The future of cash flow forecasting is here

Many businesses use spreadsheets in order to prepare their cash flow forecasts. Often, these are prepared by re-keying core information from their accounting packages and adding their anticipated payments and sales to help understand their working capital and, therefore, their cash flow. Traditionally, producing these documents has been both time consuming and prone to error.

The OSMO® CashCaster reports instantly, in real-time, producing the cash flow forecast for each business based upon both the historical and current information contained within the business’s accounts package. No re-keying or data entry is required and the predictive information is founded upon a comprehensive view of the business’s past and current trading patterns.

Now, OSMO® CashCaster from Vision Critical enables lenders to predict the cash flow and funds flow movements of a client’s business in the coming 30 to 60 days with far greater accuracy.

The reports produced by the OSMO® CashCaster can also help you identify if a business is right to move from conventional funding to Asset Based Lending and the effect this has on the cash flow and funds flow.

It is also vital that Asset Based Lenders can accurately assess the value of their security before providing funds. Prior to releasing the funds they will investigate the delivery process, invoicing process, sales ledger management and credit control function.

The new suite of OSMO® CashCaster reports can show immediately if a business is buying or selling more than it needs in order to retain enough cash to continue trading and if sales are being pre-invoiced or are simply fresh air. Lenders need accurate, real-time information to make business decisions and to predict potential fraud at an early stage, not only across a portfolio but also on an individual account basis, with complete invoice narrative.

OSMO® CashCaster is proactive and acts as an early warning system. Lenders will see immediately if cash is being washed through the trust account, buying them the time they need to respond decisively.

OSMO® has evolved from the extraction and transfer of data into the key management information source for all lenders.

To find out more about how OSMO® can give you the predictive picture you need to manage your portfolio and reduce your risk even more effectively, please contact us.

Drive Real-Time Decision Making

Management Accounts are an invaluable resource, allowing financiers to make timely and meaningful business decisions. However, they are notoriously difficult to obtain from clients, and can also be subject to a certain amount of ‘enhancement’, either in terms of ‘massaging’ the figures or delaying until more favourable results, compromising the accuracy, integrity and timeliness of the information provided.

In response to this very real problem faced by lenders, Vision Critical has developed real-time Management Accounts production, which is designed to give lenders an accurate, up-to-the-minute, reflection of their clients’ businesses and the inevitable ‘bumps in the road’ that clients may encounter.

OSMO^® is based on automatically scheduled data feeds straight from the client’s accounting package, entailing no additional work from the lender or their clients. It enables invoice finance companies and asset based lenders to see the client business’s position at any time, from pre-sale right through to the end of the invoice finance life-cycle. Using OSMO^® also removes the need to reconcile information posted on clients’ account packages with the Management Accounts.

Payroll and VAT, asset valuation and depreciation can be viewed at a glance, together with daily sales outstanding, allowing key financial ratios to be monitored.

Traffic light warning systems can also be used to highlight areas of concern and applied to risk scores set at a lender’s specific tolerances. The Management Accounts system can also be linked with CashCaster, enabling lenders to use recent information to predict future performance and cash shortfalls.

Reporting is scheduled to be sent automatically, either at the same time each day, or can be sent by the client at a time to suit them. Once installed, the lender doesn’t need to do anything in order to create future Management Accounts, saving time, money and unnecessary delays. By the same token, the client does not have to do any more than their customary book-keeping.

We live in a world where business at the speed of thought is considered the norm. Until now, the production of Management Accounts has lagged behind these technological advances and we are pleased to be able to address this by harnessing the power of OSMO^®.

Real-time and real-life Management Accounts assist and enhance operational performance at every phase of the client life-cycle.

To find out more about how OSMO^® can accelerate the production of Management Accounts, please contact us.

According to a study conducted by SAP among almost 500 senior IT staff in eight countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a key issue was the division of expenditure among three areas – operations, maintenance and innovation.

A third of companies said that their current IT strategy is too focused on “simply keeping the lights on” in the day-to-day running of existing IT systems.

Overall, 60 percent of companies said that this IT strategy has “held them back” from investing in innovation. Respondents indicated that they face a wide range of issues that currently prevent them from investing in technology.

The most commonly cited reason was uncertainty about the economy, with 48 percent of respondents believing this was a barrier. In addition, 39 percent stated that too much money is spent on operations at the moment, therefore leaving a deficit in the budget that could otherwise be directed towards innovation.

The detrimental effect was also viewed as impacting competitiveness, with 38 percent of respondents stating the current spend priorities harmed their competitive position.

A lack of spend on IT innovation is having a negative business impact, with 44 percent of respondents saying it has directly resulted in a lack of productivity.

In addition, 43 percent also claimed to have lost potential cost savings because of the spend deficit. Also, over half of the companies surveyed believed they would get greater business value if more was spent on IT innovation.

Our point is this, why compromise when you don’t have to? When your business is powered by OSMO®  you are making an investment in both innovation AND operational performance effectiveness! In fact, OSMO® gives you the perfect balance to your decision making with effortless transparency, saving you time, money and exposure to error risk.

We have just returned from the ABFA Conference which was excellent and very thought provoking. Steve Box gave an inspiring opening speech on ’Leadership Today, for Tomorrow’s World’, showing not only how far the Asset Based Lending industry has come but also an indication of  its strong potential rate of future growth.

The following blogs provide highlights of some of  the keynote addresses:

Simply the Best

OSMO® – the Superconductor

Mike Ferguson presented on Right Time Business Optimization at the Teradata Partners conference.

The notes from the conference focus on the need “to integrate business intelligence (in the broadest sense) into all operational processes, out to customers. This has to be integrated into business processes to guide operational decisions made by people and to drive automated decisions in those same processes. Business intelligence (in the broadest sense, including data mining and predictive analytics) being used to improve every operational decision. The objective is to build on the efficiency gains of business process approaches and technology by using intelligence to improve effectiveness.”

The objective, to “Continuously guide processes to meet objectives by improving decisions” could have been written about OSMO®.

This month, senior members of the Vision Critical team attended a very interesting DeVere & Co Business Information Seminar.

The agenda covered information such as how the credit reference agencies obtain their data, the taking of personal guarantees and the validity of Companies House Information.

There followed a fascinating talk by Detective Inspector Fyfe of the City of London Police on the increasing use of fake identities.

Simi Bains, Leader of Credit Communities and Fraud Liaison for D&B, spoke regarding the Internet Based Fraud Alert System that they host for the ABFA and FLA.

Mat Heritage comments: “The conference provided an in-depth insight into fraud, how it is perpetrated and what we can learn from it.  However, in OSMO®, we already have the ultimate early warning device against potential incidences of fraud. Since the customer financial information is transferred automatically from the customers’ accounting systems in real time, our clients not only have the peace of mind in respect of data integrity, vitally they will be better equipped to identify any invoicing irregularities in real-time.”

“Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.”
J. Paul Getty

“Formula for ABL success: Use OSMO®, drill down, boost profits.”
Oliver Chadwick, Vision Critical

Both of the above quotations involve drilling down more deeply for significant reward.

At Vision Critical, we provide leading Commercial Finance companies with the ability to gain immediate visibility of sales ledger, purchase ledger and debtor contact details to an unprecedented degree of granularity – Complete Invoice Narrative.

There are three simple steps involved in the process, as you can see from the diagram below:

1.   The client enters their invoices into their accounting package (they are not faced with the burden of re-keying the information later)

2.   OSMO® transmits the detail to the lender automatically and effortlessly

3.   The Lender can view and print the replica invoice, including the full, detailed invoice narrative.

As well as the significant savings in time and money enjoyed by lenders or even elimination of the error risks typically associated with re-keying client information, OSMO® offers a powerful commercial advantage that has remained a best-kept secret. By virtue of the detailed Complete Invoice Narrative available through OSMO®, Invoice Discounting and Asset-Based Lending companies gain the benefit of a ‘factoring view’, providing the opportunity to provide higher levels of funding with greater levels of comfort and control.

I read an interesting blog today that reminded me of an early OSMO® ad in which our favourite character steps out of a forest with his binoculars, with the headline, “Can’t See the Wood for the Trees?”

The blog by Matt Podowitz in CIO Update starts: “Unlike many other core business functions, IT touches most every department within the company in a significant way. As a result, most CIOs have a big picture view of company operations (and challenges) that is as broad as the CEO’s. However, since most CIOs are involved in significant business process improvement initiatives and large-scale information systems deployments, they often also have a solid understanding of how things work in and between most departments.”

