Small businesses’ only hope in the face of formidable economic obstacles has been digital payments.
According to James Allum, senior vice president of Europe at Payoneer, it is a two-edged sword that results from the “dual revolution of payments and digital” seen in recent years.
In fact, according to Allum, Payoneer’s 44-country Europe portfolio’s SMBs needed the digital modernization of payments to survive, especially in Eastern Europe, where the ongoing Ukrainian crisis has highlighted the long-term resiliency of small enterprises.
Unlike enterprises in larger nations such as Germany, which prefer to focus on their domestic markets, entrepreneurs in smaller Eastern European countries such as Serbia and Ukraine prioritise international markets and are frequently handling more complex problems with little resources.
In an interview, Allum stated that “you can have people working out of their spare bedroom [while satisfying] pretty sophisticated needs surrounding financial services, [including] setting up multi currency accounts, for example.”
It is impossible to understate the importance of a global payments network in overcoming the payments disruption that has occurred. Liubov Danylina, director and interim country manager of Payoneer in Ukraine, claims that businesses relied on Payoneer’s payment services to stay alive in 2017.
According to Danylina, 70% of Ukrainian enterprises (out of over 4,000 questioned) have kept going during the crisis, rebounding rapidly from the initial macroeconomic shock despite concerns from international clients that they wouldn’t be able to maintain regular service levels.
