The bank has also increased deposits from savers by 12% to £304m in Q2.

Aldermore was the first of the new wave of post credit crunch banks to be launched in the UK. Aldermore’s lending activity is focused on small and medium sized businesses.

Comments Phillip Monks, Aldermore CEO, “It is a great result and we really seem to be building a lot of momentum. It is an especially strong performance as we have been careful to ensure that we are lending only to credit-worthy and robust SMEs.

“We have also studiously avoided taking on more in deposits than we can sensibly put to work.

“Even with those restraints, we are growing at the kind of pace that we feel really vindicates our proposition, which is to provide savers and borrowers with straightforward, transparent and fairly priced products.”

Aldermore explains that much of its success in attracting new business, both from SMEs looking for funding and from savers looking for a competitive interest rate, has been driven by word of mouth.

Phillip Monks explains they have undertaken their expansion with minimal advertising.

Says Phillip, ”That says to me that there is huge pent up demand from SMEs for funding to help them expand.

“Similarly there is a huge pool of consumers out there who feel that the range of savings products they are offered have too many strings attached, are too opaque or just offer a poor interest rate.

“But I have worked in banking for a long time and although we know we are delivering great growth now, we are going to make sure we don’t get complacent. Banks always seem to make the mistake of taking their customers for granted.”

Aldermore says that the key to its savings strategy is simply to offer consistently competitive rates. All their fixed rate bonds and ISAs have featured in the Top 10 of the appropriate Moneyfacts Best Buy tables throughout the year. Existing customers are offered either the same or higher rates than those available to new customers.

Aldermore says that it is following the same principles as it rolls out its mortgage offering which is developing a strong following amongst professional financial advisers across the country.

As part of the expansion of its SME lending operations, Aldermore opened a new office in Reading on August 16th.

Aldermore already has eight offices across the UK in Glasgow, Manchester, Cheshire (Wilmslow), West Yorkshire (Cleckheaton), Birmingham, Peterborough, Oxford (Abingdon) and Maidstone.

Contributed by Aldermore

This is a move that will see it gearing up to take on Scottish rivals in the corporate banking market.

The plans to step up the pressure on the established Scottish banks was revealed yesterday by the newly appointed Scotland chief executive of Britain’s biggest bank.

Speaking on the day of his appointment, John Rendall revealed HSBC’s strategy to further expand its business banking team. He also promised to open additional retail branches north of the Border.

Rendall disclosed that HSBC had already increased corporate lending north of the Border by 46 per cent in the four months to the end of April, compared with the same period in 2008. Loan value grew to £744 million in the period, while revenue generated from the division rocketed by 80 per cent.

HSBC has previously flagged its independent status – it has not been forced to turn to the government for financial help – as attractive to companies looking for loans.

Although it has not specified which institutions are its targets it is clear it has Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland – previously the major players in the Scottish market – in its sights.

HSBC has already invested in its corporate activity in Scotland. Last year it opened a new north of Scotland commercial centre in Aberdeen and Inverness and established a new leveraged finance team in Aberdeen.

Scots-born Rendall, who is to take on the new role after a two-year stint as chief operating officer in Mexico, told The Scotsman: “We are very pleased with how the parts of our business have been developing in Scotland over the past few years, especially in the corporate banking sector. We have got bigger plans for Scotland – you might call them ambitious plans.”

Rendall, who grew up on Orkney and studied at St Andrews University, has worked at HSBC for 22 years.

Although he said it was “too early” to give full details of the bank’s planned expansion, he revealed that it was likely to focus on developing corporate banking as well as targeting potential international personal banking customers living in Scotland.

He said HSBC was set to open new branches in Scotland, but was reluctant to give an indication of how many or where they would be located. However, he said the bank – which has six branches north of the Border in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and Perth and employs 3,000 staff in Scotland – was not looking to challenge the likes of Bank of Scotland, now part of Lloyds Banking Group, on the Scottish high street.

He said: “We will be making investments in branches, but we are not looking to spend the next ten years opening tens of hundreds of branches.”

In the new management structure, Irene Grant will remain as Scottish head of commercial and corporate banking.

The bank recently reported strong first-quarter results, following a successful £12.5 billion rights issue earlier this year.

Article by Jane Bradley for The Scotsman

Richard Pepler, Chief Executive, Ultimate Finance believes that, before examining the different and quite distinct role played by the factor, there is an important distinction to be drawn between the respective responsibilities of banker and factor.

