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In Southeast Asia, small and medium enterprises drive everything from manufacturing and trade to tech and logistics. According to the World Bank, they represent 90% of all businesses globally and provide jobs for over half the region’s workforce. However, they still face significant challenges with financial infrastructure.
Large companies have access to advanced treasury systems and real-time dashboards. SME finance teams, often comprising just one to five people, continue to log into multiple bank portals, chase invoices, and reconcile spreadsheets. In a rapidly changing business environment, many small businesses remain entrenched in outdated silos.
The issue isn’t that SMEs lack ambition or talent. The financial tools available to them do not match the complexity of today’s world. The discussion needs to shift from providing SMEs “more software” to offering them greater intelligence.
The SME finance gap
If you speak to any SME finance lead, you’ll hear the same thing: managing money feels reactive. Every month-end is a scramble to reconcile, report, and explain where the money went. Cash is king, but visibility is lacking.
Most SMEs operate on narrow margins and have little financial cushion. A delayed payment or an unexpected FX fluctuation can affect suppliers, employees, and customers. However, the financial systems they rely on are either too basic and consumer-oriented or too complicated and expensive, tailored for large global businesses.
This leaves a wide gap in the middle where most SMEs operate.
Why real-time matters
Enterprise treasury systems are built for scale and complexity. They’re great at managing global cash pools and multi-entity reporting, but they’re not built for the smaller regional business that needs to pay overseas suppliers today, see cash positions across two markets, or decide right now.
For SMEs, real-time clarity is a matter of survival, not a luxury.
When a finance lead can see balances across accounts and currencies in one place, decisions can be made faster and more confidently: pay now, hold off, invest, or convert. That kind of visibility changes the game. It turns finance from a reporting function into a strategic one.
From experience, SME teams don’t want more dashboards or features. They want to know exactly where they stand today, and what they should do next. That’s what visibility really means.
Reimagining access, not just automation
A lot of fintech innovation still focuses on automation; how to make processes faster or reduce manual work. That’s important, but automation alone doesn’t build confidence.
What really matters is access to connected, contextual intelligence: data that helps a business make better decisions.
In recent years, a new generation of platforms has emerged with this principle in mind; tools that connect a business’s existing ecosystem rather than replace it. The idea is simple: consolidate what SMEs already use - banks, accounting systems, and payment providers - into a single intelligent layer that provides oversight, forecasting, and control.
This is how the modern finance function will evolve: not through the addition of more tools, but through connected intelligence.
At Finmo, for example, this thinking guided how we built our platform for SMEs and mid-market companies. Rather than replicate enterprise software, we focused on democratising financial intelligence, giving lean finance teams the same depth of insight that large corporates take for granted, but delivered through a more accessible and human-centred experience.
The goal isn’t to automate people out of the process; it’s to give them the clarity to act faster and with confidence, enabling them to connect, control, command, and create value with their finance stack.
From purpose to practice
The reason for this shift is clear: when SMEs manage their finances effectively, entire ecosystems improve. Supply chains stabilise, employment grows, and economies become stronger.
However, purpose only matters when it leads to action. In our experience, three things make the difference:
Connectivity before complexity:
Start with the basics: bank feeds, payments, and reconciliations. Only then should you introduce analytics or AI. Without data connectivity, intelligence cannot happen.Human-centred design:
Finance tools should use language that their users understand. Dashboards and insights must be easy enough for anyone to grasp, not just a CFO with an entire data team.Outcome-driven thinking:
The value of a good financial system isn’t measured by the number of features but by how well it helps teams make better decisions. Each product or workflow should link directly to a business goal: improved liquidity, reduced costs, or quicker decision-making.
When these principles align, automation becomes empowerment. SMEs don’t just “save time”; they unlock a new level of visibility and control that allows them to plan with precision.
The mindset shift
For many SME leaders, the term "treasury" often seems to apply only to large corporations. Effective treasury management is just good business practice. It involves understanding where money is located, how it moves, and how it can be used more efficiently.
Finance teams no longer need to wait for quarterly reports to act. With the right systems, they can forecast cash positions, test scenarios, and simulate outcomes daily. The tools once reserved for global CFOs are now available to lean, fast-growing teams.
The biggest change needed isn’t about technology, it’s about mindset. SMEs must shift from a survival approach to a strategic one. They should understand that financial clarity isn’t just an extra consideration; it’s crucial for growth.
A more intelligent future
The finance leaders who will thrive in the next decade are not those who do more, but those who see more.
They’ll depend on connected systems, real-time data, and increasingly, intelligent ‘co-pilots’ that surface insights before issues arise.
Standing still is no longer an option. As technology democratises access to financial intelligence, SMEs in the region have a rare opportunity: to operate with the same strategic foresight as the corporates they compete with, but with the agility that only smaller teams possess.
When that happens, SMEs won’t just be the backbone of the global economy, they’ll be its most intelligent growth engine.
Finmo helps modern SMEs connect their banks, payments, ERP and forecasting into one intelligent finance layer, and then act on it.
