Advice: Staying alive with a bounce back loan May 13, 2020 Business owners watched the Prime Minister’s broadcast with bated breath on Sunday. Hope of clarity for when and how companies will get back to some form of normality were soon extinguished. The vague roadmap to recovery leaves the majority in limbo, reliant on diminishing cash reserves and government support. One bright spot on the long [...]
Numeracy skills remain the key to a better life May 13, 2020 As a parent under lockdown, I count myself among the many thousands of people who have added ‘home schooling’ to their list of responsibilities at home, at least temporarily. I take my hat off to teachers who do this normally. Reflecting on the way we educate children and engage them in a subject like numeracy, [...]
Shakespeare: B&Q rollercoaster points to Covid confusion May 13, 2020 Our chart today looks like a rollercoaster and that’s what it must feel like for high street retailers negotiating government advice and public opinion. After initial confusion as to which businesses were “essential” following Boris Johnson’s initial COVID-19 lockdown announcement, Government clarified that hardware stores could remain open. But B&Q reacted to criticism from employees [...]
Coronavirus: Everything is set to change May 12, 2020 It’s no real surprise that the eagerly awaited unveiling of the plan to get back to normal turned out to be such a litany of vagueness. This is a government that has always been more comfortable talking about what it doesn’t want to see happen than laying out actual plans. But behind the obfuscation, the [...]
Banking mustn’t just put up with tech, but embrace it May 12, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new challenges to the world of business. Arguably, the most pressing being how organisations, unable to operate in their usual capacity, can access funds to remain afloat. To put the scale of this issue into context, it is predicted that if not supported correctly, a fifth of all UK SMEs [...]
The skills gap will only be solved if attitudes change, too May 12, 2020 Millions of words have been written about the skills gap holding back companies’ digital efforts. Businesses trying to launch digital services or to transform their operating model often complain that they can’t find enough people to make this happen. They often blame it on the ‘digital skills gap’, the idea that workers are not trained [...]
Covid-19 has only increased the appetite to talk trade May 11, 2020 The announcement that UK-US free trade agreement discussions have officially begun will have been welcomed by many firms across the Square Mile last Tuesday. Incidentally, it also coincided with my first virtual ‘visit’ to the country to speak to US regulators alongside UK Finance. Accounting for nearly £22 billion, the US is by far the UK’s largest single export [...]
Connecting the dots in Europe reveals a continent in decline May 11, 2020 My colleagues at my political risk firm are forced to endure my earlier incarnation as a college professor, as I cannot help but try to instruct them. One of my favourite lectures concerns the absolutely necessary need for a world-class political risk analyst to connect the dots, to clearly link together geopolitical data points that [...]
Coronavirus: Britain’s pandemic response has nothing to do with funding May 10, 2020 There have been no good weeks for Britain since the lockdown began, but last week has surely been among the worst. On Monday, the news that half of all adults are now being paid for by the state and consternation over how the Chancellor will ever roll back the furlough scheme. On Wednesday, national humiliation [...]
Coronavirus: Digital is at the heart of SME recovery May 9, 2020 Gary Turner is co-founder of Xero Behind the sobering statistics around businesses in financial distress, thousands of SMEs are making radical changes to their working models through digitisation. Businesses that have been traditional at the core are now discovering that digital processes offer far greater scalability and resilience, and as a result of Covid-19 I [...]