“This combined breadth and depth of perspective gives CIOs insights into where the greatest potential performance gains are to be had; both within a given department and in the processes that flow across multiple departments of the company. This unique CIO perspective is too important to go unleveraged, and it makes the CIO an ideal leader for performance improvement initiatives or, at the least, a valuable member of the project committee.”

This is the ideal time for the CIO to focus on the things that really matter – dramatically reducing time, operational costs, and exposure to risk and potentially fraud.

OSMO® provides Asset Based Lenders with real-time visibility of customer financial information. Helping you make an intelligent, accurate assessment of the performance of specific assets. Enabling you to spot areas of critical concern through clear exception reports and enhanced reporting on borrowing.

By taking real time sales ledger, purchase ledger and debtor contact details to complete invoice narrative detail, we enable you to view the past, present and future with unprecedented accuracy and clarity. You really can see the wood for the trees!

To make lenders’ lives easier and to save them time and money (which let’s face it,  OSMO® is all about),  Vision Critical is delighted to announce a new fast-track process for the development of specialist vertical sector accounts packages.

If we come across sector-specific accounts packages, such as those that serve the transport and freight industry for example, we can accelerate development of the new OSMO® for a known flat rate fee. This saves lenders undertaking a lengthy approval process, which helps business development teams write more deals and, importantly, ensures they have more OSMOs working for them with all of the benefits they bring.

…not according to the BBH creative director that created him! Alexsandr Orlov is of course the entrepreneurial meerkat for Comparethemarket insurance site and he is as popular as ever.

This week, Marketing magazine looks at the pros and cons of using ‘mascots’ and gives you the top 10 brand characters, covering dogs, bunnies and Martians – I wonder what OSMO® would make of them!

I read a great comment on Silicon.com:

“There are two ways of injecting greater creativity into a strategic plan. The first is to avoid biases. When we asked 50 strategic planners what stood out about strategic decisions they did not regret taking, the most common answer was decisions where they understood all the decision makers’ biases. For example, risk aversion, overvaluing consensus and deference to seniority.

The second approach is to diversify perspectives. This approach can be accomplished by developing the strategic thinking skills of high-potential staff and middle managers.

For example, by asking them to shadow the senior executive team during strategy-setting. Another tactic is to debate deliberately extreme or unlikely views of the future to make those involved with strategic planning think more broadly.”

Making plans for 2011 is top of mind for many IT specialists within financial services organisations right now. Here are some classic mistakes to avoid.

The primary function of the IT strategy is to align IT initiatives with business strategy. However, so many plans fail to either define business objectives or define the vital links between corporate goals and the business vision. Where this is the case, they are often loose, without an audit trail or clear metrics being applied.

Updating last  years’ goals isn’t enough. They lack any progressive, forward-looking perspective. Bureaucratic box-ticking mustn’t be allowed to replace innovation. IT is about shaping the future, not merely creating a to do list.

Vision Critical is once again proud to sponsor the Welcome Reception for the Asset Based Finance Association Annual Conference.

The conference is being held over Tuesday 7th and Wednesday 8th December at the Hilton, Park Lane and features a progressive, forward-looking theme: ‘Leadership Today, for Tomorrrow’s World.’

There will be a morning’s session in the main conference hall, facilitated by Fiona Bruce, the award winning BBC newscaster. This will be followed by the popular in-depth ‘Breakout Zones’ in the afternoon, addressing topics such as Invoice Finance, Asset Based Lending, and Customer Intelligence. The Key Note speaker is Stephen King, HSBC’s group chief economist and the Bank’s global head of economics and asset allocation research.

It struck me that there is a good deal of talk about visionary leadership and there are complete tomes of information on IT leadership but, as it happens, very little about visionary CIOs in a practical sense. I read a great article from FT Columnist, Ade McCormack, which sets out clear stages that the visionary CIO can take in and out of the boardroom.

“Step 1 – Be an IT visionary. Your focus will be operational and your role will sit outside the boardroom. The focus here is to inspire the troops by creating a compelling vision that galvanises the IT function into a genuine service organisation.

Step 2 – Be a visionary supplier. Your focus will be strategic and your role will remain outside the boardroom. This time you will be working closely with board members focusing on using new technologies that will help them progress their key imperatives.

Step 3 – Be a visionary advisor. You are in the boardroom, shaping the visions of your peers. You are now a co-creator of business strategy rather than a victim of it.

Step 4 – Be a visionary integrator. Your role now is to integrate the visions of fellow CxOs into a coherent organisational vision that is underpinned by a coherent business, information, knowledge and technology architecture. In fact this role is starting to look rather like a hybrid CIO-CEO.”

IT spending rebounded quickly in the first half of 2010, led by capital spending on new hardware infrastructure as businesses, governments, and consumers took advantage of a stabilized economy to work off pent-up demand for new PCs, servers, storage, and network equipment. Emerging markets led the way, with the economic recovery driving a new wave of intense IT investment in countries such as China, India, Brazil, and Russia. As a result, the International Data Corporation (IDC) has raised its projection for annual IT spending in 2010 to $1.51 trillion, representing growth of 6% in constant currency. Hardware spending will increase by 11% to $624 billion, while software and services spending is set to rise by 4% and 2% respectively.

“The first half of 2010 was robust by any standards for the IT industry,” said Stephen Minton, vice president of Worldwide IT Markets and Strategies at IDC. “PC shipments were strong, enterprise spending began to recover from the depths of the Great Recession, and consumers remained enthusiastic about new devices such as smartphones. While the high growth rates recorded by many vendors in the first two quarters of 2010 are partly a reflection of how bad things were in the same period of 2009, there’s also no doubt that it partly reflects a very real swelling of pent-up demand for hardware replacements and upgrades.”

Amongst mature economies, the U.S. is set to record IT market growth of 5% this year, recovering from the 4% plunge in 2009. Western Europe, where economic recovery has been slower to materialize, is expected to post IT spending growth of 3% in constant currency, while Japan is on course for growth of 0.5%. The real strength of the IT rebound has materialized in emerging markets, however. Growth in China this year is now expected to reach 21% in constant currency, while other fast-growing IT markets include India (13%), Brazil (14%), and Russia (17%).

“Amidst the general sense of optimism that has accompanied results from the first half of this year, there are also reasons to be wary of excessive exuberance,” said Minton. “Our surveys indicate that businesses are still cautious about committing to new, long-term IT projects, and are still anxious about the possibility of a double-dip recession. Decision-making cycles remain long, and many enterprises have contingency plans in place for the next 12 months which could see more projects suspended.”

This caution is rooted in economic uncertainty, with many economists still concerned that the debt crisis in Western Europe, the waning of government stimulus spending ,and the persistently high levels of unemployment in mature economies, including the U.S., might yet translate into a double-dip recession in the second half of this year or the first half of 2011.

“There are very real reasons to be concerned about the near-term prospects for the global economy,” said Anna Toncheva, program manager and economist with IDC’s IT Markets and Strategies group. “Financial turmoil in Europe and government austerity measures could spill over into vulnerable economies including the United States and Japan. Business confidence and stock markets are still fragile, and another wave of panic in the banking sector can’t yet be ruled out. Much will depend on the willingness and ability of governments to consider further interventionist measures in the event of downside scenarios.”

IDC uses a scenario model based on more than 40 years of historical correlations between IT spending and economic growth, along with other inputs, to predict the potential impact of alternative economic scenarios on its projections for IT market growth. Based on a double-dip recession scenario, IT market growth in 2011 could be effectively flat with less than 1% growth (versus the baseline forecast of 6% growth, which is based on more optimistic economic assumptions). Recovery would then be sluggish in 2012 as mature economies, in particular Western Europe, struggled to emerge from the impact of another recession. Emerging markets would recover more quickly.

“We stand in the middle of two powerful and opposing forces,” said Minton. “On the one hand, the very real pent-up demand for new IT investment, which has driven the solid recovery in the first half of 2010 and which will hopefully continue into 2011. On the other hand, the potential loss of confidence in a global economy which remains extremely vulnerable to any further escalation of the European debt crisis or a deterioration in the U.S. stock market. The next three months will be crucial to determining which of these scenarios is more likely; in the meantime, IT vendors should plan accordingly by understanding the potential impact on their near-term revenues.”

