UOB (Thai) set to round off services digitalisation

Biz Smart will enable the bank to monitor the financial transactions of its small-business customers, so that it gets a better handle on when they might require more working capital for ordering materials or increasing cash flow, said Sayumrat Maranate, UOB (Thai)’s country head of Business Banking.
UOB (Thai) has focused more on the small-business end of the SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) segment for a number of years, as the owners of such businesses are generally new-generation operators who can adopt technology quickly and are familiar with using mobile applications as a key element of doing business, she explained.
Moreover, the parent bank’s headquarters in Singapore has set a business direction for its Asean units that all service processes must be made via digital applications by 2020, she said, adding that Biz Smart would help complete the eco-system for the provision of a digitalised service. 
Sayumrat also said the main target for UOB (Thai) in servicing the small-business segment was not lending, but transactions.
According to the “UOB Asian Enterprise Survey 2016”, 63 per cent of small businesses in Thailand see overseas expansion as a way to drive business growth in the next three to five years, while more than 70 per cent already operate overseas. To cater to non-borrowing customers, UOB (Thai) has laid out strategies in four stages.
In 2013, it launched a deposit product called Biz Super for tracking the transactions of customers, and the following year the bank introduced Biz Money, an unsecured loan, for Biz Super customers, she said, adding that the monitoring of transactions of such customers gave the bank confidence about lending without collateral to its small-business clients.
“We offer a limited a credit line of Bt4 million and an annual interest rate of 12-15 per cent, lower than the normal rate in the market, which is 18-21 per cent. The bank uses credit analysis to help screen customers and, since it has offered this type of lending [Biz Money], only one customer has had a non-performing loan,” she said.
This year, UOB (Thai) carried out the third stage of the strategy with the introduction of Business App, offering live updates on foreign-exchange rates to help small businesses manage their forex risk from overseas markets. 
The application sends alerts to customers when the price of a currency reaches a specified level, and they can also contact the bank’s forex specialists via the app.
Some 600 people have already downloaded the app, of which 50 per cent are active UOB (Thai) customers, she said.
Next year’s launch of Biz Smart will complete the four-stage strategy.
“We want to increase the number of non-borrowing customers who use UOB as the main transactional bank. Once they require lending, we will be the choice that they turn to,” the country head said.
Non-borrowing small-business account holders currently total around 40,000, compared to 20,000 a few years ago, while UOB (Thai) has about 10,000 borrowing-customer business accounts.
The bank’s definition of a small business is one with annual sales revenue of no more than Bt100 million, and a lending limit of Bt20 million.