(MENAFN- The Peninsula)
By Deepak John | The Peninsula
Doha: As many SMEs move towards digital transformations, Qatar Development Bank (QDB) plans to launch more value-added services for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), said a senior QDB official during a webinar held last week.
The Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) in collaboration with QDB organised the sixth digital forum 'The Importance Role of Digitization - Shifting Business Models' which highlighted the importance of digitisation in Qatar and globally. The Digital Transformation of Small and Medium Enterprises (DTSME) initiative under MoTC started in 2017 and until today has worked with more than 3,000 SMEs and supported more than 1,000 to start their journey in digital transformation through more than 300 workshops supported by MoTC.
Amna Al Mazroei, Customer Experience Manager at the QDB, discussed the impact of digitisation by highlighting some of QDB's offers, programs and products to achieve this goal.
Speaking on the QDB 2.0 vision she said,“We have established a vision to fully digitise the ways of working and engaging with our clients and we are pushing ourselves to digitally transform our services and operations. Within six months of execution, we made progress by building a fully end to end digital industrial financing journey for our SME clients.”
“Alongside digital product development, we have trained more than 100 colleagues on the basics of digitalisation. Our plan for 2021 has been to build and launch more value-added services for our SME clients,” she added.
She said,“As many SMEs are embarking towards digital transformations, we at QDB are also pushing ourselves to go through this journey ourselves,” emphasizing the significant national efforts taken by Qatar to digitise even before COVID but the pandemic only made it faster.“Our vision is to build sustainable digital capabilities supported by new ways of working and a future-ready digital ecosystem to deliver on QDB's vision to accelerate SMEs development in Qatar,” she added.
She said,“We are genuinely a partner of the SMEs and entrepreneurs across their different journey's and we consider ourselves as a one stop shop whether it is for help in developing business ideas or to start and strengthen the business and take it globally. The bank has been established since 1997 with Qatar National Vision towards a diversifying economy.”
Al Mazroei shed light on six different offerings and their benefits on the incubators and accelerators, noting that the first accelerator QDB has is 'Digital and Beyond' which is specialised incubator and accelerator with QBIC.
The second is 'Fintech' on the financial technology with the Qatar Fintech Hub and the third product is 'Istihmar' – the SME equity program which focusses on businesses that are two to three years old. The fourth service is the 'Capability Development' which is a wide range of training programs such as IT security and digital transformation, change management for effective organisational shifts, creating a new revenue stream virtually.
The fifth service is the technology and digitalisation solution financing and the sixth is 'QDB Hackathon' which is a virtual competition promoting cutting-edge solutions for a wide range of today's relevant challenges, across seven industry-specific themes, she noted.
Omar Ashour, Co-founder and CEO of EButler shared success story of the SME and how it benefited from the digital tools for developing and expanding its business during the pandemic and working with partners on Qatari market to achieve real digital transformation.
He said,“QDB and MoTC has been supporting us from the beginning and our mission is to help SME's benefit from the digital economy meshed well with QDB's goals for Qatar.”
“EButler is laser focused on a hyper local approach to curation as we vet our providers on a 100 plus point of quality measures and we focus on local small and medium businesses in our curation and we require that our providers achieve a certain level of operational efficiency before working with us,” he added.
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