“Both the banker and the factor have first to produce a satisfactory return on their shareholders’ funds but, after this requirement, I believe the priorities part company. The banker has to meet his depositors’ withdrawals on demand because part of this function is to take deposits from the public – an overriding requirement which does not exist for the factor. As yet, factors do not seek or take deposits from the public and are not faced with this responsibility.

The factor is thus better placed to accept more risk and we are at least, to some extent, employed for that specific purpose. Secondly the banker is not equipped with the resources nor does he have the time to monitor the changing quality of the receivables he is called upon to fund. For this reason alone, having regard to his first duties, he should be relatively conservative.

It is through providing these services (as distinct from the mere provision of finance or working capital) that the factor earns himself fee income to sustain his business. He has established a team of specialists backed by a veritable library of credit information and the most sophisticated information technology. For example, his client three hundred miles away can already view his ledger via the Internet within the time it takes to make a telephone call, and the factoring industry is up with, if not in some cases actually ahead of, big brother in the information technology race.

THE NATURAL ROLE OF THE FACTOR

Before we examine the end products of benefits of the various services, let us look at the factor’s natural niche in the market place. Rapidly growing successful businesses often start from a low capital base and the entrepreneurial proprietor prefers to own the whole equity of his business rather than share the fruits of his labours with even the most benign of sleeping partners. He ploughs back all his profits into the business and calls on his friendly bank manager to obtain an overdraft to meet his working capital needs. The bank manager will appreciate a well presented case and the customer who presents his budget, cash flow and audited accounts will probably leave the meeting satisfied that he has made adequate arrangements.

Imagine now his business grows still faster and further. Not only must he carry greater stocks to meet increasing demand but he also has to extend a greater volume of credit – not necessarily in time but certainly in quantity, to a growing bank of satisfied customers. So his asset base expands quicker than his capital base and he needs a bigger overdraft or he embarks on the dangerous course of extending his trade creditors and delaying his tax settlements.

On returning to the bank he is perhaps told that he is overtrading and is advised to pull in his horns. The situation is becoming progressively overheated and the bank manager having regard to his other obligations may be obliged to decline increasing the overdraft facility to the extent requested.

FACTOR v BANKER: A QUESTION OF “CUSTOMER SATISFACTION”

This is precisely where we find the factor’s niche in the market place. The banker has the “customer satisfaction” problem of being unable prudently to meet his customer’s requirements while the customer cannot maintain his satisfactory progress because his own capital resources have not expanded at the same rate as his business. The factor solves both problems, to the comfort of both parties.

Having examined the book debts and satisfied himself that they are of reasonable quality, the factor prices his services and quotes a factoring charge of, say 1.5% of turnover – a sum significantly less than the trade settlement discount the client frequently offers his customers just to pay on time, and incidentally, a sum less than the stockbroker charges to deal in modest parcels of shares on the stock market. For this fee he will render statements to regularly overdue accounts, deal with queries and disputes, and collect in the money, usually about a week quicker than his client did.

But in addition to that, he also offers access to immediate cash up to perhaps 85% of the value of the debts purchased for which extra facility the charge is much the same as the cost of a bank overdraft.

Thus the very first impact of factoring is to reduce the debtors on the balance sheet at a stroke. The client uses, or should use, the money first to reduce trade creditors, seeking at the same time to obtain discounts from them for prompt settlement. This will pay for some, if not all, factoring costs.

Next he can reduce the overdraft if that is what the bank manager requires. At the very least, he will not have to go supplicating at the door of the man he used to call his friend. His continuity of supply of raw materials will be strengthened by his improved conduct of his bought ledger and his own credit standing will increase in the eyes of his creditors.

Of course these benefits will not accrue if he puts the factoring monies into a new factory or buying another business or buying himself a smart car because these expenditures are a gross misuse of factoring funds. It has to be admitted that some people do misuse funds and they run the risk of failure if they do.

ELIMIMATING THE RISK OF BUSINESS FAILURES

Pareto’s law seems to afflict most businesses where 20% of the customers take 80% of the sales and 80% take only 20% of the sales. In the small to medium size business, with limited or stretched capital resources, the unexpected failure of a major customer can spell termination to all the hard endeavour put into building a business and is thus a contributory cause to the unemployment problem.

The commercial view taken by factors of the credit risk eliminates this hazard, often underestimated by entrepreneurs flying on a wing and a prayer. The record number of business failures in the last year or so has, however, brought this hazard home to the market place and the value of bad debt protection being utilised alongside the factoring facility is increasingly appreciated. Indeed with the two facilities running in parallel the clients can now sleep at night.

