Beyond banking services is one of the topics that are on the agenda during our Annual CEE SME Banking Club Conferences. SME customers expect more and more from the banks to go beyond traditional banking services and to help them to automate and simplify their daily business routine. Online invoicing, accounting, integration of the online shops are becoming the criteria SMEs are choosing a financial services provider nowadays.
During last year’s CEE20 SME Banking Club Conference Sibylle Strack presented Kontist (an online bank for freelancers in Germany) and shared their experience in working with that segment of SMEs and solving their pain points.
In July 2020, Kontist launched tax services for their freelancers in Germany. The launch of that service was preceded by a survey, conducted in Germany among freelancers, and revealing that the biggest problem for freelancers was calculating taxes and doing tax reporting.
Previously Kontist provided to their customers business bank account in combination with integrated accounting software. So, even previously Kontist app’s users could see which amount should be reserved for taxes on the account, so the tax payments could be fulfilled properly.
But during the COVID-19 Kontist received many inquiries from their customers about employing tax advisors as, for example, some of the state aid could be addressed only by tax advisors. That is why Kontist decided to update the existing product. For that reason, Kontist employed professional tax advisers (who can always answer the customers’ questions) and built the backbone of the service (using also the AI and machine learning algorithm to train the system). Now the customers do not need to remember about filing the taxes monthly, quarterly, or yearly as all of that is done for them. The customers should only scan and upload the receipts and invoices to the application.
Watch the full presentation about the service below:
