64% of UAE SMEs Still Run on Excel. Is Your POS Being Wasted?

Tom (0:00)

This is the Morning Drive. Before we discuss a new survey out of SMEs still running on Excel, believe it or not, a reminder, don't forget to hit like and subscribe. Now, there's a new Fortis survey. More than 130 UE merchants reveals a surprising digital gap. 64% of SMEs still run core operations on Excel. And that's even as businesses invest heavily in this digital transformation.

How much of a surprise is this? Many already have a powerful tool sitting at the checkout there, a point of sale system, their POS system, but are they actually using it to run the business? Lots of questions and to unpack why SMEs in the UE might be leaving valuable business intelligence untapped. We have the Chief Marketing Officer at Fortis, Ahmed Sameh, is with me in the studio. It's good to meet you.

Ahmed Sameh (0:55)

Good to meet you, Tom. Thanks for having me here.

Tom (0:58)

You're very welcome. Thanks for being here. I want to get to why UE SMEs might be leaving this valuable business intelligence untapped and more. But first of all, it's that figure. Why is it that over, just over, I mean, just under, sorry, two-thirds of businesses in the UE, small, medium enterprises, are still relying on Excel for core stuff? This is 2026, Ahmed.

Ahmed Sameh (1:25)

Yes, that's a study that we've done with around 130 merchants in the UE. And what we have found that merchants are still using, or SMEs are still using Excel in navigating their business.

It's not the problem of Excel, or using Excel or not using Excel, the problem when the business grows itself. So when they are growing, they start tracking everything in an Excel file. So customer data, when you are talking about, let's say, transactions, what they have sold in the daily basis and like all, and then sharing all of that to connect all the departments together. So, for example, accounting with the inventory, with customer data, so they can target their customers again and all, it happens in Excel. And this is where the problem is, to connect all of that together through Excel, it becomes a problem. Because having all this amount of data, especially like if you have a good amount of transaction that are happening on the daily basis, it becomes a mess. And that's why it is a problem. However, they are still using it.

Tom (2:37)

Yeah, it's easy that you can see how it can get out of hand. And it's an interesting paradox, this, because particularly in the small business economy, is you've got billions being poured into digital transformation. It is cheaper to allow that to have an effect on your business. The point of sale systems just aren't being used to their full potential. So when your team looked at the data, it was 130 merchants, right?

So what was the most surprising revelation about how small businesses manage their day-to-day operations compared to this narrative? We hear it all the time. Digital transformation is... That's kind of the story.

Ahmed Sameh (3:20)

Yes. The main thing that the team have found is how the merchants themselves are utilizing the data, as I've mentioned in the end.

And the digital transformation for them was, oh, it's a big word. It's like, oh, digital transformation is like moving everything to be digitalized like an old...

Some merchants are scared of that because they wouldn't be having this old way of tracking what they were doing on a daily basis or like something. Or what if the cloud gets hacked or something like that? Which is surprisingly that people still understands the digital transformation in the wrong way. And what we wanted to talk with the merchants about and like teach the merchant is mainly kind of combining the systems that they are using into one place or even having two more systems, like two systems talking to each other is better than having five systems. So we still see even merchants are using pen and paper to track their transactions on a daily basis, which is like was surprising for us.

Tom (4:38)

I mean, there are lots of things that play here, right? There's the fear of change, first of all, and upgrading a system, generally there are.

Things don't always go smoothly. So I understand that. There's the investment. And then there's just the, this is the way it works. If it ain't broke, why do we need to fix it kind of thing? Plus, on top of that, you've got digital transformation. Transformation is a big word.

Ahmed Sameh (5:02)

It's a big word.

Tom (5:03)

It encompasses lots of different things. So you can see that.