It makes sense for technology providers to team up with banks, as this would allow them to provide the service to more customers.

According to numbers provided by SAP, SMEs contributes to 75 percent of GDP, and 68 percent of employment. This is a critical market, but many businesses are often unaware of the technologies available to them.

“Businesses often think that SAP solutions are only available to larger businesses. Actually, 80 percent of our 355,000 customers are SMEs,” explained Brad Gray, Head of General Business for Southeast Asia, SAP.

By teaming up with UOB, SAP can reach more customers that have a need for easy to use technology that can help improve their productivity. This means SMEs can save time, reduce costs, minimize errors, and ultimately spend more time on growing their business.

“SMEs today are the big companies of tomorrow. They’ll need the right tools that can help scale their business,” Gray concludes.

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