The government is unlikely to meet its £35 billion spending reduction deadline next year, with departments lacking the proper data to measure the cuts, according to the National Audit Office.

The news follows an NAO report last week that found the Ministry of Defence was struggling to cut the costs of its vast estate because it lacked centralised data.

The £35 billion target was set by the former Labour government in 2007, as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review.

The NAO investigated five large departments due to deliver £2.8 billion of the savings. It found that while 38 per cent of individual savings targets were sustainable, 44 per cent were uncertain, and 18 per cent “significantly overstate” realistic savings potential.

Problems include a lack of centralised data, difficulties demonstrating links between savings and performance, unsuitable baselines for measurement, and a lack of transparency over reporting.

If only they had asked for OSMO®!

A major new McKinsey research initiative to spot the trends that will define the coming era has identified five forces, or “crucibles,” of innovation where the stresses and tensions will be greatest and the opportunities for smart strategy most promising:

The productivity imperative. Developed-world economies will need to generate pronounced gains in productivity to power continued economic growth. The most dramatic innovations in the Western world are likely to be those that accelerate economic productivity.

The global grid. The global economy is growing ever more connected. Complex flows of capital, goods, information, and people are creating an interlinked network that spans geographies, social groups, and economies in ways that permit large-scale interactions at any moment. This expanding grid is seeding new business models and accelerating the pace of innovation. It also makes destabilizing cycles of volatility more likely.

Pricing the planet. A collision is shaping up among the rising demand for resources, constrained supplies, and changing social attitudes toward environmental protection. The next decade will see an increased focus on resource productivity, the emergence of substantial clean-tech industries, and regulatory initiatives.

The market state. The often contradictory demands of driving economic growth and providing the necessary safety nets to maintain social stability have put governments under extraordinary pressure. Globalization applies additional heat: how will distinctly national entities govern in an increasingly globalized world?

Read the entire article here.

Greg Babe, CEO, Bayer Corp said recently: “It has become critically important that the CIO be at the executive table, acting as a business influencer who can advise me and be trusted to help us come to the right conclusions in achieving our business goals.”

Ongoing research and analysis within the CIO Executive Council confirms that CIOs and their IT organisations need to evolve from traditional internally focused functional heads of IT to business strategists or the future of the profession is at risk. Progressive CEOs and business leaders understand the unique value these transformational CIOs bring to the enterprise. This is the future-state of the profession and how it will sustain itself as a valued executive position according to the Council community.

There’s a great article on this, called “What the CEO wants from the CIO“. It makes fascinating reading. More to the point – it makes sense!

I was reminded about Finagle’s Law of Information earlier today.  A corollary to Murphy’s Law, an elaboration of the concept appears in Essential Public Health: Theory and Practice by Stephen Gillam and Jan Yates.

They wrote: “The information you have is not the information you want. The information you want is not the information you need. The information you need is not what you can get or is not known. The information that is known can’t be found in time”.

The reality is that today, with OSMO®, we can give you access to the information you want and need from the most reliable source – the accounts package. Known information that can and will be found, not just in time, but every time!

The Reputation in Financial Services conference, held at the Chelsea Bridge Pestana hotel, saw a wide variety of speakers from different industry sectors tackling the issue of restoring trust.

Lord Currie of Marylebone opened the conference by covering the issues surrounding financial regulation and how to avoid the next credit crunch.

As noted today in leading portal site, FinancialMarketing.co.uk, Oliver Chadwick, CEO of Vision Critical, who shared the podium with speakers from Google and Monitise, gave some “great insights” as to how technology is being used by the company in Asset Based Lending and Foreign Exchange markets.

The technology session also featured Robert Pink, industry manager at Google giving an overview of the latest web stats and trends and Peter Simpson, chief marketing office at Monitise and all-round entrepreneur covering mobile financial services.

Oliver Chadwick is speaking at Communicate magazine’s financial services conference tomorrow on technology in a session entitled, “Multi-channel brands in a technological world”.  Oliver’s keynote presentation will be heard by the leading financial marketing and communications professionals in Europe. His session also includes Robert Pink, industry manager of Google and Peter Simpson, chief marketing officer, Monetise.

The range of new channels available in all sectors of financial services is staggering; iPad, social media channels, digital banking, mobile apps etc. The risks of early adoption can be daunting, but the potential for marketing, brand awareness and customer services is immense. The ability to increase the availability, access and interaction has huge upside implications. Together with the other speakers in this session, Oliver Chadwick will be exploring exciting new opportunities afforded by technology.

Expert speakers from Goldman Sachs, the International Centre for Financial Regulation, UBS, Capital One, Barclays, Wolff Olins, British Bankers Association, Barclaycard, Rothschild, Aviva, Interbrand, PayPal, BigMouthMedia, Strand Financial, Zurich Financial Services, The Observer, KPMG, Google, Monetise, Friends Provident and many many more.

To find out more, visit http://www.communicatemagazine.co.uk/reputationinfinancialservices

As a YouGov study found, not only do staff find re-keying information to be demoralising and feel it to be a waste of their time, it inevitably leads to errors leaking into the systems. As a result, vital management decisions end up being based on inaccurate information, leading to costly mistakes that dwarf any savings the company might have thought it was making by going for the apparently “cheaper” option.

Industry figures suggest that today anywhere between 8 and 20 percent of invoice transactions regularly have mistakes. They should have spoken with Vision Critical.

You see, the unified data extracted directly from the borrower’s accounting package via OSMO® is DoubleKeyFree™. By automating the extraction and transfer of customer information, OSMO® effectively replaces the repetitive re-keying of data relied upon by the financial service provider. This not only eliminates the time expended in duplicated effort, the staff costs and the high potential for human error, it also makes for a  far superior customer experience.

Think data quality. Think OSMO® and the advantages of living DoubleKeyFree™.

The Office of Fair Trading is considering a more thorough review of data accuracy elements in its debt collection guidance, after an industry lobbying campaign, according to Credit Today magazine.

The OFT’s much delayed review of its debt collection guidance is due to focus in part on the issue of data accuracy. The Credit Services Association has been lobbying the OFT to act more decisively, through its review, on data quality, tracing and creditors’ responsibilities.

Peter Wallwork, chief executive of the CSA and Debt Buyers & Sellers Group (DBSG),  said: “Unless and until the OFT confronts the issue of data accuracy, the businesses at the end of the collections cycle – notably our members – will continue to shoulder the blame for things that go wrong that are invariably beyond their control.”

In an article featured in The Telegraph last week,  Rob Morris, vice-president of financial services at IBM Global Business Services UK&I, outlined the results of their new financial survey.

“Banks need to focus on making better use of their data to improve operating efficiency, to be more effective in managing and pricing risk and to get closer to their clients. The data required to do this exists – banks just need to be able to use it, and this requires better integration, transparency and analysis.”

He continues: “Managing a financial services firm is all about managing data, but it is estimated that poor quality data will cost the banking industry £19bn in increased operating costs.”

“Our survey found that insufficient information and the pace of change have increased business risk. Turning all their data into information that can provide real insight is a problem for all. Despite the exponential growth of data, 47pc of senior leaders claim they don’t have sufficient information to do their job, with 79pc making business decisions based on intuition.”

Funny how those words “Integration” and “Transparency” keep cropping up recently. It sounds just the right time for you to take a closer look at OSMO®.

The latest quarterly figures released today by the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA) show total sales from firms financed by asset based finance have increased, with client sales at £49,371 million, a rise of eight per cent from March 2009.

Whilst there has been an eight percent increase in turnover compared to the Q1 2009 figures (March 2009), there has been a six percent drop in advances, which may indicate that members’ clients are being conservative when it comes to drawing on funds available to them.

Kate Sharp, chief executive of the ABFA, said: “The latest figures are interesting. ABFA members’ clients are representative of businesses of all sizes but particularly of the SME community. This growth in turnover is a positive indication that increased demand is filtering through to all levels of UK industry. However, whilst client sales are encouraging it seems that businesses are treading carefully when it comes to borrowing suggesting an underlying degree of uncertainty surrounding the UK’s economy.”

Though overall advances were down, advances against plant and machinery witnessed a positive growth of nine percent, indicating that with the resurgence of UK manufacturing, more manufacturing firms are turning to asset based finance to fund their business needs.