The benefits do not end here. The factor produces from his system regular statistics on sales, debtor ageing, speed of debt turn incidence of credit notes, cash availability and almost any other information his client requires. Both parties obtain a much better overall perception of the state of the business. The client can see how well or badly the collection job is being done and the factor can see how his client’s business is changing from month to month. This acts as an effective discipline on both factor and client and if adverse trends are not rapidly corrected, then either party can set up a meeting with the other at very short notice. Serious disagreement may lead to mutual termination of the contract at the worst but, far more commonly, realism and reason prevail in the light of the accurate facts displayed and openly discussed.

Thus the factor has reduced and, in some instances, altogether eliminated some of the critical issues facing his client. He need not fail just because of a disproportionately large bad debt, he need not fail because his supply is interrupted by slow payments to his creditors, he need not fail because his overworked staff do a poor job on getting the money from slow paying customers and, more positively, he is enabled to continue his successful growth without sacrificing part of his equity.

Some businesses still fail after factoring because they have allowed overheads to get out of control, or they overstocked, or their quality declined and they lost market, but the factor lays no claim to being able to control these other hazards.

We do claim that the resultant benefits of factoring significantly reduce the totality of business hazards, making the factored business more soundly based, better disciplined more visible to management and finally an altogether better risk proposition.

A NEW RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CLIENT AND HIS BANKER

The client who is factoring thus becomes a better business proposition in the eyes of our now more receptive again banker and relationships improve. Indeed overdraft lending is safer because the sources of its repayments and sales proceeds, are professionally managed and monitored on a day to day basis and in a spirit of enlightened co-operation.

And what about objections?

Most common from the client is “what will my customer think?” coupled with “will my customer be upset by the factor’s collection methods?” If factors were in the business of upsetting their client’s customers they would quickly have no business left themselves. The growth of factoring itself answers this question and it has grown through satisfying a real market need.

The bank manager’s principal objection is that the factor has “taken away” the debtors which he regarded as the principal security for the overdraft. Therefore he must reduce his lending and hence his income and profit. Factors may have been a little slow to grapple with this one, thinking that, since they have to obtain their funds from the bank anyway, the same resultant profit ends up with shareholders – so what?

With the decentralisation of profit centres in the banking system, the fact that one branch’s loss is another branch’s gain is not an altogether satisfactory answer, particularly from the point of view of the losing branch. The problem once clearly perceived, can be solved be recompensing the losing branch in whatever way is considered most appropriate. Thus the manager who has spent time on his customer’s problems can now offer a solution which no longer conflicts with his own interests.

Indeed there is no reason why we cannot create a tripartite agreement between customer, banker and factor whereby the total financial requirement is worked out and then apportioned so much on overdraft and the balance from the factor. The necessary controls and constantly updated information are readily available. Lastly, the availability of ready cash from the factor is geared, not to a finite sum which has to be renegotiated, but to the sales volume generated. Thus it can be used as a more flexible tool to meet the needs to the growing company.

REAL AND NECESSARY SYNERGY BETWEEN BANKERS AND FACTORS

Meanwhile the factors continue to study the ever changing patterns of customer requirements. As information technology becomes cheaper and faster and more widely deployed, so more companies will adapt its use to their requirements, thus assisting the factor in its initial appraisal of the business. It also creates yet further opportunities for the factoring industry through diversifying its products to meet the changing market needs.

The factor himself, like the business he serves, wishes to grow and no one who is aware of his existence beats a path to his door? How does the factor market his admirable wares? He is not seeking millions of customers and his advertising spend is, of economic necessity, small by comparison with many other important businesses.

Interestingly, factors receive many of their enquiries from the banks. It is generally of good quality and the conversion ratio is high. In return, it is very usual for many factors to refer clients back to the banks as new customers.

Thus we see the completion of the synergy circle. The factoring service benefits the customer, the banker has a stronger customer better enabled to grow and the factor has another client. By combining these attributes we reduce the risks inherent in all business transactions. We expect to see both more successes and fewer failures and this in turn will both mitigate the unemployment problem and increase the profits of each party to the partnership.

Contributed by Richard Pepler, Chief Executive at Ultimate Finance Group PLC

Tel: 0845 251 3030

Website:www.ultimatefinance.co.uk

Thomson’s is one of the slowly growing number of businesses to receive funding under the Enterprise Finance Guarantee scheme (EFG), which was launched this year in an effort to support SMEs through government-guaranteed loans.

