Rising Digital Business Spends: Managing a $15 Trillion India opportunity –Whitepaper co-authored by EnKash & Kearney explores the significant opportunity to digitize business spends processing for Corporate India

EnKash, India’s leading & fastest-growing Corporate Spend management and cards platform, partnered with the global management consulting firm Kearney to publish a whitepaper titled ‘Rising Digital Business Spends: Managing a $15 Trillion India Opportunity. The whitepaper explores some key elements in the growing business spending market in India, delving into the groundwork initiated and recommending catalysts to enable further growth, especially for small to medium businesses.

The whitepaper offers insights into the current state of business spending in India. It compares the performance of leading countries on various parameters of the Kearney Global B2B Index, highlighting the strides India has made in digitizing business spending and further scope. It dives deeper to understand key challenges that affect the industry while offering potential solutions like a spending management platform and corporate cards to aid the doubling of business spending to $15 trillion by the end of the decade. Apart from analyzing the domestic ecosystem, the white paper also touches upon some of the key learnings from global peers to help benchmark technological, government, and regulatory factors influencing the industry.

At the launch of the white paper, Hemant Vishnoi Co-Founder, EnKash India, said, “The business spending market in India is at an inflection point with an ever-emerging need to transform age-old processes in business spending management. Through this insightful whitepaper in association with Kearney, we aim to identify key challenges and list down potential solutions that will drive the digitization of the business spending value chain. Given the thriving small to medium size businesses & start-ups business landscape in India, an all-in-one business spends solution can create large value and improve overall business efficiency.”

Shashwat Sharma, Partner, Kearney, noted, – ‘’The Indian businesses, especially the SMBs, have untapped potential that is currently consumed by manual processes across the operations, especially payments. India is progressing on digital penetration and has an opportunity to improve operational efficiency, as analyzed by The Kearney Global B2B Index. Growing the industry from the US $ 7 trillion (approx.) to US $ 15 trillion by 2030 will require a collaborative effort of leading fintech players like EnKash, the Government, and the Regulator. The whitepaper analyzes the initiatives undertaken and the incremental steps that can be catalytical to the growth of the industry and digital adoption.’’

Key highlights

• The current business spending market in India is estimated at US$ ~7 trillion and is set in motion to reach US$ 15 trillion by the end of this decade.
• Of the 64 million businesses in India, there are about 3-4 million businesses that have shown rapid progress in digitizing. business spends. These include large corporates, mid-market enterprises (INR 5-250 cr turnover), and a rapidly growing ecosystem of start-ups.
• On the digital front, large businesses are front-runners in the adoption of innovative technology, having transitioned to digital modes enabled by ERP integration along with the use of commercial credit cards in many cases. SMBs are slowly migrating to the digital modes while micro-enterprises and retailers are perceived to be cash and cheque intensive, followed by NEFT payments
• Kearney Global B2B Index measures the operational efficiency and digital penetration in the business payment ecosystem across countries – highlights India as significant ahead in digitization, but more room to improve payment efficiency

Key Challenges in the business spending value chain

• Businesses in India are still operating on a manual processing model, wherein a team is deployed to process the invoice and upload the payment, while the payment itself is online. While corporate players are digitizing the steps involved in the process, the medium, small and micro players prefer maintaining a mix of manual and digital processes
• Medium & small enterprises might leverage standalone solutions for each element, integrating them for cohesiveness. These enterprises aspire to growth and progression which drives them to adopt the latest technology for digitizing and simplifying processes. Some might use manual databases to run the whole process, relying on manual rechecks as a validation. Unfortunately, these also require manpower muscle on account of manual operations and the need for a maker-checker at each step.
• Small, medium, and micro businesses face a paucity of working capital which hampers their ability to scale operations
• Groundwork to address the challenges is underway- Fintech-led solutions across three elements of the value chain: product proposition, digitization, and customer acquisition platforms.