SBM magazine / 11-2018

Interview
You have a whole
ecosystem for SME
customers within the
bank, starting from the
very first step: customers
can start a business with
you, taking advantage of
mPower Business Starter,
which allows businesses
to be registered via
the bank’s website,
then to automatically
open current account
and deliver all banking
products online to
providing accounting
services to the customers.
Could you please tell us
in more details about the
SME Banking Ecosystem
within mBank?
The main idea behind the
ecosystem is to help new
entrepreneurs with the
challenges they face in their
daily lives. We want to allow
them to concentrate on their core business
and take from their shoulders the most difficult
aspects of managing a company. Naturally,
the accounting system comes to mind
first of all, since the accountant is the most
important person cooperating with a new
businessperson. It’s crucial for a company to be
able to entrust its accounting to a trustworthy
and competent person. But how do you find a
suitable accountant? How can an entrepreneur
know that a given accounting service is
reliable? Young businesspeople have to find
answers to these questions, because the whole
company is at stake. Thanks to mAccounting,
entrepreneurs don’t have to worry about
that, as mBank provides them with complex
accounting assistance without them having to
leave the house.
What’s more, entrepreneurs don’t have to
deliver any invoices or any other documents
to the accounting office, since the accountant
has access to all the necessary information
through the mBank’s system, which means
fewer mistakes and misunderstandings.
Another advantage of mAccounting is the fact
that the accountant communicates with the
client through Task Center — mBank’s calendar
for entrepreneurs. The accountant creates a
task within Task Center, and the client receives
a push notification on their smartphone. It
takes only three clicks to pay tax or social
insurance, since the accountant fills out all
the necessary information, and the client only
has to accept the transaction. As a result, they
save precious time and enjoy guaranteed and
consistent service quality.
For the vast majority of our clients with
sales-based business, points of sale are an
essential part of their work. In Poland, noncash
payments are an every-day reality, and
for that reason stores that don’t accept credit
cards or another form of mobile payment are
at a disadvantage. To support them, mBank,
in cooperation with the Cashless Poland
Foundation, offers POS devices for up to 24
months free of charge in order to provide new
entrepreneurs with a smooth start.
Last, but not least, I have to underline that
mBank’s clients have the opportunity to
exchange currencies via online banking 24
hours a day, seven days a week. Moreover,
they can deal with official matters also through
mBank’s online system. As you can see, mBank
is building an ecosystem that will allow
entrepreneurs to take care of the vast majority
of their tasks through their smartphone
or computer, because we care about our
customers and, what’s more, their time. This
will not be the last of our ecosystem products
since we aim to expand the assistance we
provide into other areas of business in order to
help our customers devote themselves to their
passion and vision rather than spend time on
red tape.
Do you track how many (or what
percentage) of your new customers you
acquired due to mPower Business Starter?
As expected, the mPower Business Starter
initiative turned out to be crucial for the
increase in sales of business accounts in 2018
and started a revolution in the process of
opening business operations. mPower Business
Starter enables a company to be launched by
the mBank system via the internet, CC or inbranch
within just a few minutes. This idea
came from our customers, who showed us the
difficulties they face and indicated that there
are hundreds of questions and thousands of
answers about how to start up a company. At
mBank, we wanted them to feel happy upon
starting a new chapter of their lives by opening
their own company. As our statistics show
— 22% of our monthly acquisition of SME
accounts was generated thanks to mPower
Business Starter. We believe that our market
shares will increase in new SME account
SMALL BUSINESS BANKING MAGAZINE
19