EFG’s patron, the Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR), claims that £186 million of a potential 1.3 billion has now been distributed through the scheme to some 2,059 businesses, via 26 lenders (of which 21 have lent money so far). But how much genuine support is it offering?

By virtue of a 90 page business plan submitted to its bank, Lloyds TSB, Idscan was able to secure £175,000 through the EFG scheme, which it has used to provide asset finance for clients, through deals worth an average of £6,000 over a three year contract.

Although the money has been crucial to getting Idscan’s sales moving through the setup of an internal sales-aid programme, it has come at the cost of a major change in strategy. The extent of this becomes clear when I ask Thomson what advantages Idscan has gained through the new in-house asset finance offering.

“We can carry on doing business. That’s the only advantage.” He says sharply, before clarifying his position. “Just to make it clear, none of our customers have been able to get asset finance externally for almost nine months. It’s been impossible, and the situation has created a blockage in our cashflow.”

“We are in effect doing the job of the asset financers. In the long run it benefits us to the extent that we take the margin the asset finance house would normally take, but in the short run it doesn’t, because it works completely against our business model.”

For some companies, such as franking machine supplier Nationwide Franking Sense (NFS), the buildup of an internal finance provision facility dovetails with an existing strategy – NFS had previously run a small book off its own revenue. But in this case, the transition has not been so smooth.

Thomson explains that much of Idscan’s liquidity has historically been fed into research and development for new products, a situation aided by the upfront payments of clients using externally sourced asset finance. Now, he says, plans for product design, new programmers and increased European distribution have been mothballed while the firm’s capital is being plowed into sales aid.

Apart from these capital issues, the move to internal finance provision has changed Idscan’s sales model profoundly, and necessitated the uptake of a raft of new processes and priorities for the formerly R&D-aligned company.

Considering the sustained sales growth that Idscan saw for seven consecutive months prior to the bank’s clampdown on lending, it would seem that its business would be much better served if the EFG were applied directly to its customers.

After all, with its client base in the poorly-perceived leisure sector, the chances of external finance coming in from a balance sheet lender seem as slim as ever.

Contributed by: Fred Crawley, Reporter – Leasing Life & Motor Finance

Staff at Handelsbanken London, are celebrating after the bank topped a national opinion poll for customer satisfaction. 

The survey by EPSI Rating is the first of its kind for the UK banking sector and is based on a pan European model already used to benchmark banks in 11 other countries, over 20 years. Professor Jan Eklof coordinator of the survey commented “This survey shows that customer satisfaction with Handelsbanken is significantly higher than the industry average and that the banks customers are also very loyal. This separates Handelsbanken from other specially analysed banks in the study and depicts results which are consistent with surveys undertaken in other countries.” 

Handelsbanken’s decentralised approach allows them to adapt quickly to the requirements and wishes of its customers, with decision making being made locally by its branch managers. This may appear to be a simple proposition, but it is one that is proving successful for the Swedish bank in the UK. 

Handelsbanken, which employs 130 staff across London, and 480 across the UK, was ranked top by both it’s business and personal customers in terms of satisfaction and for customer loyalty. 

The survey follows a strong set of results from the bank last month when it reported record profits on the back of strong demand for its services.

Magnus Uggla, Head of Regional Bank Southern Britain, said: “The results are a strong vote of confidence from our customers. Excellent personal customer service is our key competitive factor. Therefore it is very encouraging that we score so much better than the competition.” 

The London West End branch was the 38th UK branch to open in 2007 and is now one of 63 across England, Wales and Scotland. 

John Hodson, Branch Manager of Handelsbanken London West End, said having satisfied customers is something Handelsbanken has always focused on and the survey demonstrates the success of Handelsbanken’s ‘old fashioned’ approach to banking. 

“We believe in growing our business in a safe and considered way with the emphasis on a very personal relationship with individuals and businesses,” he said.

“The fact that we’re a large Swedish bank with stable finances and a good credit rating by international rating agencies also gives comfort to our customers.” 

Handelsbanken first came to the UK more than 25 years ago to cater for Nordic businesses and their British subsidiaries, but quickly realised the potential to provide universal banking services locally; the branch network that has followed is one of the most successful branch banking operations set up outside of the high street banks.  

