How the digitalization of business affects the financing of small businesses, including microbusinesses, by the banks second-tier banks, the issues of the development of the Unified Republican Commodity Directory and implementation of the Almaty Business, a regional programme of entrepreneurship development and other issues have been touched upon at a meeting of the Committee for SME Development of the Presidium of the Atameken NCE RK.

The century of technology requires adaptation to new business realities, so most Kazakh companies are working on a digital transformation of business. Its necessity cannot be underestimated today, as important business decision-makers believe that without adaptation to the digital market they will face significant delays in growth and profit. This is why it is time to look at the importance of digital transformation for the Kazakh market.

In the course of the meeting, the Halyk Bank and Alfa Bank employees talked about the performance of the banking system and presented digital services, product lines, and credit opportunities currently available to small businesses. Online banking systems, payment cards for business, acquiring services and specially developed mobile applications help entrepreneurs to solve daily business processes.

In addition to the digitalization of banking services, representatives of banks touched upon the problems of lending to small, primarily micro-businesses due to the lack of official accounting records. "More than 70% of small business entrepreneurs keep records in the notebook," Damir Kakiev, Managing Director of Alfa-Bank's Mass Business Unit, said.

Alfiya Zheksenbay, Director of Sales Department of SME of the Halyk Bank, noted, that the banks, on their part, develop various types of online financing, but banks need a countermovement from business representatives to fill the market of various cloud services with their data. For example, if an entrepreneur uses cloud services that allow him to do business, keep accounts, use cashless payments, connect online services and services - this allows banks to make a detailed analysis of the client, know the client and remotely offer various credit solutions if they are needed. In this case, Alfiya explains, that the bank will be ready to make a remote decision on granting financing to entrepreneurs without providing collateral, and collecting certain documents, etc.

In turn, Chairman of the SME Development Committee Raimbek Batalov noted that today banks have made great progress in the field of online lending, and small businesses should embark on the path of business transparency and digitalization to attract the maximum possible working capital for the development of their businesses.

The experts discussed the creation of the Unified Republican Commodity Directory, which will allow developing unified standards for product description and providing all market participants with access to unified data on all products sold in the regions and the country.

"At the moment, we have a lot of product classifiers in our country, such as TNVED (Commodity nomenclature of foreign economic activity), KPVED (Classifier of products by types of economic activity), NS TRU (Nomenclature directory of goods, works and services) - which have their own highly specialized purposes and are used only for certain groups of users. There are no transition routes between the available directories, the same goods items in different product directories are listed under different codes. All these directories are inconvenient and unacceptable for business in the field of trade. Our task is to introduce a single reference book, where each product item will contain from 90 to 300 fields. The Unified Republican Commodity Directory will allow using barcodes of goods for convenient trade and help to track goods from customs to the moment of realization of goods via online cash register. All this allows protecting both entrepreneurs and consumers," the Deputy Chairman of the Management Board on the production of Center of Electronic Finance JSC Darkhan Birzhanov explained.

"Business needs it. It is extremely important to implement it. Entrepreneurs currently bear the costs, spend time to drive the nomenclature manually, which is inevitably associated with errors, and each error then requires time to correct. Another question is that we should work out the formation of this reference book. In working order, I suggest that together with the associations, which certainly need to participate, we take up the task," Raimbek Batalov summed up.

In the course of the meeting, Sagindykov Kanat, Deputy Head of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Investments of Almaty city, presented the Almaty business – 2025 project, which will be called upon to help the development of entrepreneurship in Almaty city, including 5 main directions of the program: high-quality training of entrepreneurs in online and offline modes of entrepreneurship, reduction of administrative barriers due to the creation of the Qoldaý entrepreneurship center, financial support for business realization, attraction of new investors.

"Small businesses are given a lot of opportunities. It is necessary to be digitized. We must show the trend, bring the small business out of the shadows. Digitalization is, first of all, the efficiency of doing business. The stability of the business itself depends on it. The state and second-tier banks offer solutions, and we need to use them. Today it is necessary to introduce online services, cloud services. We will talk about subsidizing the cost of digitalization in the Business Road Map. We want local authorities to use financial resources, budget money to subsidize the cost of digitalization. We will motivate small businesses to come out of the shadows, become transparent and motivate them to use transparent accounting schemes," Raimbek Batalov summed up.