The ABFA stats also suggest that UK firms are expanding their horizons outside of the UK to find new business opportunities, with export invoice discounting showing a positive rise of 15 per cent.

I was listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger on an international news channel this morning, talking about how he was going to rebuild California’s ‘INFO-STRUCTURE’.  His excruciating but nonetheless entertaining mispronunciation of infrastructure made me think that this is the perfect term to describe how OSMO® works – delivering an information extraction and transfer superhighway.

The term ‘infrastructure’ typically relates to physical and organisational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. The term is generally applied to technical structures that support a society, such as roads, water supply, power grids and telecommunications –  all of which, just like OSMO®, are designed to determine and organise the most effective flow from point to point.

Sometimes, when people talk about OSMO®, they talk about RAW data being transferred directly from accounts package to the lender’s system. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here’s the science…Normalization is the word coined by E.F.Codd (who conceived of the relational model) and his colleagues to refer to the organization of the logical structure of a database so as to facilitate ad-hoc query as well as data update.

In a 1993 interview with DBMS magazine, Codd stated that he got the inspiration for this phrase in 1972 when he read about President Nixon “normalizing relations” with China. (Codd used the word “Relation” as a synonym for “Table”.) It implies “logical” (proper) design of a database with minimal redundancy of data.

Normalization is therefore the process of efficiently organising data in a database. There are two goals of the normalization process: eliminating redundant data (for example, storing the same data in more than one table) and ensuring data dependencies make sense (only storing related data in a table). Both of these are worthy goals as they reduce the amount of space a database consumes and ensure that data is logically stored.

“What does this mean for me”, I hear you ask? When you receive data from OSMO®, rules and tables are checked automatically, ensuring you receive PURE data. Now, that is stacking the chips in your favour.

The ABFA dinner last night was a great opportunity to meet friends old and new – I guess you could call it the most perfect form of social network.

A social network is a social structure made of individuals (or organisations) called “nodes,” which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. Last night we saw it all!

Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of network theory consisting of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. The resulting graph-based structures are often very complex. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organisations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.

In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between all the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to measure social capital — the value that an individual gets from the social network.

Here’s an interesting exercise between the croissants and the grapefruit juice (does anyone drink grapefruit juice when they are not staying at a hotel?):

Take all of the business cards that you received last night and map all of the relationships from that person – companies they have worked for, the individuals you know from those companies, the people that introduced you to them, the people who were on their table and start to understand the complex web of relationships and connectors that exist.

Then go to LinkedIn and start plugging in the names and add other connections you may know to the mind map. You will be surprised as to what a connector you are – the hub of social capital!

Metrics are skyrocketing in importance thanks to the challenges of the current economy and the higher performance expectations it has brought with it. Today more than ever, financiers in sales, marketing, risk and operations roles don’t have the time or resources to waste on programmes that don’t deliver results.

So how do you surf for Sterling, mine for money, or turn data into Dollars?

The key is Motion Metrics: Data that moves you forward by helping you understand not the “what” but the “why” behind a result. Every financier who uses OSMO® has Motion Metrics at their disposal, and can easily put them to use without an advanced degree in Mathematics. Motion Metrics are the heroes of the data world because they deliver actionable insights to help you take informed action propelling you in a positive direction -

* Establish meaningful parameters. Identify the data that matters most.
* Simplify & mine. You already know more than you think. Simplify what you’re looking for in the data and mine existing data for quick wins.
* Discover the “why”. What happened is not as important as why it happened. It’s the why that will inform future action.
* Draw conclusions. Data alone is not helpful. It’s the conclusions and implications you draw from that data that lead to gains.
* Put your metrics in motion. Don’t stop with the analysis. Use your learning to take fact-based action with confidence.

ABFA has reported on its web site that “It is excellent news that a new government has been formed and this positive step should help reassure businesses that a credible and effective steer on economic policy will be forthcoming, rather than facing the nightmare alternative of a continued hung parliament and further elections.”

The ABFA welcomed both David Cameron as Prime Minister and Nick Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister and looks forward to detailed policy initiatives to in support of UK firms.

The article continues: “In particular we agree with their latest moves giving capital gains tax exemptions for entrepreneurial business activities which can only help boost SMEs, plus support the major loan guarantee scheme in its goal of improving access to finance for UK firms.”

However, the ABFA has concerns regarding the recent statement from the new government on implementing net lending targets for the nationalised banks and sees this move as potentially damaging for both UK companies and banks alike.

They conclude: “That said we consider the move towards giving the Bank of England charge of macro-prudential regulation, whilst overseeing the FSA’s role as the micro-prudential regulator, as highly sensible and workable.”

Rob Harris, Operations Director of Close Invoice Finance, answers questions on Vision Critical and OSMO®. For the full interview please scroll to the bottom of the page.

How you started to deal with Vision Critical?

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How has OSMO powered IDeal?

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What have you managed to achieve?

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Launch the full video testimonial from Rob Harris, Operations Director of Close Invoice Finance.

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Coalition is, understandably, the term on everyone’s lips at the moment. The concept gets some tough press politically, yet the real opportunities lie in a business context. According to management guru, Peter Drucker, ‘Alliances are where the real growth is.’

It’s an assertion that is in total disconnect with the language of competition: It is a commonly held view that competitors are the enemy, that this is a war in which no holds are barred and no prisoners taken. But during this era of New Politics,  whatever we think of that, comes New Profitability!

However, in practice there are countless examples where the opposite is true. Collaboration between adversaries is expanding rapidly and widely – and the best collaborators are also the most intense and successful competitors.

Andersen Consulting found that consistent high performers had almost three times as many alliances as the low and the medium. Barry J.Nalebuff and Adam M.Brandenburger coined the term ‘co-opetition’ to describe a new world of companies working in alliance. Co-opetitors abound in information and communications technology, because no company, however mighty, can supply from its own resources all the hardware, software, connections and distribution that customers require – and it’s customer needs that drive co-opetition.

Seizing these chances is so imperative that one electronics executive, speaking to Andersen, said: ‘I would give equal emphasis to competition and collaboration…it is as important for us to work with the competition as it is to beat our competition.’ That’s a practical expression of what Nalebuff and Brandenburger expound as ‘game theory’. The theory holds (irrefutably) that the company and its competitors form part of the same ‘business system’: that system is their shared ‘game’.

We all have common interests with other players: for instance, getting the largest possible combined ’score’. The idea is to enlarge the pie, as well as your share.

Collaborative working is the key to New Profitability – let’s hook up and play the game.

It’s energising to start the week with an inspirational quote or two. That’s why I thought we would start with three. They all come from William Pollard and have something to say about how we think at Vision Critical. Here’s to making it happen:

“Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit.”

“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.”

“It is not always what we know or analyzed before we make a decision that makes it a great decision. It is what we do after we make the decision to implement and execute it that makes it a good decision.”

Companies are created, structured and run primarily to deliver operational products and services. Projects, however, are still critical to these organisations’ successes – in creating, enhancing, replacing and retiring products and services in response to competitive and market demands. The challenge, then, is to arrive at an approach to managing projects in organisations that can co-exist with their current operational focus. Here is a whistle-stop tour of the critical success factors:

A clear sense of direction and a plan for its attainment. Strategic plans are all too often viewed as theoretical statements that have no practical bearing on the direction of the company. The disconnect for many is the failure to follow through. The mechanism for delivery, however, is project management – every strategic plan should articulate the projects that will allow for its attainment, and every project should directly align with and support the delivery of the strategic plan.

An objective means of defining project priority. For many companies, the priority of projects is determined by who last screamed loudest. For others, priority is ‘high’ – for everything. In both cases, priority is a reaction rather than a deliberate choice. To be successful, a prioritisation must be objective, flexible and balanced. It must be able to allow the organisation to determine a clear order of delivery. It must be able to respond to changes in the marketplace and the availability of resources, money and time. And it must be able to provide a balanced picture of the fit, value and risk factors associated with a project.

Clearly defined project outcomes and benefits. One of the primary risks associated with project management is not defining and agreeing on requirements and scope. While requirements may change over the course of the project, the reality is that all projects are initiated for a reason. They are intended to deliver some tangible benefit for the investment being made, such as saving time and money and reducing risk, and this return must be understood and objectively defined.

