Editor’s Note: The 2020 FIS Fintech Accelerator features ten high-potential emerging fintech companies from around the world. Through the accelerator program, FIS explores these companies as potential partners to help how the world pays, banks and invests, and founders have a unique chance to grow their businesses everywhere in the world. Today, we’d like you to meet Andy Li with Silot. Learn more about the cohort at www.venturecenter.co/fisfintech.
Breaking down the silos to build up stronger SMEs
By Andy Li, Founder, Silot.ai
While a different story has unfolded during COVID19, small-medium enterprises, or SMEs, kept Indonesia’s economy afloat as it weathered financial crises in 1998 and 2008. SMEs are one of the key reasons why Indonesia, despite global economic downturns, has managed to sustain five percent growth for well over a decade now. Indonesian government statistics show that as of December 2018, 60 million SMEs contributed to 60 percent of Indonesia’s GDP and employed 97 percent of the country’s workforce. Hopefully, once the pandemic has passed, the hard-hit SME sector will get back on its feet and “level up” by going online and exporting. The main growth barrier, however, remains financial access and cumbersome bank procedures.
At Silot, we are working with banks to simplify and speed-up bank operations by using decision-making technology. To produce better, more affordable results, Silot leverages knowledge-driven AI technology, which essentially learns concepts like humans do.
Banks generally store different sets of data in silos. In other words: data is all over the place. When you do a Google search, silos of data are broken down, combined, and vetted to give you a set of search results. Similarly, at Silot (short for “Silo Technology”), we break down silos in banks by gathering internal and external data to create a Data Platform. This platform then transforms data into knowledge, which feeds into a Decision Engine that helps a bank make decisions on payments, onboarding, loans, and other services related to merchants or SME owners.
Banks are only half the equation of Silot’s service offering. The other – and far more critical half – is creating user-friendly apps and operations portals for merchants that help them digitally onboard with banks, monitor credit reports, and keep track of payments. By providing technology to merchants and bank partners, we offer end-to-end solutions for payment, onboarding, credit, and other merchant-related services.
We’ve worked with banks in both Indonesia and Thailand to help:
● Verify proof of payment, business ownership, and income
● Make lending suggestions and pre-approve loans
● Increase merchant acquisition by over 400 percent in six months
● Allow customers to process 40 percent more transactions
● Streamline payments management systems and cut down operation costs by more than 75 percent
● Reduce active fraud by 40 to 50 percent
More than ever, SMEs need a helping hand to get through the current economic storm that COVID19 has created. While many of us can continue earning a living working from home during the pandemic, the small business owners that once formed the backbone of Indonesia’s economy are at their most vulnerable.
Banks can play a significant role in helping SMEs get back on their feet by easing the onboarding process for opening new accounts and applying for loans, relaxing loan payments, and improving credit monitoring, among other measures. There’s certainly no one-size-fits-all solution for banks, and Silot is prepared to work with banks to develop the right technologies that can best support SMEs to operate, grow, and thrive.