Sydney students tackle COVID-19 economic disruption with handy new tool

Accessing government support can be tricky, but these Sydney students have created a tool they hope will revolutionise everyday interactions.

What do you get when you combine two law students with a future computer scientist and budding engineer? The answer isn’t immediately obvious. A tool that will help NSW small businesses get back on their feet in a post-COVID world? A cash prize of USD$25,000? All of the above?

University of Sydney students Jagen Yoon, Joshua Mok, Andrew Esteban and Theresa Wang have been named first runners-up in this year’s IBM Call for Code Global Challenge. Their project, Business Buddy, delivers individual support for struggling small businesses as they fight back against COVID-19.

“When we first started researching, we thought the issues would be that small businesses didn’t have a lot of financial service to seek out, that there [weren’t] enough resources being allocated to small businesses,” Yoon told news.com.au. “What we discovered is that there were quite a lot of resources out there, but they were difficult to access. It was just finding a way to communicate.”

COVID-19 small business relief

Small businesses are classified as those employing 20 people or less. It’s a cliche to say they’re the backbone of the Australian economy, but according to the Small Business Enterprise and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, they employ 44 per cent of the workforce and account for 35 per cent of GDP.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics published a Business Impacts of COVID-19 Survey in August, which revealed that more than a third of businesses were finding it difficult to meet financial commitments, and that small businesses were almost twice as likely to report solvency issues than larger companies.

Government spending has reached record levels in response, with $70 billion allocated to JobKeeper, $14.1 billion to Jobseeker, and $17.6 billion to the original coronavirus stimulus package to boost the economy. State governments are also spending big to help businesses with cashflow, personal protective equipment, tenancy relief, workforce shortages, mental health support, and much more.

Business Buddy aims to work in partnership with government to cut time involved in accessing the services small businesses need. Picture Glenn Hampson

The Business Buddy team, in researching their project, observed that the biggest pain point for small businesses was ineffective communication channels, which is something they knew they could fix.

Accessing government support

“Governments were providing a lot of services on both the federal and the state level, but access to support systems wasn’t clear-cut at times,” Mok told news.com.au. “We found that the various websites, and the means of application, were on an ad hoc basis which created a lot of difficulty.”

Yoon and Mok developed the idea while working together on a summer school project about solving complex problems in government services. Not having technological backgrounds, they weren’t sure if their idea was viable, until they connected with IBM and started working with Esteban and Wang.

The team used IBM Cloud Foundry, IBM Cloudant, and IBM Watson Assistant technology to create a platform that allows small and medium-sized businesses to sign up, submit information specific to their business, and receive a preliminary determination of their eligibility to access a range of programs. If a business is eligible to apply for something like a loan or grant, it links them to the application portal.

It’s a platform, with a virtually limitless scope when it comes to connecting businesses with governments. The team is planning to invest their cash prize into developing and growingBusiness Buddy and making it compatible with government software, so it can link seamlessly with online resources such as Service NSW.

“We want to make it all-encompassing with small and medium-sized businesses, to create a service connecting people to multiple government entities – taxes, whatever it might be,” says Yoon. “We want to start looking at how we can apply Business Buddy in more practical terms to everyday life.”

Scaling quickly to create change

The Call for Code challenge invites people from all over the world to collaborate and build technology solutions that tackle societal issues. Projects tackle economics, environment, and everything in between.

This year’s overall winner, Agrolly, helps small-scale farmers better manage resources by providing information tailored by location, crop type, and growth stage. Meanwhile, a second Australian team reached the grand finals in the University Edition for a project called Recharged, which is a sharing platform that connects drivers of electronic vehicles with people who own household charging stations.

IBM Developer Advocate, DeveloperSteve Coochin, has been involved in the initiative for two years. He helped the Business Buddy team through the process, and said growth potential made it a standout.

“One of the most important things in software development, and building apps and generating ideas, is scalability – building a small subset to validate an idea and having it built in a way that scales really quickly. We’re building for 10 users now, but 100,000 in a month,” he said. “Part of that is the feasibility phase, going through the validation steps and the design thinking process – what are we really solving?”

For now, it’s about accessing small business support. In the future, however, the customised results it provides could change the way businesses interact with the government on much, much more.

This article was created in partnership with IBM.