A commitment to realise the project outcomes. Even where projects take the time to define the outcomes they are expected to deliver, for the majority of projects there is no formal effort to evaluate whether the benefits were actually attained. The realisation of project benefits – ensuring that we receive our return on investment, in whatever form it was defined – is essential to both governing individual projects and verifying the attainment of the organisation’s overall strategic goals.

Migration literally means movement from one place to another and let’s face it we have seen plenty of that in the last few days. However, if you were to move from Boston to New York, or from Manchester to London, one would not normally describe that as migration. Boston to Paris? You would be considered (e)migrating from Boston, or, (im)migrating to Paris.
These concepts can be applied to data migration as we take into account which processes involve major changes versus minor ones.

Data migration projects frequently overrun their budgets, get delayed or, in extreme circumstances, get cancelled. A major reason behind these failures is because the techniques and disciplines of data migration are not treated seriously enough or are not well enough understood. This white paper highlights the major issues and complexities involved in data migration; it includes practical recommendations by the leading independent analyst firm for the success of migration projects.

“In our view, data migration has historically been under-valued, under-resourced and not treated with the attention it deserves.” – Philip Howard, Bloor Research

We agree. The following presentation, “Practical Recommendations for Data Migration – A White Paper” by Bloor Research makes interesting reading as it highlights many of the major issues and complexities involved in data migration. It also includes practical recommendations to help make your migration a successful project.

Discover more about OSMO®’s transformational data migration capabilities.

In respect of the hung parliament position, the Asset Based Finance Association, ABFA,  has a clear stance:

“The hung parliament result could seriously hurt the UK’s fragile economic recovery, delivering as it does more uncertainty and risk to businesses. At a time when the country is facing its highest debt ever a clear reduction strategy is needed, which a hung parliament is not best suited to deliver.

The ABFA supports policy plans to increase the availability of credit to SMEs. However, with a hung parliament it is not clear what party policies will actually be implemented, and this could be to the serious detriment of British business. We hope all parties will work to find a swift resolution.

In addition, the wider implications of such uncertainty – for instance the pound has already dropped – will only hurt the UK economy further, demonstrating the need for stability to support both companies and employees alike.”

As we enter another round of political twists and turns this evening, stability is exactly what the economy needs right now.

Whatever course political events take over the coming days and weeks, the focus on personal ideals remains. The phrase, “Making a dent in the universe” sounds as if it owes more to political rhetoric than business thinking. However, many of today’s biggest and most successful businesses started out with exactly that kind of mission.

For example, Bill Gates set out to redefine the world of computing away from vast mainframes with their own dedicated floors and air conditioned rooms to being something personal on every desk and in every home.

Steve Jobs continues to redefine our experience of the world of technology. Here is a quote that could be taken as political, but speaks in an inspirational way to every entrepreneur and business professional:

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Now, time to make that dent…

OSMO®’s manifesto is clear to understand and sends a clear message to all. Here are the main points:

Total Transparency

Substantial Savings on Budgeted Costs

Significantly Reduced Risk

Error Free Information

Effortless Automation

Imagine how straightforward the polling process would be with effortless, automated extraction and transfer of information in real time.

Plus, OSMO® has never flip-flopped a second home!

Vote for OSMO®. Vote for Transparency today.

Politicians of all parties have used statistics to back up their points over the past few weeks and months or to pull apart their opponents’ arguments. But how can we work out whether to believe the figures and what do they really mean?

Statisticians, journalists and scientists have launched Making Sense of Statistics, a guide that provides a few questions you can ask and outlines the pitfalls to look out for when weighing up claims that use statistics. As more and more data and statistics are wheeled out on the eve of the General Election, we have to take a step back and decide what it all means.

Here is an interesting take on the science behind statistics that all Media Editors should read. No doubt it would get in the way of many a good headline:

http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/PDF/MSofStatistics.pdf

Section 1: If a statistic is the answer, what was the question?
Statistics are the product of conscious choices: what to count, how to count it and how to express the results. To understand them we need to consider what choices were made when the study was designed, ask how big the sample was, how it was chosen and, in making projections or forecasts, what assumptions were used.

Section 2: Common pitfalls
There is more than one type of average; each one can give a different answer and we need to find out why a particular one was used. To make a story more dramatic, people regularly use the most extreme number from a range of possible values, that is, an outlier – a possible but not very likely value.

Section 3: How sure are we?
Statisticians check if a result is consistent with
chance or if it is ‘statistically significant’. Even if a result is statistically significant it doesn’t mean it is practically significant or of importance to society. Confidence intervals give the scale of potential uncertainties in counting, measuring or observing data. Just because there has been a run of events – deaths at a hospital, accidents on a road, draws in football matches – it doesn’t necessarily mean that something beyond chance has caused it.

Section 4: Percentages and risk – Knowing the absolute and relative changes
To understand the importance of any increase or decrease we need to know both the absolute and relative change. To know if a change in risk matters to an individual we need to know what the risk was to begin with.

I saw this at www.ted.com over the weekend and I thought it might help set everyone up for this short, packed week:

An idea can be created out of nothing except an inspired mind.
An idea weighs nothing.
It can be transferred to billions around the world at the speed of light for virtually no cost.
And yet an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact.
It can reshape that mind’s view of the world.
It can dramatically alter the behaviour of the receiver.
It can cause the mind to pass on the idea to others.
In fact, the only way the mankind has ever evolved was through the communication and adoption of a better idea.

I’m blogging live today from the Business Money All-Asset Conference and Sophie Grove has just very kindly handed me a wonderful new book: “Obliquity” by John Kay.

Obliquity is the principle that complex goals are best achieved indirectly.  This book explains why the happiest people aren’t necessarily those who focus on happiness, and how the most successful cities aren’t planned (look at Paris versus Brasilia).  And if a company announces shareholder return as its number one goal, perhaps we should beware: the most profit-orientated companies aren’t usually the most profitable.

Paradoxical as it sounds, if you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in another.  Using dozens of intriguing examples, Obliquity explains how. The Panama Canal, for instance, follows the shortest crossing of America; and yet it starts by following a south-easterly direction. The shortest straight line running from east to west goes through Nicaragua, and this ‘direct’ route is much longer.  The people who first found this route weren’t looking west, and they were looking for silver and gold – not oceans.

Obliquity is necessary because we live in an world of uncertainty and complexity; the problems we encounter aren’t always clear – and we often can’t pinpoint what our goals are anyway; circumstances change; people change – and are infuriatingly hard to predict; and direct approaches are often arrogant and unimaginative (Did Le Corbusier really think people would ever feel at home in his ‘machines for living in’?)  John shows how we can apply the principle of obliquity to our own lives (why ‘muddling through’ can sometimes be the answer).

In Su Doku the world is certain and static – and people act as if the world is too, taking the direct approach.  But the challenges in our lives are not the same as those of Su Doku.  So often it’s the oblique approach which turns up trumps. Today, we face unprecedented problems: environmental, political, economic, social – and personal.  It’s time we thought obliquely!

This is the week when one of the most eagerly awaited conference dates is firmly planted in the senior financier’s smartphone. I write, of course, about the Business Money All-Asset Conference at the CBI  – on 29 April.

Paul Hancock will be presiding over the conference. There is a rich seam of knowledge being mined throughout the day, looking at pre-packs, CVAs, property / real estate asset values and trends, collections  and fraud.

The hot topic for the debate, moderated by Bob Lefroy, “Are European banks ousting established ABL providers?”, promises some spirited dialogue between seasoned professionals such as Paul Hancock, David Kelsey, John Bevan, Steven Chait, Simon Featherstone, Jeff Longhurst and Alison Small.

In the afternoon, financing cross border transactions takes centre stage as a key topic, followed by views on ABL in the USA and where it is going,  a glimpse at Receivables Exchange in the UK and the syndication market in the UK.

OK, we missed the fireworks! The Digital Economy Bill is officially the Digital Economy Act 2010, following Royal Assent.

Summary
The Act includes provisions relating to the UK’s communications infrastructure, public service broadcasting, copyright licensing and online infringement of copyright, and security and safety online and in video games.

Some of the measures in the Act will come into effect immediately with others coming into effect in two months’ time.

Many of the Act’s provisions require further public consultation and in some cases approval by Parliament, before they can be implemented.

What is in the Digital Economy Act?

