How financial services and payment providers can use conversational AI to better understand SMEs.
By George Spedding (Senior Consultant)

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of most economies – globally accounting for 90% of businesses, 60%-70% of employment and contributing to 50% of GDP1. In the UK, they make up over 99.2% of all businesses and account for more than 60% of private sector jobs2.
Despite this scale and importance, many financial services and payments providers still treat SMEs as a single segment. A ten-person consultancy, a regional manufacturer, and a fast-growing e-commerce brand are all grouped together under the same “SME” label. If that’s your approach, you’ll end up with products that don’t fit, go-to-market strategies that don’t land, and frustrated customers that won’t be in a hurry to buy what you’re selling.
The opportunity cost is enormous. The global SME finance gap is estimated at $5.7 trillion3, while tailored embedded finance solutions for SMEs could generate over $100 billion in new revenue by the end of the year4. The providers who can get closer to SMEs stand to unlock enormous growth.
Why traditional approaches now fall short
Financial institutions have long relied on ‘blunt instruments’ such as static segmentation, one-off surveys, or occasional focus groups. These approaches are expensive, time-consuming, and often yield limited insight in the grand scheme of things. Even if they do uncover good insight, by the time findings are processed, SME needs have already shifted.
Not to mention that many SMEs don’t really engage with these methods anyway. Long surveys feel like a burden, and small, time-pressed operators, often those with the greatest unmet needs, rarely make it into focus groups. That leaves product and marketing teams designing in the dark, or with best guesses.
Conversational AI offers something different
Conversational AI refers to AI-powered tools that engage people in natural, adaptive conversations across chat, voice, or messaging platforms. Unlike traditional static surveys, these tools can adjust questions in real time, probe deeper when answers are unclear, and capture the nuance of how people actually talk about their different needs.
For understanding SMEs, this is critical. Owners and managers are notoriously busy. They don’t have time to complete a 20-question survey, but they will answer two or three smart, adaptive questions in the flow of their day. Conversational AI allows service providers to meet SMEs where they are, and to gather deeper qualitative richness at scale.
6 ways financial services companies can use Conversational AI to better understand SMEs:
- Dynamic, adaptive surveys: short conversations that adjust based on responses, surfacing pain points like cashflow stress or late payments.
- Longitudinal panels: regular conversational check-ins with the same SMEs to track how needs and sentiment evolve.
- Embedded digital touchpoint feedback: capturing real-time insight during onboarding, applications, or service use.
- Product journey mapping: conversational interviews to understand how SMEs discover, evaluate, and adopt financial tools.
- Future-looking scenarios: probing “what if” situations such as business growth and regulation shifts to anticipate emerging needs.
- Competitor insight: natural commentary on other providers SMEs use, highlighting strengths, frustrations, and switching triggers.
These applications move beyond basic data collection and uncover context, emotion, intent, and the drivers that traditional research often miss.
Turning insight into action
The value of conversational AI isn’t just in listening; it’s in translating those insights into more focused decisions to enable growth and competitive advantage.
- For strategy and innovation teams, it means highlighting unmet needs and market shifts, pointing to new opportunities or adjustments.
- For product teams, it means features designed around real pain points, prioritised roadmaps that reflect genuine demand, and lower risk of misfires.
- For go-to-market teams, it means messaging built on the words SMEs actually use, channel strategies aligned to behaviour, and clearer levers of trust and adoption.
In each case the result is the same: more relevant products, stronger relationships, and faster growth in one of the most commercially attractive segments in financial services.
Getting started with Conversational AI
Getting started doesn’t mean building a custom platform from scratch. If you’re going it alone, there are plenty of tools already available, from GPT-based chatbots to platforms like Salomo , Typeform , or OnePulse to name a select few. The key is to start small - pick one use case, one segment, or even one question to explore and build from there.
But – and this is important - the human layer still matters. AI tools can capture the data, but human analysis is essential to interpret themes, connect the dots, and link insights to strategy. The organisations that combine both will be the ones to get, and stay, ahead.
How KAE helps
At KAE, we help financial services and payments companies get closer to their customers by uncovering meaningful insight and turning it into strategy and commercial outcomes. If you feel like we could help you, book a call with one of our experts and we can chat further.