European SMEs play a vital role by contributing 56% to the European region economy. Despite their importance, SMEs are facing a huge challenge of dealing with their highly complex finances, the need to ensure appropriate and timely funding and managing cashflow and working capital. These are acting as major operating constraints for SMEs. Cashflow is the lifeblood of any business and the forecasting is critical to avoid shortfalls in cash balances, ensuring that payments can be made and ultimately avoid insolvency. Whilst there is an increased focus towards improving the financial situation, the inability to manage SMEs finances effectively is still a significant cause of small business failure (50% of SMEs fail in the first 5-years with 82% of failures due to cashflow issues). Currently, the management of SME’s finances are delivered either by a remote book-keeper or an expensive in-house accountant, yet providing a poor quality of financial services and delays. Existing big data implementation in accounting industry is at a very early stage, and the emergence of big data analytics and artificial intelligence creates an opportunity for SMEs to exploit the data for intelligent financial and business decisions.
Fluidly is an augmented intelligent fintech solution for SMEs to extract valuable financial insights to perform cashflow management, intuitive forecasting and future investments. It is a software platform which uses advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms to leverage information from business accounting and raw financial data. It provides business owners with real-time insights about cash flow, its projection, AI-driven insights and actionable financial recommendations. Fluidly also provides lending insights to procure beneficial and better financing as well as business deals.
The overall objectives of the project include, defining a minimum viable product, establish a feasible product development plan and industrialisation strategy, plan demonstration and validation trials and analyse risks and opportunities.