Following Government amendments in the House of Commons, the Act’s provisions cover:

Ofcom Reports – to require the sectoral regulator, Ofcom, to carry out an assessment of the UK’s communications infrastructure every three years;
Online infringement of copyright – to tackle online infringement of copyright, by placing obligations on Internet Service Providers to work with rights holders and, if necessary, to take technical measures against infringing subscribers. It also provides a power for the Secretary of State to introduce Regulations for rights holders to seek a court injunction to prevent access to specified online locations for the prevention of online copyright infringement;
Internet domain registries – to provide reserve powers in respect of efficient and effective management and distribution of internet domain names;
Channel 4 Television Corporation – to adjust Channel 4 Corporation’s functions from a focus on traditional broadcast activities to include provision of public service media content on other platforms, including the internet;
Independent television services – to enable future alterations of the Channel 3 and Channel 5 licenses, including adjusting the requirements on Channel 3 licence holders to produce or broadcast Gaelic programming, and allowing Ofcom to provide advice to the Secretary of State on future Teletext licences;
Digital radio – to provide arrangements for digital switchover by making changes to the existing radio licensing regulatory framework, varying the conditions for multiplex licence holders and facilitating the relaxation of the localness requirements of local licences;
Access to electromagnetic spectrum – to allow for the charging of periodic payments on auctioned spectrum licences, and confer more proportionate enforcement powers on Ofcom;
Video games – to make changes to how video games should be classified in the UK. This will put age ratings of computer games on a statutory footing for ratings of 12 years and above;
Public lending right – to extend eligibility for PLR to non-print books which are not currently eligible under the existing PLR scheme;
Copyright penalties – changes to levels of penalties for copyright infringement.

When does the Act take effect?
The online infringement of copyright provisions of the Act will require secondary legislation before they can be implemented.
The majority of the Act’s provisions come into effect two months after the Act is published.

Some of the Act’s provisions come into immediate effect, including:
Sections 5-7 regarding the initial obligations code;
Section 15 regarding the sharing of costs in relation to provisions on online infringement of copyright; and
Sections 30 to 32 regarding digital radio switchover and renewal of radio licences.
Other provisions come into affect on a date to be appointed by the Secretary of State in secondary legislation.

In CIO this month, Rob Koplowitz,  principal analyst at Forrester Research, sets out three clear stages for social media adoption:

Stage 1: Ensure that your organisation wants to adopt social. As with the introduction of any new technology, the smart organisation starts small. In the case of social technologies, there is no guarantee that your organisation will embrace them.

Carefully define the business issue you want to address and work closely with business leaders in a controlled pilot to ensure that your organisation will embrace social technologies. Do not underestimate the change management efforts to drive adoption. Change management should certainly include access to training materials, but far more important is that users have a strong understanding of the business goals and objectives regarding the initiative. Tightly coupled to this is strong business backing for the initiative.

•    Stage 2: Define success, avoid risk. Stage 2 should build on the success of stage 1. Expand the use of social technologies to include more users and more business use cases. Look for business cases that reflect the lessons learned in stage 1, and engage appropriate business leaders to support the broad initiatives. During stage 2 it is important to determine policy and governance of the emerging social environment. Many organisations balk at wide-scale use of social technologies because of challenges related to security, privacy and compliance. These issues are generally manageable, and a well-governed social environment will lower risk because of transparency.

•    Stage 3: Treat social like a true enterprise asset. As your organisation moves social technologies into enterprise wide deployment, be prepared to harden the implementation. By stage 3 a social environment should be capable of existing in a mission-critical environment. Operationally, your social applications should be highly available, integrated with corporate authentication systems, and deployed widely to drive critical mass of adoption. Integration with adjacent technologies, like line-of-business systems, should be part of stage 3 if this part of your long-term strategy – and technology selection should support those goals. Forward-thinking organisations that have moved toward broad deployment of social technologies are now in the process of building out strategies with core line-of-business systems like CRM, ERP, and others.

A recent Forrester survey of IT decision-makers in North America and Europe shows that a third of organisations have implemented, or plan to implement, social networking technologies in their enterprise in 2010.

While the benefits of social technology can be significant, firms need to manage the challenges of driving adoption, realising true business value, and managing risk. For some organisations, the initial response is to keep social technologies out. Unfortunately, this introduces new risks that could well be more significant. Users could provision tools on their own from public sources, out of the view and control of IT, that create more significant risk.

Even more troubling, your competition could embrace and manage the risk and place your organisation at competitive disadvantage in the market. For many, the opportunity to foster innovation using social tools is too compelling to ignore. Forrester sees an emerging pattern of adoption in those organisations that choose to proceed with social technologies.

“Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.”
Peter Drucker

Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren’t there before.”
Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

“Creative people pay attention to their world, see things differently, challenge assumptions, take risks, are not afraid to fail, and strive to generate multiple solutions to problems. They are passionate about creativity and seek opportunities to innovate.”
Everyday Creativity: Principles for Innovative Design. Dr. Larry G. Richards

“We know that people do their most creative work when they love doing what they’re doing. There’s no substitute for intrinsic motivation, that is, motivation that comes from within. Although such motivation doesn’t guarantee creativity, dislike or lack of interest in work practically guarantees non-creativity.”
Ten Keys to Creative Innovation by Robert J. Sternberg, Ph.D. and Todd I. Lubart, Ph.D.

In the Strategos survey of innovation practices of more than 550 large companies, an overwhelming majority of respondents in every industry rated innovation as critical and said that the importance of innovation would grow in the future. However, most respondents were critical of their companies’ innovation effectiveness – for example, only 19 percent said their companies ‘‘walked the talk’’ on innovation, and a majority rated their company’s innovation effectiveness below average.

The top six obstacles to innovation identified by respondents were consistent across industries:

1. Short-term focus.

2. Lack of time, resources or staff.

3. Leadership expects payoff sooner than is realistic.

4. Management incentives are not structured to reward innovation.

5. Lack of a systematic innovation process.

6. Belief that innovation is inherently risky.

Innovation needs to nurtured today more than ever, so its vitally important to catch these ’symptoms’ at an early stage.

In business and economics, innovation is often divided into five types:

Product innovation, which involves the introduction of a new good or service that is substantially improved. This might include improvements in functional characteristics, technical abilities, ease of use, or any other dimension.

Process innovation involves the implementation of a new or significantly improved production or delivery method.

Marketing innovation is the development of new marketing methods with improvement in product design or packaging, product promotion or pricing.

Organisational innovation (also referred to as social innovation) involves the creation of new organisations, business practices, ways of running organisations or new organisational behavior.

Business Model innovation involves changing the way business is done in terms of capturing value.

The Vision Critical Financial Technology Survey conducted late last year, predicted a substantial shift in lenders’ priorities in 2010 from cutting costs to enhancing service provision and improving the customer experience. 90% of respondents ranked these reasons as important to very important in terms of their weighting.

Now, as we enter the second quarter of 2010, we can confirm that this is turning out to be reality, with tangible examples of renewed technology spend on customer focus areas reported by Gartner, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Experience Management (CEM), plus sophisticated data and behavioural modelling.

Here are four key areas where Vision Critical is helping lenders enhance the customer value proposition and experience, improving client acquisition, loyalty and retention:

1. Making Your Clients Lives Easier
Electronic extraction and migration of data from your clients’ accounting packages automatically to your own systems, not only results in resource savings in terms of people and processing, it also makes your clients lives so much easier, since they no longer have to re-key ledger information. Inevitably, as a result there will be fewer reconciliation issues or causes for complaint that could stand in the way of customer satisfaction and ultimately retention.

2. Real-time, Right-time Response
Technology has a significant role to play in delivering insights for your business to enable you to navigate strategic changes ahead more effectively. Just as importantly, it allows you to respond tactically to a given client’s current position, in terms of funding gaps, cash flows, seasonality, invoicing trends, draw down preferences and behaviours, enabling you to enhance your service to that client. Today, client retention depends on having access to comprehensive, accurate, consistent real-time data. With this depth of data, you can make more informed decisions, offering the right products to the right customers at the right times and providing the best customer service through any touch point.

3. Trust From Transparency
The imperative for rebuilding trust in the financial services arena is paramount. As a consequence, the technologies that financial firms are investing in today are concerned primarily with visibility, transparency and improved access to customer financial information. As a heightened expectation of greater openness surrounds the entire financial infrastructure going forward, those players that emerge strongest will have renewed commitment to capabilities and technologies that promote transparency.

