[India MSME Summit 2021] Transformation, talent, tech – 35 quotes from YourStory’s third annual MSME event

Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our earlier articles. This special compilation of quotes focuses on innovation opportunities, resilience approaches, and digital transformation from our third annual India MSME Summit.

MSMEs will play a crucial role in the government’s plan for economic survival. - Harshala Chandorkar, TransUnion CIBIL

The MSME sector in India is the backbone of the business ecosystem and in addition to contributing about 30 percent to the country's GDP, also contributes 40 percent to exports. - Ashish Sikka, Lenovo India

The line between essential and non-essential businesses got drawn quite sharply last year. And so those businesses that were non-essential have been more impacted. Micro enterprises have been impacted far severely than medium enterprises. - Hardika Shah, Kinara Capital

Government schemes have to be made more accessible and more usable so that an increasing number of people can take advantage of them. - Ridhima Arora, Namhya Foods

Most IT solutions are designed for very large enterprises. But, SMBs require a totally different solution. - Ashish Sikka, Lenovo India

Most SMBs may not have heard of the tools that startups use. - Jaspreet Dhingra, BANC

We have 60 million small businesses (SMBs) according to the government, but only 15 percent of them have access to formal credit. And out of those 15 percent, 99 percent of businesses don’t have access to credit at the right price. - Meghna Suryakumar, Crediwatch

Credit buyers have a set of data on loan and credit card repayment but don’t capture B2B payments. - Winny Patro, Recordent

Once an MSME enables digital payments, they enter the formal sector. This not only helps them increase their profits, but also enables them to raise capital. - Vikas Saraogi, Mastercard

MSMEs also need to start taking charge of their credit profile while banks continue to monitor it. - Sujata Ahlawat, TransUnion CIBIL

A whopping two-thirds of MSMEs and four-fifth of micro MSMEs face significantly delayed payments. - Tushar Thakkar, Dalberg Advisors India

When the lockdown began, most artisans who were supplying to physical retail stores had their orders cancelled till November. - Kirti Poonia, Okhai

Hyper-personalisation becomes very easy with the cloud. With the available data and tools, it is easier to tweak models, reduce compute time and helps running campaigns seamlessly. - Saurav Dutta, Payback

With the cloud, there is huge flexibility in terms of what you want to do. It helps fast track a lot of aspects like turnaround time on getting everything on the system, meeting customer expectations, security, and compliance. - Ravi Daparthi, Oorwin Labs

Cloud has democratised technology and innovation for all organisations. - B Raghavendran, AISPL

Cloud and collaboration services platforms have exploded. - Vivek Sharma, Lenovo India

The future will be where technology, innovation, and the cloud go hand in hand. - B Raghavendran, AISPL

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Running a BFSI firm nowadays is almost unthinkable without managed services. - Deepak Aggarwal, Moneybox

Managed services involve the transfer of a high degree of control to a dependable partner who can deliver outcomes across aspects, including risk, regulation, cybersecurity, legal, and compliance. - Rohit Midha, Lenovo India

The managed services partner should be experienced across locations, be flexible to scale up or down the services based on the need and bring significant expertise in the area of business of the customer. - Sundeep Mohindru, M1xchange

The managed services partner should be able to innovate and adapt based on customer needs because the pandemic has shown the need for evolution. - Satyajeet Limaye, BANKIT

The internet is inherently the most vulnerable channel today. - Rajiv Agarwal, Boloro India

A business owner needs to protect their website as they would secure their physical store. Just like you’d put grills on windows and lock the doors before leaving, you need to protect your website from cybercrimes. - Sujay Vasudevan, Mastercard

Businesses need the ability to deploy, manage, maintain, and secure devices and data. They should also be able to look at their business models across functions and see what needs to change to meet the evolving demands created by the pandemic. - Ashish Sikka, Lenovo India

SMEs should now think about how they can reduce costs, achieve economies of scale, and spread their risk. - Vivek Bindra, Bada Business

The next five years are going to be very exciting for online brands. - Manish Chowdhary, Wow Skin Science

Watch out, there will be new disruptors coming in the process and it’s going to be a completely long term game. Offline to online will keep happening over the next few decades. -

Saravanan Ramakrishnan, AISPL

People are not going back to stores soon, this festive season they are going to shop online, so anyone who is digital-first will have a huge advantage right now. - Chinu Kala, Rubaans

This is the best time to be a customer in India and to be a D2C brand. Customers are coming online with very strong fundamentals, not just coming for the price but buying for the convenience, buying for the selection. - Bharat Kalia, Lifelong Online

As an SMB, you cannot really build an entire business just on top of SaaS services... you will have to make sure that SaaS is being used to make your organisation efficient, make your business grow faster. - Ankur Sharma, Instamojo

Online selling gives you ready data about consumer behaviour. This helps businesses to innovate according to the market demands, which is essential to survive and sustain. - Hirdyesh Mordani, MyEasyStore

The ability to pivot, understand the need of the market, and look for alternative sources of income while being resilient, and weathering out the storm has helped SMBs during the pandemic. -  Meghna Suryakumar, Crediwatch

Pandemic acted as a catalyst for the health supplement industry in India. - Pallav Bihani, Boldfit

The pandemic has shown what a distributed business could look like. - George Chacko, Intel

Earlier, technology was looked at as an expense, now it is being looked at as an investment. That is the biggest change that has happened in the last year. - Ashish Sikka, Lenovo India

We have seen 700 percent business growth in the last year. The tech stack has helped us scale our business really fast. - Alok Paul, Berrylush

Try, you will get a solution; if not today, then tomorrow. - Mukesh Mohan Gupta, Chamber of MSME

YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).