Category: Sustainability, ESG
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Rebalancing the financial services workforce
It’s been an interesting start to the year. Falling oil prices, stock market dampening and China-led slowdown have kept us occupied while snowstorms, rains and floods do their thing. On the international stage, a few key themes seem to have been dominating Davos: while the year’s burning security, humanitarian and energy and political realities are…
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How do we fill 60 million empty bank accounts?
Last year the Indian government embarked on a financial inclusion drive of massive proportion. The fruit of this labour: 160+ million bank accounts for the underserved. Wow. The government’s identity card scheme (that made this achievable) notwithstanding, still a substantive achievement. But with all the best intentions, these accounts are not yet doing what…
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Is regulation contributing to ‘disrupted’ financial services?
I tend to get more passionate about this idea as the evening progresses. A few years ago, a trickle of fintech startups started offering alternatives to traditional financial services. Lending, payments, FX, savings, borrowing, wealth management were among the first targets, all of whom expanded the trickle to a flood. Narrowing it down to lending,…
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Team Is Hard!
Business model, product, market, timing: all key success factors for any startup (and pretty much any organization! But team, is an ever-evolving puzzle that changes shape over time. Pitching to investors or accelerators? What’s on paper grabs their attention: technical cofounder, tick. Digital marketing, tick. Worked in a startup before, tick. Domain knowledge, tick. With…
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The Low-Down on SMB Lending
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland released research suggesting that SMB lending had more than one thing affecting it. A supply and demand problem. Policy Analyst Anne Marie Wiersh and Professor Scott Shane summed it up in the following paragraph: “Since the Great Recession, bank lending to small businesses has fallen significantly,…
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When You Should Order Invoice Finance on the Funding Menu–Part 2
In part 1 of this two-part post, I talked about the use of invoice finance as a cost effective way for business to fund its credit sales. While invoice finance tends to have ‘sweet spot’ sectors (manufacturing, services) and hard to do areas (construction, hospitality, consulting), the basic suitability is simple: we’ve seen deals go…
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Why e-Invoicing Helps Late Payment to Smaller Suppliers More Than Regulation
This week, the European Directive 2011/7/EU on Combating Late Payment in Commercial Transactions comes into force. To summarise, it’s looking to cap payment terms at 60 days unless agreed otherwise, ‘provided such extension is not grossly unfair’ to the supplier. It also sets a maximum period of acceptance/verification to 30 days unless agreed otherwise and…
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Initial Reaction: The BIS Task Force Report
For those who have not already read it, the report released by the BIS Task Force will make interesting reading. Some of the figures quoted in there are scary: 9% of SMBs sought financing in 2011; 1/3 of SMBs applying were unsuccessful in their loan application; a projected 5 year funding gap of £44 billion…