4. Delivering More Value
Lenders are in the midst of finishing off the work they started in 2009 -  streamlining their business operations and dumping non-performing or non-strategic projects. All lenders are looking to contain risk. The smart money remains with those who succeed in keeping risk in check and who are lending more. Enhanced visibility of high-integrity data allows you the ability to attain both of these objectives, offering greater levels of funding at far less risk. This capability greatly assists retention and is a key driver / differentiator for new business.

These are substantial, inclusive customer focused trends, that together are consistent with the dialogue we are having with lenders right now. We expect these technology trends will drive the commercial finance industry throughout 2010, enabling you to get even closer to your clients.

“If the question is, ‘How can a company quantify and measure innovation?’ – then it’s certain the company is asking the wrong question”, comments Seth Godin.

“Innovation happens long before the benefit is realized. And, by definition, each innovation is different than the one before it. As a result, you can watch an innovation become profitable and then say, ‘Wow that was great, let’s buy some more of that.’

Great organisations have faith in their future, and part of that belief is that innovation pays, even when it doesn’t. It pays because the next innovation — the one after this one — will pay.

And if we embrace the process, not the event, we win.

According to the IBM Global CIO Study: The New Voice of the CIO, today’s CIOs spend an impressive 55 percent of their time on activities that spur innovation. These activities include generating buy-in for innovative plans, implementing new technologies and managing non-technology business issues. The remaining 45 percent is spent on essential, more traditional CIO tasks related to managing the ongoing technology environment. This includes reducing IT costs, mitigating enterprise risks and leveraging automation to reduce costs elsewhere in the business.

After thousands of interviews, IBM found that successful CIOs actually blend three pairs of roles. These roles seem contradictory, but they are actually complementary. To characterise each role, IBM has coined a term that describes its dominant quality.

At any given time, a CIO is:

• An Insightful Visionary and an Able Pragmatist

• A Savvy Value Creator and a Relentless Cost Cutter

• A Collaborative Business Leader and an Inspiring IT Manager.

We are focused here on the former. The Insightful Visionary is active in setting strategy and helps the business explore how technology can drive innovation. Key Visionary actions are to: push business/technology integration, champion innovation and extend CIO influence.

It’s not enough to just plan for innovation – it needs a robust foundation. When acting as an Insightful Visionary, a CIO is perceptive, promoting a broad technology agenda to help the business profit from leading-edge initiatives. At its core is the source of the insight – business information.

Some time ago whilst we were preparing a Q&A for Business Money magazine, Charlotte asked all the members of our team the following question: “What is it that makes you get up in the morning?”.

Here are just a few of the comments that ended up on the cutting room floor (but are otherwise completely unedited!).

“This is a company where every individual can, and does, make a difference. There is individual and collective pride in our delivery and services across the board. With this ‘in common’ and company attitudes and objectives, the team strength, delivery turnover and quality is consistently exceptional.”

“No two days are the same here at Vision Critical. That’s what makes it exciting and challenging in the same breath. There are always new developments to get creative with and existing projects to support and develop. Keeping on top of such a fast reacting and growing business is my main challenge and one which means there’s no chance of a gentle start to my mornings!”

“At grass roots level, the business functions because of the strength we have between different areas of the business and different members of the team. There is a tangible loyalty that we all share at Vision Critical, I get up in the morning because I share that with everybody else. Oh, and because my alarm clock goes off…”

A culture of innovation is just one way of describing what I believe we have here. It goes a lot deeper than that as these comments reveal and that speaks volumes for the individual and collective motivations, commitment, quality and energy of our team. Next week, I will write a few more thoughts on our particular take on innovation and what it means to us and our clients.

Forecasting business trends and customer behaviour is, by necessity, an increasing preoccupation for many financial businesses and today is no longer the exclusive preserve of economic forecasting units or the treasury function.

Like weather forecasters, we all must deal with a system that is extraordinarily complex, that is subject to random shocks, and about which our understanding will always be imperfect.

Two thoughts here. The first is that if you are going to make predictions within given tolerances, you have better make them on the basis of automated, accurate, transparent, real-time source data, rather than historical data that has been subject to the vagaries of manual re-keying.  The second is that you need to get past the level of dashboards that show you what happened a few weeks, months or years ago and move into the domain of what is happening in the business right now and visualise what you can do to move it forward.

Our cash flow forecasting software, CashCaster, follows this thought process and makes predictive technology a reality. Why not ask for more information on how it could be your reality – and that of your clients too?

I read the following brand insight in Marketing Week over the break:

“Moulding brand values into a memorable character is proving an effective way to captivate consumers and set yourself apart from the competition. Move over Cheryl Cole – there is a band of celebrities in town who are proving to be just as valuable as those of the flesh and blood type. Brand characters are standing up to be a reliable, and often more human alternative to using celebrity ambassadors. And the benefits of them don’t end there/ there are no messy contracts and exorbitant fees to negotiate and, most importantly, they won’t let brands down with “transgressions” committed in their personal life.”

As characters become more three-dimensional, so they become personalities in their own right and develop even closer brand relationships with customers. Step forward OSMO®.

If the world of finance is a jargon jungle, then business information technology surely takes things to another level in terms of acronyms. Here are just a few of the terms that you may come into contact with now and again:

BAM
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) refers to the ability to use technology to recognise significant business events and respond appropriately, based on a business rules. BAM helps companies recognise, respond and resolve events quickly, while understanding the impact on the business.

BI
Business Intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI systems are often referred to as the successor to “decision support systems” and most often facilitate various kinds of enterprise reporting.

CEP
Complex Event Processing (CEP) is the use of technology to identify key events in business, automatically generating alerts and additional analysis. It is related to business activity monitoring, which often uses event processing to drive dashboards and issues alerts.

CPM
Corporate Performance Management (CPM), also referred to as Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) or Business Performance Management (BPM), refers to the processes and technology used to monitor and manage an organisation’s performance, often by tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other operational metrics.

A major new website has been launched to the public this year which gives anyone who wants to use it unprecedented and free access to government data in one place.

The site called data.gov.uk contains more than 2500 sets of data from across government.  All of the data is non-personal and in a format that can be reused by any individual or business to create innovative new software tools, such as applications about house prices, local amenities and services, or access to local hospitals.

Stephen Timms, Minister for Digital Britain, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton, worked together to launch the website.

In the run-up to the public launch, 2400 registered developers were given access to a preview version of the site, so they could offer feedback and start experimenting with the data.

Some of the applications developed in this preview stage include:
a video which shows traffic flows and congestion on the motorway network over the past decade
the ‘School Finder’ website which enables parents to search for schools by location and Ofsted report
a “postcode newspaper” which details the different public services in a postcode area
So that people can continue to create new products in the future, data.gov.uk will be using a new, open licence, which allows government-owned data to be freely reused by anybody.

Stephen Timms, Minister for Digital Britain, said: “Freeing up public data will create major new opportunities for businesses.  By allowing industry to use data creatively they can develop new services and generate economic value from it.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for UK firms to secure better value for money in service delivery and to develop innovative services which will help to grow the economy.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said: “Making public data available for re-use is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource.  By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services. ”

Just to balance out yesterday’s blog, here are some quotes from Sir Tim Berners-Lee that we can all rally behind:

“When it comes to professionalism, it makes sense to talk about being professional in IT. Standards are vital so that IT professionals can provide systems that last.”

“Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.”

“I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.”

“The Mobile Web Initiative is important – information must be made seamlessly available on any device.”

“IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.”

“We could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically. To do that, we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.”

This week, I thought we would take a look at some of the quotes around the web from Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Sometimes, we’ll agree and gain a real insight into the power of data integration, sometimes we will agree to differ. This is one of those occasions where the latter is true.

Comments Sir Tim Berners-Lee: “So, some data is scraped from HTML pages, some of it is pulled out of databases, some of it comes from projects which have been in XML. So, things come in many different ways. And once they’re exported, as you browse around the RDF graph, as you write mash-ups to reuse that data, you really don’t have to be aware of how it was produced.”

For truly useful business information, the source is everything. That is why we extract data directly from the source – the accounts package. And that is why intelligent use of source business information is empowering credit analysts to make more informed decisions. Search is a long way from being perfect as anyone who uses Google regularly knows. That the base data on which you are relying to make critical decisions is valid and accurate is a major step forward.

