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Genie, a company that aims to revolutionise finance management for small businesses, is seeing rapid traction across Australia and New Zealand. "The reality is managing finances is still hard and particularly for most small businesses," said Fungum, Genie's General Manager for Australia and New Zealand, in an interview this week.

Founded in 2017, Genie set out to make financial management easier for both individuals and companies by leveraging artificial intelligence. "We've helped over a hundred thousand people and businesses around the world to understand their financial data better," Fungum explained.

Despite advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, much of the financial management process for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) remains labour-intensive and complex. "There's a lot of manual work required to reconcile and analyse data, right," she said. "Even with the AI developed these days to make these tasks easier, it's unfortunately very much out of reach for these small businesses, particularly in the area of bookkeeping."

Genie's solution is a platform designed to automate what Fungum called "onerous, manual and complicated processes" involved in financial forecasting, scenario planning and reporting. "Our platform is able to automate most of these processes, making it simpler for even the smallest businesses," she said.

While Genie's offering can have a global appeal, its focus is firmly on the Asia-Pacific region, where SMEs are the bedrock of local economies. "In these two markets, SMEs make up 97% of the entire country's businesses. In New Zealand alone, for example, they're employing just shy of a third of all New Zealand employees," Fungum highlighted. "As engines of these economies we're very focused on helping them understand their data better and to make it work harder for them."

Genie's target customers are primarily professionals in finance functions, such as bookkeepers, accountants, and financial controllers. But Fungum described a much wider customer base. "We have a very diverse group of customers, from bakeries to skincare, even a ride-hailing company," she said.

What unifies these businesses is their increasing access, through Genie, to technology that was once reserved for much larger corporates. "The average SME can now use enterprise-grade forecasting power to accurately and quickly carry out forecasting and scenario planning tasks," she said.

Genie's go-to-market strategy involves both direct sales and reseller partnerships. "We're not keeping any stone unturned," said Fungum. "We are also discussing strategic partnerships, particularly here in Australia and New Zealand, where it's a mecca for financial software tools."

She pointed to the region's strong uptake of digital accounting platforms. "The statistics that I got were that one of the major accounting softwares has grown its subscribers by 20% from last year, so they're about to hit, if not exceed, 2.74 million users. Another prominent software has had a 61% uplift and is on track to hit their one million target," she said. "So it's a very exciting market here."

On the ways customers are using Genie's products and services, Fungum outlined automation as a key advantage. "The most common use case is really around automating reporting and financial analysis," she explained. Many customers use Genie's platform to sync live data feeds to their financial models, leveraging forecasting tools to create a variety of scenarios.

She is especially proud of the ingenuity some early adopters have shown. "What we love seeing is how creative our customers have used our tools. For example, we've seen a theme of early users looking to build reports that can be used for raising growth capital, either as a pitching tool or to simplify investor reporting," she said. "It's very exciting seeing what our customers are using it for."

Looking to the future, Fungum is optimistic about the growth and transformation in the market. "There was a great article in TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago that said the fintech SME love story is just beginning," she said. "They pointed out that SMEs often have to deal with dated and time-consuming manual interfaces to upload data to their banks and would likely be willing to pay for value-added analytics to help them grow and access capital."

Such trends underscore the growing awareness in the technology community of SMEs' unique needs. "Articles like this really show there's a growing acknowledgement in the tech community that we need to really step up and support these SMEs. After all, they were one of the worst hit in the pandemic," she said.

For Genie, change is coming quickly. "I expect that over the next two to five years, you'll see enormous growth and evolution in this space as a growing number of solutions continue to come to the market," she added.

Asked about how prospective customers or partners can reach Genie, Fungum pointed to her open door. "Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn," she said. "I really enjoyed this, I really appreciate your time on this - really happy to do this."