EPSI Rating (Extended Performance Satisfaction Index) is a system created to collect, analyse and disseminate information about how an organisation is perceived by its stakeholders. The assessment is done in terms of image, preferences and perceived quality as well as loyalty and attractiveness by customers, employees and other interested parties. With a system of databases including more than 70,000 indices derived from some 2 million interviews taken during surveys in numerous country studies over almost two decades, ESPI Rating is the European leader in stakeholder management and benchmarking.

Contributed by John Hodson, Branch Manager of Handelsbanken London West End

About Handelsbanken: Founded in Stockholm in 1871, the Handelsbanken Group has 461 branches in Sweden, 48 in Norway, 45 in Finland, 54 in Denmark, and 62 in Great Britain.  The bank has a growing presence internationally, with branches in Russia, China, and India. Handelsbanken is rated Aa1 by Moody’s

www.handelsbanken.co.uk

With the benefit of hindsight, what we have seen in the run-up to the current crisis is a substantial under-pricing of risks being built up in the banks’ books. This has come about as a result of over-optimism among borrowers and lenders, fuelled by abundant liquidity and an intense search for yield in a low-interest-rate environment. 

The credit risk increase was not properly recognised in banks’ financial statements. In general, profits and dividends reached record levels year-after-year, as did management remuneration based on them. Yet the rampant risk-taking was making an increase in loan losses inevitable. 

It now seems clear that financial statements delivered by banks did not properly recognise the substantial increase in losses that were certain to be incurred but had not yet been identified in specific loans. Either bank managers did not exercise enough judgment to increase loan loss provisions, or accounting standards were not sufficiently flexible to allow coverage of those inevitable losses. 

Dynamic provisions are a way to cover losses not yet individually identified on specific loans as these losses are being built up in balance sheets, and to deliver accurate information to investors about the financial position and risk profile of the firm. A profit and loss account that only informs of the increase in income generated but is mute on the risks/losses incurred to obtain that income provides the wrong incentives to management: keep increasing the leverage (i.e. strong credit growth), on and off balance sheet, at a time when over-optimism, strong competition and under-pricing of risk dominate the financial landscape. 

Since mid-2000, Spain has applied a dynamic provisioning system (so-called statistical provision), which was revised in 2004 to be consistent with the incoming International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). 

Dynamic provisions refer to the collective assessment for impairment, and are based on historical credit loss information from the Banco de España Credit Register, a database at individual loan level. Our dynamic statistical, or general, provision is not an expected-loss model, but rather, a backward-looking model. These losses are effectively incurred.

It is a rule-based system, but there is nothing to prevent each bank from applying its own loan-loss model to calculate provisions. 

One key element of dynamic provisioning is that it recognises that the speed of transition from losses incurred but not yet individually identified to specific individual loan losses varies according to the point in the lending cycle. In expansion periods, the transition is very slow, while in downturns it is very fast. 

To put it into operation, we have two parameters (alpha and beta). The alpha parameter is the average estimate of the credit loss, or the collective assessment for impairment in a cyclically neutral year. It is tailored to homogeneous loan portfolios (i.e. different alphas for credit cards, mortgages, loans for small and medium enterprises, etc.). 

The beta parameter is the average specific provision for those loan portfolios. By comparing the current level of specific provisions with that average, we recognise the different speed at which collective assessment for impairment translates into specific losses. 

In addition, we have a cap in the dynamic provision fund to avoid excess provisioning and the system is transparent. Banks must disclose separately the amount of dynamic provision, so that investors have all the relevant information. A transparent rule-based system with a cap kills any suspicion that it may be used by bankers to manage/smooth their results (no room for cookie jars). 

Since dynamic provisions accurately register credit losses already incurred, they must be above the bottom line in the P&L account. This is the only way to deliver correct information to investors about the true financial position of the bank as well as the right incentives to management. 

Dynamic provisions account for about 10 per cent of the net operating income of banks. At the end of 2007, before they started to be drawn down, they covered around 1.3 per cent of the total assets of Spanish deposit institutions. General provisions are tax deductible up to 1 per cent of the increase in normal loans, provided they are not mortgages. Non-deductible amounts are accounted for as deferred tax assets, which will become deductible, when the impairment is assigned to an individual loan. 

Dynamic provisions are an accounting device with a macro-prudential dimension. As banks properly recognise the losses incurred through the lending cycle, they are building up a (transparent) buffer that protects them when credit losses appear in specific loans. Moreover, they make managers (and investors) more aware of the credit risk incurred and can, therefore, contribute to a more prudent appraisal of lending. Finally, by addressing the bias in profits during expansion, they may help to curtail the incentives for management to increase leverage.  Of course, there is no guarantee that the amounts provisioned will be enough to cover all the individual credit losses banks are facing, given the depth of the current crisis. 

