By Andrew Farnhill, Business Development Advisor at LiquidX, based in London
Small to medium enterprises often don’t have the same internal resources of their larger competitors, leading to a gap in the race for customers’ interest and attention. With the European Commission listing that about 99 per cent of all businesses in the EU are SMEs, that gap can be disheartening. Whether it’s a matter of funding, scale, or innovation, it can be difficult to keep up when you don’t have an internal team of experts, especially when it comes to digitisation.
Digitising a business is no longer just a techie fad. Today, a business needs to deliver an automated experience for customers. Digitisation helps your team save time managing records, becoming more cost efficient and productive, improving security, and gaining faster access to information.
How can SMEs proactively digitize to the same scale as their largest competitors? The answer is simple: partner with a fintech expert.
Accessible trade finance solutions have become an important asset in the market. Working with financial trade experts can help you compete in both the short and the long race.
Redefining What It Means to Partner with Fintech Experts
Fintech partners are increasingly extending their services to small and medium sized businesses. These new partnerships have catalysed a new level of growth and capabilities for SMEs, allowing time and cost savings by leveraging automation and paperless processes.
As an example, when new legislation is introduced, particularly in the EU, generating more time-consuming administrative tasks, SMEs have an easier time falling into compliance without dramatically increasing their staff or budgets to compensate.
Part of this portfolio expansion for fintech companies comes from a new strategy meant to fill a gap that has been left for SMEs by large providers of services who only serve the largest customers. It generates much more value in the market to adapt to smaller customers at volume, creating a diverse portfolio of businesses leveraging the fintech companies’ market-leading technology solutions.
This diversity provides new revenue opportunities for fintech companies, building experience and reputation, but also provides huge value for SME customers who have previously been underserved. This is evidenced as many European fintechs are expanding their services beyond banking in an effort to remain competitive and provide value.
Supply chain finance, accounts receivable solutions, and other large-scale trade finance solutions used to be reserved for enterprises and their big suppliers, but access to SCF has opened up considerably. SCF has matured amongst the largest customers, with the benefit for funders of a sense of security when joining new financing programs managed through trusted fintech partners. The expanding footprint of fintech is beginning to deliver similar advantages for high quality SMEs, granting them the opportunity to finance their growth, diversifying their lending relationships.
When SMEs join up with a fintech provider to support financing, solutions like LiquidX’s digitisation platform, LiquidX’s digitization technology, remove the friction from the process so businesses of any size can access the same calibre of trade finance and working capital services.
Small and medium businesses can gain the same advantages as enjoyed by large companies when working with a company able to digitise and automate their processes. From improved security and compliance to automated payroll, invoice processing, funding and workflow management, SMEs are now able to level up in new ways like their largest peers. Partnering with a global company, like LiquidX, can make all the difference in keeping SMEs competitive in the trade finance industry.
Learn more about LiquidX’s solutions that will help you work faster and smarter while delivering more value to the business. Contact us for more information.
Andrew Farnhill is Business Development Advisor at LiquidX, based in London.
