From providing financial support to helping the Small and Medium Enterprises procure quality raw materials, today a clutch of companies are providing practical solutions to SMEs. This is helping hundreds of SMEs reach their right target audience. Take for examples the new age firms including GlobalLinker, MyforexEye, Power2SME or Ofbusiness – all these firms have come to the rescue of hundreds and thousands of SMEs while offering differentiated solutions. Myforexeye provides foreign exchange products and services to SMEs, GlobalLinker provides a common online platform for SMEs to engage with each other while companies like Power2SME, OfBusiness help providing loans and procuring raw materials at low cost.

B2B firm Power2SME, in the period of five years, has spread to 16 cities focusing on SMEs, aiding them at every step of their way, from raw materials to financial assistance. “I want to provide the entire ecosystem for SMEs. I will do whatever it needs on the SME side. Whatever I have the power to do,” says R Narayan, CEO Power2SME.

Sameer Vakil, Co-founder and CEO, GlobalLinker says, “SMEs are very diverse as a group and so while we refer to them as a single community, we know that there are multitude of SME segments and each segment and even each firm is impacted differently.”

But the common challenge faced by all remains finance and reaching the right target audience. Getting loans at low interest rates at minimum valuable collateral is difficult even today. The government schemes like MUDRA, low cost subsidies have helped many enterprises but it hasn’t managed to reach each and every enterprise.

Providing a common platform for the SMEs from various segment, Sameer of GlobalLinker adds, “Our basic philosophy is to help SMEs grow and better manage their business and do so with little to no incremental costs. Our revenue is linked to the service being offered by large corporations to SME clients and from a share of margins of providers of products and services to SME, who see great value from increased revenues at lower costs. The model is also very cost efficient and we expect to break even on a cash flow basis before the end of the year.”

Providing loans and raw materials at low cost, Asish Mohapata, Of Business, CEO and Co-founder said, “We lead acquisition online by capturing the SMEs as they bid and win tenders, which makes the marketing effort efficient in both cost and quality. Underwriting of loans by OfBusiness is done by financial data of the SME as well by alternate data sources of SME operations, which are contributed by the SME community of buyers and sellers. Fulfilment of raw materials is done by using a unique bidding engine that helps both buyers and suppliers get discovery and commercial benefits.”

The modem of technology is also being welcomed by the SMEs in India to reach out to bigger mass of people. According to the Future of Business Survey, an ongoing collaboration between Facebook, OECD and World Bank, 63 per cent of 1,301 Indian small and medium scale exporters agree that using online tools for selling internationally has increased their revenue.

Ankhi Das, Director of Public Policy for Facebook India and South Asia said, “More than 270 million people around the world are connected to a small business in India. These businesses are using technology to grow, build new opportunities and find customers at home and abroad.”

Source: Business World