Nevertheless, dynamic provisions have contributed to the stability of the Spanish financial system and allowed Spanish banks to cope with the crisis from a much better starting point.

To conclude, there is an urgent need for an enhanced dialogue between bank supervisors and accounting standard setters to explore how dynamic provisions can be fully accommodated in the current accounting framework. This will not help us to get out of the crisis but it will certainly reduce the depth of the next one. Now is the right time to make the necessary changes.

Jesús Saurina is Director of the Financial Stability Department at Banco de España - the opinions expressed in this article are his own

Published by kind permission of Financial World magazine www.financialworld.co.uk

and how can struggling companies and those in the market for new challenges survive in stormy times? Bonnie Yuill assesses the situation.

In all probability it’s not as bad as it seems. The finance industry, resilient and innovative as ever, is getting back to basics and swiftly taking stock of its position. Rebranding and redeployment will probably be the name of the game for some time to come as companies are increasingly finding it difficult to access trained and experienced staff. Recycling, another popular buzzword, makes good business sense in the current economic climate especially when it comes to recruitment. 

As the economy slows and insolvencies are on the rise, it makes sense to recycle proven workers by retraining them for recoveries, turnarounds and insolvency work. It’s no secret that we are in the midst of an insolvency epidemic, thus far largely confined to the retail, property and automotive sectors but, as with all epidemics, it is spreading rapidly. 

The goldrush is over 

Without a doubt, the changing need for certain types of skills means that the way business has been done recently will need to change, possibly forever. If it hasn’t already been swept away, cosy relationship-driven business development and the influx of sales-focused bankers is rapidly faltering in the cold light of dawn and an urgent need for other skills has become apparent. 

But there’s no need to panic. A steady hand, a steeling of nerves and some expert up-skilling will oil the wheels of the finance industry in its bid to rebuild once again. Now that the gold rush is over, professionals of whatever age are needed to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in as reinforcements in the risk, compliance, credit, collections, restructuring, turnarounds, recovery and insolvency job sectors are now needed more than ever. Of course, it may take a while for adjustments to be made. Even with the best will in the world, these vacancies cannot be filled by those currently being made redundant, as they are unlikely to have the right skills. A limited talent pipeline is therefore inevitable for some time to come, but the good news for clients and candidates alike is that these slots can be filled with the minimum fuss and delay. 

The banking and finance sector may be the hardest hit by the current global economic downturn, but with all of the aplomb expected of such venerable institutions, organisations such as large accountancy firms and banks are getting all hands on deck and redeploying where possible. 

In some of the larger mergers and acquisitions teams, for instance, the business has slowed considerably. In the past, that would have resulted in a round of redundancies. Now the firms are wisely using this time to develop their staff further and are giving them the opportunity to take secondments in other business areas or to work in more buoyant markets abroad. On the upside, they are developing their future business leaders in ways that would never have arisen without the current market conditions. 

Transferable skills 

The truth is that for many employees in the banking and finance industry, career stability is a thing of the past.  Most people in today’s workforce will have multiple careers across a number of organisations, and often several industries, throughout their working lives. As time goes on, it is likely that the financial organisations, accountants and recovery firms affected will also need to widen the net and reassess candidates’ transferable skills and marketable assets. (And, as has recently been demonstrated when certain bank bosses were grilled live on national TV, formal banking qualifications aren’t always necessary in order to secure a top job in banking…) 

By noting transferable skills such as project management, team building, and communications, while downplaying a specific industry focus, it’s always possible for candidates to be successful in other areas. Once transferable skills have been identified, running a critical eye over possible deficits in experience and/or knowledge is crucial and the right training will soon remedy the situation. 

Plenty of research into a prospective job is a good investment in order to avoid an unrealistic image of what working in a different sector involves. It is common for candidates to underestimate the value of their existing talents, so a week or so spent shadowing someone, if possible, is recommended. It’s all about matching current skill sets with current market needs. Marketing expertise, commercial acumen and sales experience are a good basis for many disciplines. Communication skills, team work, IT skills and evidence of problem solving also provide an excellent starting point for most careers. 

Article written by BONNIE YUILL (commissioned by Commercial Finance People)

For any information on recruitment issues contact Prue Heron on 0845 260 2525