Here’s the 13 fintech solutions you need to know

 

If you take a look at the news about fintech startups, you might get a feeling that all the new financial services are built for retail clients, but not for businesses. However, these are namely the entrepreneurs that may become drivers of fintech, especially in Asia. First, SME, retail and overall entrepreneurship culture are highly developed in Asia. Second, for a start, we should clarify what exactly do we mean by “SME”. I believe the target audience can be split in three segments that are most receptive to the new technologies and demonstrate the highest customer’s involvement at the same time. These are cafes and restaurants, hotels, taxi services and fashion retail:

• They use products not just themselves, but, being bound to working with retail clients, they also engage them with their new services;
• Cafes, restaurants, apparel stores (I often hear Asians say: “We have two passions – food and shopping”), hotels, cabs – here end consumers spend quite a long time (quality contact) and get more emotional satisfaction rather than just functional (interaction with your brand and loyalty to your service).

Close work with such segments provides banks (and telcos) with a number of advantages:

• Marketing – fintech demonstrates a significantly lower price of customer acquisition, comparing to what banks spend to sell their main products (current accounts, loans, deposits). Moreover, fintech is able to differentiate these products in the eyes of the end consumers. A client, that purchased the main product after being attracted by the fintech one (up-sell/cross-sell), costs much less than the one from the street, won in a fight by common messages;
• Lower risks – fintech services generate so much new data about clients (and they know how to store, analyse and turn it into leads), that they lower the loan risk assessment rate;
• Lower talent acquisition costs and acceleration of new products and services development.

There are several kinds of fintech solutions that may be very useful for solving some of the SME problems:

1. POS-management systems

(Mobikon, Square.Dashboard, LifePay_Dynamica)

Most of entrepreneurs do their bookkeeping in copybooks or Excel, which is not very convenient, especially when your business is growing. At the same time they don’t have neither extra time, nor money to develop new managing or technical skills. The new generation of online services allow you to automatise your point of sale working process in a cost-efficient and intuitively simple way:

• Selling goods and services through social networks (Ecwid, MyApps, MyWishBoard) in accordance with enormous social networks and mobile penetration in Asia.
• Booking/reservation modules (restaurants, hotels, yoga classes, gyms, psychologist consultation etc.).
• Marketing campaigns and loyalty programs development. Automatised context advertising, SMS- and email- lists management and analysis.
• Feedback processing – multi channels, distribution, analysis.
• All your customers’ details storage – contacts, preferences, loyalty.
• Stock and its movements analysis (for further replenishment).
• Your employees analysis (h2est/weakest etc.).

2. Tablet-based cash registers

(Poynt, StoreHub, REV, HotTab)

3. mPOS-acquiring

4. IoT: beacons & WiFi, card-not-present payments

5. Preordering

6. Working with feedback and loyalty

7. O2O experience: do as Apple does: turn your customers into cashiers

8. Online acquiring

9. POS-loans

10. SME-loans

11. Alternative sources of capital and their influence on marketing and loyalty

12. Turn your SME customer into your bank branch

13. And this is just the beginning…