The age of AI offers many opportunities - also for SMEs

Mr Budke, mesoneer has made it their mission to revolutionize digital interactions. What exactly does that mean?

To put it simply, we always focus on the interface between people and technology. That is our core competence. These interfaces are becoming increasingly important, which is why we founded our company in 2014 and rebranded it around two years ago under the name “mesoneer”. “Meso” is ancient Greek and stands for the connecting element in the middle, which reflects our mission to connect people. We took the second syllable from the word “engineer” to represent that we “build” solutions that are necessary for such connectivity. In short: we revolutionize the interaction within companies, with their customers and with their partners. To do so, we support companies from a wide range of industries with tailor-made software solutions for digitalization, modernize existing applications or implement complex data streaming solutions - and thus create the basis for AI applications. Moreover, mesoneer is one of the leading Swiss providers of digital onboarding. We have developed a SaaS solution specifically for this use case, as well as for digital identification and electronic signatures. But no matter what type of software we develop: We always use state-of-the-art technologies that offer our customers the greatest benefits.

And which technologies and developments currently offer the greatest benefits?

Over the last few years, the cloud has been a key driver, bringing with it many new possibilities. Processes and projects that used to take weeks or months are now mostly automated and run much faster. These possibilities have made organizations of all kinds and work itself noticeably more agile. We now see similar opportunities in the recent AI era: while artificial intelligence has long been a niche field, “large language models” such as ChatGPT have brought the topic - and its opportunities - to the public eye. This also opens up exciting potential for SMEs. And of course, this development also affects us and our products.

What do these products look like - and how are they being changed by AI?

“m_IDeal”, our platform for flexible digital business transactions, is a good example of this. Whereas contracts used to be signed manually, our customers can conveniently identify themselves via smartphone and - if required - digitally sign the corresponding documents directly. The application can be flexibly adapted, includes various security levels and has also integrated different identification technologies. This makes m_IDeal just as attractive for large retail providers as it is for public authorities, the insurance industry and the financial sector. The latter offers a particularly exciting use case: when customers want to open a bank account, they have to scan their ID or passport. This is where AI now helps with biometric face matching: the future bank customer records a video and the AI automatically and with high precision checks whether the face really matches the scanned ID and whether it is a real, living person and not just a still image.

Another focus of mesoneer is on digital signatures.

That is correct. Our signature platform “signeer” is a legally compliant and state-of-the-art solution for electronic signatures. It allows contracting parties to sign documents from anywhere in the world, always in accordance with the required security standards. To issue a qualified electronic signature, you first have to identify yourself. The fact that we can offer both secure identification and digital signing from a single source represents an enormous efficiency gain for our customers. And since our solutions are software-as-a-service applications, the entry barriers are minimal and the highest level of data security is guaranteed. The same applies to our services for developing or modernizing individual software solutions.

What exactly does this area involve?

Here too, we have a strong presence in the world of finance and insurance and count the public sector and large retail companies among our customers. At the core of our development activities are automation services that aim to improve the customer journey of our client companies. What problem do we need to solve? What stages should an ideal customer journey involve? And what should a digital user interface look like accordingly? These and other questions are the focus here. Our expertise also lies in docking industry-specific core systems to in-house developments and thus developing a customized solution. Here, too, the financial sector provides an exciting practical example: banks want to move away from so-called “batch processing” when processing transactions and increasingly use “instant payment”. The big banks are even obliged to offer these instant transfers. Integration solutions in the background must therefore be geared accordingly and transfer and check all the necessary data in real time. We are dealing here with an enormous amount of “data events” in the company, which must take place immediately and trigger the appropriate reactions in the right places. We are talking about “near real time data streaming” here, i.e. all operations take place almost in real time. These examples show how important it is for us to keep our finger on the technological pulse. After all, we don't just develop software, we connect people.

To stay up to date, you need to know which topics will be relevant on a medium to long-term basis. What do you think these are?

There are various trends that are emerging. The SaaS trend, for example, will continue. What we are also seeing: Various well-known ERP manufacturers, some of which are market leaders in their sector/niche, have not yet taken the step towards the cloud. This paradigm shift is now imminent, with far-reaching consequences for the customers of these ERP providers. We also support companies with our expertise in such “application modernization”. It is also clear that the speed of change and development will continue to increase. Decision-makers in companies therefore need a reliable basis - i.e. data - in order to be able to make well-founded decisions. This data must be consistent and up-to-date. All information must be prepared for individual employees in such a way that they can make decisions quickly and efficiently. And last but not least, we will also see the spread of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and agent AI solutions. This means that AI systems will continue to evolve and will be able to independently retrieve knowledge, research, reason and use various digital tools in the future. Of course, we will also keep an eye on these developments - and implement them if they will benefit our customers.