Grant Thornton Bharat, Zoho Unite to Boost India’s Mid-Market Enterprises

Consulting and services company Grant Thornton Bharat and SaaS giant Zoho have announced a strategic partnership to enhance digital capabilities for Indian mid-market enterprises. This alliance brings together Grant Thornton Bharat's industry expertise with Zoho’s cloud-based solutions and allows businesses to navigate their digital journeys more efficiently.

The partnership is designed to provide businesses with expert guidance on financial management, compliance, and strategic growth. By using Zoho’s customisable platform, companies can avoid upfront capital expenditures and benefit from tailored solutions that integrate seamlessly with existing technology ecosystems. This synergy is expected to deliver faster implementation, accelerated time-to-value, and higher return on investment (ROI).

Suresh Venkatesan, partner at Grant Thornton Bharat, emphasised that digital transformation is no longer optional for businesses seeking competitiveness. This collaboration aims to equip businesses with the agility and efficiency needed to drive sustained growth in an evolving market.

Bishan Singh, who handles strategic partnerships and business growth at Zoho, highlighted the company’s focus on flexible and extendable solutions. “We have a wide range of business apps and tools that cater to varying complexities,” he said. Through this partnership, Zoho’s comprehensive suite of applications will be tailored to meet the specific needs of businesses across different sectors.

Initially, the partnership will focus on the automotive, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), and education sectors. Businesses in these sectors will benefit from Zoho’s flagship offerings, including financial management tools like Zoho Books and Zoho CRM, as well as low-code platforms like Zoho Creator. Moreover, Zoho’s platform capabilities and developer tools will help solve specialised requirements such as dealership management systems, loan origination systems, and financial management solutions.

Shift to SaaS

A growing trend is observed in companies either actively partnering with SaaS companies or shifting their existing business to cater to the SaaS market. Real estate services company NoBroker has launched ConvoZen.AI, a conversational intelligence platform designed to enhance customer engagement across various sectors, marking its entry into the SaaS market with AI-driven automation. The platform analyses and transcribes customer interactions across calls, meetings, chats, and social media, supporting multiple languages such as English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. Using machine learning models, ConvoZen.AI offers features such as speaker identification, sentiment analysis, and entity recognition to improve customer service and operational efficiency.

Similarly, a few weeks ago, Zomato announced the launch of Nugget, an AI-native, no-code customer support platform designed to help businesses scale their support operations efficiently. Originally developed as an internal tool over three years, Nugget now manages over 15 million support interactions monthly for Zomato, Blinkit, and Hyperpure. Now open to businesses worldwide, the platform has achieved a 90% adoption rate among companies that have tested it.