Uome: Making self-employed life simple
Uome’s solution allows sole traders and small business owners to run their operation entirely from their phone. Their Founder and CEO Jason Halstead tells us more about it.
Uome’s solution allows sole traders and small business owners to run their operation entirely from their phone. Their Founder and CEO Jason Halstead tells us more about it.
How many self-employed people are there in the UK and will their numbers increase?
According to Statista.com, as of October 2022 there were around 4.2 million self-employed workers in the United Kingdom. They state that self-employment in the UK has grown steadily, from a low of just 3.2 million in December 2000, to a peak of over five million at the start of 2020.
Conducting your main activity while running your own business is not easy. What are the difficulties faced by self-employed people?
Small business owners and particularly micro-businesses and sole traders have been a historically underserved sector by financial services providers, especially those covering banking and payments. Both of which are fundamental demands and essential for anyone running a business. Sole traders are usually fed solutions meant for larger enterprises that have been shoehorned to try and fit their demand, with little to no bespoke development for a vast market of business owners. And that’s where Uome comes in.
Due to low transaction volumes and revenues, small and micro-businesses and sole traders tend to be overlooked, when in fact, they contribute around GBP 2 trillion to the UK economy alone.
Could you present Uome for us? What led to its creation? Is it operating in other countries than the UK?
Uome’s innovative, bespoke solution allows sole traders and small business owners to run their operation entirely from their phone. With Uome a business owner can invoice customers, manage income and expenses, take payments and much more. All without the need for any kind of additional hardware. Uome is available in the UK currently with plans to expand to other markets in the future.
What do you offer to self-employed people? What are Uome's main features?
Uome enables the self-employed community to connect, engage and get paid. With Uome, business owners have full control of how they choose to run and grow their business and can switch on or off integrated services at their discretion. Users can sign up for a monthly subscription and access open banking for instant payments or opt to receive funds via Stripe with our PAYG option. The same applies for Uome’s Klarna integration which can be switched on and off, giving its users full autonomy. This is useful for those who often have to pay upfront for costs or want to be able to do more for their customers without feeling the pinch.
Uome empowers the self-employed to run their businesses from their mobile phones and does this by allowing Uome users to:
• Get paid quicker via Google pay, Apple pay, Stripe and Open Banking
• Reduce admin: instant app-based quotes and invoicing including duplication for repeat
• Spread the costs: users can enable their clients to spread costs with the Klarna buy now pay later option, at no cost to their business.
• Enhance client relationships: real-time messaging to share project visuals, documents and work updates
• Peace of mind: tax preparation, account reporting (log expenses, track sales, etc.) and keeping a track record of client interaction in the event something goes wrong
• Collaboration: Uome supports collaborative working and allows users to easily invoice each other as well as raise purchase orders for repeat work.
• aPOS: enabling Uome users to take in-person payments directly from customers via scanning a QR code that links to open banking (newly added feature)
What are your ambitions for Uome by 2030 and what are the main challenges you face to get there?
Uome, as a tool for sole traders and small businesses, has been built for the sole purpose of making it easier, more efficient and cost effective to run a small operation. This includes anything from managing customer relationships and communication, paperwork such as issuing quotes and invoices, through to actually getting paid as a business.
Uome, as a brand and as an application has already gone live in the UK market. However, we look to expand and serve small business owners all over the globe by 2030, but more importantly, due to the extreme flexibility of the platform, we also seek to empower other companies who wish to serve small businesses by letting them utilize the Uome APIs.
Uome’s technology is built entirely around an API based platform, which allows any company, anywhere in the world, to take advantage of any part of the suite of features we offer to integrate into their own platform to better serve and add value to their offering. In doing so, the Uome brand will not only be known as the go-to application for improving any small business, but it will be the engine that services and provides features and applications for small businesses all around the world.
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