In today’s dynamic, digitally driven economy, how you fund small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is just as important as whom you fund.
With SME owners expecting fast, flexible service, forward-thinking funders are turning to modern platforms designed for speed, scalability, and smarter collaboration.
In this article, we’ll explore the key features you should look for in a funding platform, explaining how each one can dramatically transform your operations and help you stay ahead in the digital era.
Benefits of a SME Funding Platform
Traditional banks often create more hurdles than benefits for SME owners in need of funding.
Between lengthy wait times, strict eligibility terms, and legacy systems, it’s no surprise many SMEs feel overlooked or underserved.
The alternative funding industry, however, is known for embracing emerging technology, which simplifies everything from applications to disbursements. This translates into SMEs being better services by alternative funders.
Adopting a modern funding platform can empower your SME funding business in countless ways:
- Optimize your underwriting process: Dramatically reducing the paperwork, time, and errors associated with manual data entry.
- Leverage real-time data to make decisions: Combining a solid data repository with automatically generated reports to inform your next move.
- Improve stakeholder collaboration: Allowing people you work with to access the system and view relevant information so that they can play their part in the funding process—no more silos.
- Safeguard all information: Advanced security in cloud-based systems prevents fraud and protects sensitive data.
- Improve the customer experience: Analyze and leverage the right data to provide a personalized funding experience, and reap the benefits of satisfied customers.
Regardless of a funder’s size or time in the market, having a solid funding platform offers boundless advantages, particularly when it comes to saving time and money.
Below, we break down the five must-have features to prioritize in your next SME funding platform.
Essential Feature #1: Cloud-Based
Scalable, secure, and cost-efficient, there are a plethora of reasons that cloud-based solutions should be your top SME funding platform feature.
To begin with, the cloud enables:
- Unparalleled flexibility: Allowing you to adjust resources based on demand, even during peak times, without needing to spend countless dollars on physical infrastructure.
- Robust security: Offering built-in, comprehensive data protection, disaster recovery capabilities and more, without the burden of managing it yourself.
- Improved operational efficiency: By streamlining workflows, automating routine tasks, and enabling real-time data processing, you can obtain performance gains of up to 30%.
- Cost savings: No need to invest in on-premises servers or data centres; rather, cloud adoption can lead to enormous financial savings in IT spending, up-front costs, and recurring costs like maintenance.
In other words? For funders who wish to remain competitive and responsive to evolving SME demands, embracing a cloud-based funding platform is not merely an option but a strategic imperative.
Essential Feature #2: Automation
In a nutshell, automation involves the use of technology to complete tasks with minimal human intervention.
In the context of SME funding, nearly every stage of the process can benefit from automation. Moreover, its business advantages are clear and compelling.
Among other things, automation empowers funders by:
- Reducing manual errors: From application review through funds disbursement and beyond.
- Providing detailed data insights: With more precise risk assessments resulting in a leaner, more agile operation.
- Improving the customer experience: Enabling quicker, more reliable and streamlined funding decisions, thereby reducing friction.
Interestingly, while consumer funding has tended to embrace automation, SME funding is currently lagging behind. The good news? This gap represents a significant opportunity for forward-thinking funders.
However, it’s always important to keep in mind that you should strike the right balance between automation and the human touch—after all, nothing can replace human sensibility.
Essential Feature #3: Configuration and Customization
First, let’s differentiate the terms.
A configurable funding platform enables you to adjust settings within the software’s built-in capabilities, without changing its core code.
These platforms usually provide a user-friendly interface and features, so you can easily create, adjust, and manage client profiles, business rules, standard terms, etc.
Meanwhile, a customizable funding platform is flexible enough to support entirely new functionality built into it—like, for example, a unique repayment workflow proprietary to your funding operation.
Some digital funding platforms are structured to only be configurable or customizable, essentially forcing their customers to choose one or the other.
Ideally, though, your platform should offer both.
Here’s a big reason why: An out-of-the-box funding solution that offers just the right amount of customization, like Onyx IQ, will scale with your business.
When you invest in this kind of technology, there is less need to switch to a new platform as your requirements change. Instead, you or the solution developers can adapt the existing solution, building upon your current one.
More and more, financial institutions are recognizing the importance of a combined solution, citing critical features such as preconfigured workflows as well as low-code customization.
As you seek out that dual solution, double-check that your vendor has the resources and expertise to interpret and execute any changes that you require. Also ensure they clearly communicate timelines and associated costs for custom work—not only in the present, but into the future.
Essential Feature #4: End-To-End Management
Looking for programs within your computer or browser bookmarks, opening and closing windows, switching tabs—each of these tasks will make you lose time and energy.
That’s why your funding operation needs a powerful and comprehensive end-to-end digital funding platform, which helps you manage the entire financing lifecycle from just one place.
The right solution will use APIs to enable robust integrations, allowing you to seamlessly bring all other software into one efficient funding ecosystem where you can easily complete tasks including:
- E-signing of sensitive documents.
- Collecting bank account data in real-time.
- Processing payments.
- Verifying customer identity.
Even better?
With the lifecycle under one proverbial roof, you get total transparency along the funding journey (as do your merchant customers), as you will have quick access to all the information you need. In turn, this gives you greater control over what you’re doing, not only because you’re viewing data in real-time, but because you have it all in context as well.
Essential Feature #5: Collaboration
Collaboration is key to thriving in the modern alternative funding industry—especially as syndication and partnership models continue to grow in importance.
As such, look for a funding platform that enables your business, as facilitator of the entire financing process, to work hand-in-hand with all stakeholders, from customer applications through collections and even beyond.
Consider a solution that facilitates:
- Multi-party workflows: Such as comprehensive syndication pipelines that clearly assign responsibilities and track progress.
- Custom login roles and permissions: Enhancing security by ensuring each stakeholder accesses only the data they need—no more, no less.
- Real-time communication and document sharing between collaborators: Helping reduce delays and miscommunications, which is essential when managing syndicated deals.
At the end of the day, when it comes to features, the more boxes you can tick when looking at a funding platform, the better it will be for your SME funding business.
Your Ideal SME Funding Platform Awaits
Tedious and slow manual processes, lost information, scattered tools—in the SME financing world, modern funding platforms have made these hassles a thing of the past.
Even better, a digital funding solution like Onyx IQ can empower your alternative SME funding business like never before, making it easier to serve merchant clients, scale up, and stay compliant.
Cloud-based, collaboration-friendly, and featuring both configuration and customization capabilities, Onyx IQ provides the end-to-end management and automation you need.
And did we mention? It was built specifically by SME funders specializing in MCA financing, for funders specializing in MCA financing.
Investing in a new funding platform is a big decision, but it doesn’t have to be a hard one.
Onyx IQ has everything SME funders need to succeed, so book a demo with one of our experts today.
