Heaptalk, Jakarta – SMEs are a critical backbone of Indonesia’s economy as its ability to absorb 97% of the total workers across the nation based on the data revealed by the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs in 2018. The report released by the Central Statistic Agency (BPS) also strengthens the previous fact by considering the contribution of SMEs to Indonesia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that attained 61.41 % in 2018. However, the great shock that hit Indonesia as a result of the attack of the covid-19 has inevitably brought a great impact to SMEs’ business pace.
A surge of the covid-19 infection that driven the Government to rapidly shift the rule as the effort to balance to the current condition has led SMEs’ actors to race against time to survive in a state of uncertainty. During the condition, the penetration of e-wallet firms to SMEs is perceived to have delivered a great impact that makes SMEs is more resilient in facing the challenges.
Once the e-wallet firms endeavor to introduce their business line to people, by the campaign, the firms also promote their partner, namely SMEs, indirectly. This activity will benefit SMEs to increase people’s awareness towards their brand or product as well as potentially allow them to attract more consumers. By tapping into e-wallet’s channel and technology, the promotion held by SMEs can be more effective and on target considering to the platform’s ability that reached wide range as well as its incredible algorithm that is capable of disseminating promotion to the prospective consumers. The partnership offered by e-wallet likely will enhance SMEs’ product sales and enable them to withstand, even grow amid the pandemic.
In addition to its effect on SMEs’ sales, e-wallet also penetrates digital transformation that makes the process of bookkeeping is easier. Recording transactions that used to be conducted manually is considered troublesome, wasting a lot of time and energy, and potentially causing mistakes in the transaction record. On the other hand, technology inserted by e-wallet into SMEs’ bookkeeping system makes the entire transaction put down instantly, so the risk of error in transaction record or calculation vanishes. By the automatic system, SMEs do not need to invest their time and energy solely for quantifying the sales manually.
The data saved in the e-wallet system also assist SMEs to track their business milestone, thus they can identify their growth and savvy the time to expand their business. The record also can be used to analyze the highest and lowest rate of sales, demonstrate the time when the biggest and lowest transaction volume occurred, as well as show the best-selling products accepted by people. The result, further, can be investigated in depth to generate guidance to develop SMEs’ business in the future and reduce the loss risk as well. The emergence of e-wallet also supports SMEs’ growth by creating more simple and practical transactions due to the price of all payments received is according to the price tag of the product or services, so SMEs do not need to prepare small changes.
At the time when the covid-19 pandemic invades the nation, the people’s lifestyle alteration to interact with each other has urge people to carry out digital transformation rapidly. The transformation has broken in e-wallet development significantly. Neurosensum recorded that since the covid-19 pandemic hit the archipelago, the number of e-wallet consumers escalated by 44%. With the transition of people behavior, SMEs have to make a movement to their business to customize to their consumers proceeding. Recently, according to research conducted by Mandiri Survey Institute from March to April 2021, with a total of 505 SME actors as the respondent, it demonstrated that OVO is the e-wallet that is mostly utilized with a total percentage is 72%. Additionally, Gopay and LinkAja reached the second and third place by reaching 66% and 64%, respectively. The Ministry of Cooperatives and MSMEs obviously stated that 80% of MSMEs performed digital transformation, such as employing e-wallet, can battle through the crisis. For these reasons, e-wallet also holds a prominent role in the national economy while expediting digital transformation across the nation. (WLN)