This term, “Business Intelligence” was coined as early as September, 1996, when a Gartner Group report said:

“By 2000, Information Democracy will emerge in forward-thinking enterprises, with Business Intelligence information and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers, and the public. The key to thriving in a competitive marketplace is staying ahead of the competition. Making sound business decisions based on accurate and current information takes more than intuition. Data analysis, reporting, and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data to synthesize valuable information from it – today these tools collectively fall into a category called “Business Intelligence.”

Business intelligence applications can be:
Mission-critical and integral to an enterprise’s operations or occasional to meet a special requirement
Enterprise-wide or local to one division, department, or project
Centrally initiated or driven by user demand

Rarely does Business Intelligence encompass all of the above, unless you’re thinking of Vision Critical’s future-proofed solutions!

Left unchecked, subconscious biases can undermine strategic decision making.

McKinsey Quarterly are producing a fascinating series on improving strategic decision making, which presents new research quantifying the financial benefits of mitigating biases, proposes a business-oriented language for discussing them, and suggests practical tools for countering biases. An accompanying interactive further explores those biases and the ways they can combine to create dysfunctional patterns in corporate cultures.

Once heretical, behavioral economics is now mainstream. Money managers employ its insights about the limits of rationality in understanding investor behavior and exploiting stock-pricing anomalies. Policy makers use behavioral principles to boost participation in retirement-savings plans. Marketers now understand why some promotions entice consumers and others don’t.

Yet very few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases—systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations—revealed by behavioral economics. It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making leaders need to recognize their own biases. So despite growing awareness of behavioral economics and numerous efforts by management writers, including ourselves, to make the case for its application, most executives have a justifiably difficult time knowing how to harness its power.

This is not to say that executives think their strategic decisions are perfect. In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent.

Our candid conversations with senior executives behind closed doors reveal a similar unease with the quality of decision making and confirm the significant body of research indicating that cognitive biases affect the most important strategic decisions made by the smartest managers in the best companies. Mergers routinely fail to deliver the expected synergies. Strategic plans often ignore competitive responses. And large investment projects are over budget and over time—over and over again.

Vision Critical has, since its inception, powered the development of customer relationships for invoice financiers and asset based lenders. The following customer quote explains just one of the ways in which we have helped: “Previously, we had to do our own credit checks and this was just taking far too long. Because everything goes through our SAGE system, anything that we do our lender can access and that make processing invoices much quicker and life more straightforward.”

Add to this ease and convenience the fact that the data is always up to date, so information (funding levels) can be passed back to the borrower more quickly, and you can see why the popularity and adoption of both OSMO® and invoice finance are so strong.

We also read with interest today that UK businesses will prioritise reliable service ahead of best price when choosing a funding provider during the recovery. These are the finding of the think tank hosted by Venture Finance, documented in the  subsequent white paper: “The Evolution of Invoice and Asset Based Lending”.

Attendees included representatives from the Asset Based Finance Association, KPMG, the Federation of Small Businesses and the South East England Development Agency. Professor Nigel Waite, head of the Financial Services Research Forum, chaired the debate.

The white paper reports the consensus that Invoice and Asset Based Lenders’ ability to build a robust and long-term business relationship is based upon a deep understanding of a client’s operations, and provides the industry with a defining USP, one of particular relevance to businesses in the current financial landscape.

Peter Ewen, Managing Director of Venture Finance, comments: “Our industry’s relationship-based approach has remained consistent. Battle-weary businesses are entering this new financial era with a changed perspective on their lending requirements, seeking to make the relationship they have with their financier a top priority. Many businesses are finding traditional methods of funding, like overdrafts, are not appropriate anymore.”

Professor Nigel Waite, head of the Financial Services Research Forum, comments: “As well as proving its worth as a reliable source of working capital, ABL has also demonstrated that service features rank highly as core components of its proposition to business. Indeed, ABL adds considerable value to a business through the ways in which it validates the robustness of a client’s business model and operational performance. In this way, it should be viewed as being an endorsement of the business and be sought after as such. Trustworthy, value-added services mark ABL out from the more distant and remote sources of finance that are on offer from the banks.”

Vision Critical and OSMO® empower lenders with real-time information, saving them and their customers time and money. As our relationships with lenders strengthen and grow, so do their own corresponding customer relationships.

I saw Thomas Power this weekend at the Expand Your Brand Conference. If you haven’t come across  him before, Thomas Power is the co-founder of Ecademy (a social network for business people with over 250,000 members). For the last 10 years, he has led the trend of social networking and is at the forefront of personal branding online.

His take on what is happening  in the world of business information is  fascinating. He commented: “The attention source is the input source. Consider where you are getting your information from.”  It made me think immediately about Vision Critical’s role in the extraction and transfer of the purest form of data there is – originating source information gained directly from the accounting package – without manual intervention. For this is the only information worthy of attention. Consider this, “the attention source is the input source” -  the strongest foundation for your most far-reaching business  decisions.

Mergers routinely fail to deliver expected synergies. Strategic plans frequently ignore competitive responses. And large investment projects are over budget and over time – over and over again. Why is that?

In a recent McKinsey survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent.

It is the case that left unchecked, subconscious biases can undermine strategic decision-making. McKinsey is now embarking on a fascinating series on improving strategic decision making, presenting new research that quantifies the financial benefits of mitigating biases.

In the first of the series, they concede that few corporate strategists making important decisions consciously take into account the cognitive biases – systematic tendencies to deviate from rational calculations – revealed by behavioural economics.

It’s easy to see why: unlike in fields such as finance and marketing, where executives can use psychology to make the most of the biases residing in others, in strategic decision making, leaders need to recognise their own biases.

I heard an interesting soundbite from management consultant, Jim Collins this morning: “We found no evidence that the good-to-great companies had more or better information than the comparison companies. None. Both sets of companies had virtually identical access to good information. The key, then lies not in better information, but in turning information into information that cannot be ignored.”

In one sense, I agree. With so much data available, there is a need to identify that which is business critical.  However, if your organisation is able to gain its information via superior financial technology in real time – in contrast with a company in your market that has to wait several weeks – you have a potentially significant competitive advantage.

The 360 degree combination of timeliness, accuracy, transparency and analytics delivers business information that certainly cannot be ignored.

Financial organisations can gain substantial competitive advantage from leaders who display finely honed intuition.

Making informed decisions is about pursuing intuition in a more strategic and measured way – determining and verifying useful facts through research and analytics based on accurate transparent financial information, then acting on it.

At times, the possession of such information can spark intuition. Indeed, insight and intuition make an extremely powerful decision-making team.

Making decisions based on intuition is alluring. Eric Bonabeau, writing for the Harvard Business Review, said: “We want to believe in the transformative power of intuition. For one thing, it’s romantic. It raises business above the drab world of spreadsheets and statements and turns it into something of an art form. The executive office becomes a place of inspiration and vision rather than planning and number crunching.”

The reality is that information-driven decision-making is anything but dull.  It is cerebral, powering the ability to make more effective decisions based on salient facts and adding real-time dynamics to the equation. As Bonabeau observes: “Our desire to believe in the wisdom of intuition blinds us to the less romantic realities of business decision-making.  We remember the examples of hunches that pay off but conveniently forget all the ones that turn out badly.” How true that is.

There is a place where insight and intuition combine that is far more interesting than the latter in isolation – where information inspires leaders to make the right decisions that lead to business success.

Many of the invoice discounting companies and asset based lenders that use OSMO® are reporting that, due to increased visibility, they are able to lend up to 15% more against their clients’ invoices.

That means that today you can advance funds with the comfort and confidence that comes with real-time financial information and don’t have to speculate on what will be collected against the face value of the invoices.

It also means that you can offer greater flexibility of choice at point of sale, whether recourse or non-recourse, collection or non-collection.

With OSMO® powering your information systems, there’s no longer any need for you to make the Risk vs. Rewards trade-off.

Although there are no reliable figures available, anecdotally at least, the receivables industry in the UK alone loses in excess of £50 million per annum in fraud-related incidences.  If follows that access to real time transactional information acts as a powerful early warning system that can win you vital days or even hours in incidences of fraud.

Using Vision Critical’s OSMO® software, sales ledger, purchase ledger and debtor contact details are imported automatically into your operational system, giving you an up to date view of your exposure. This enables you to see precisely what the daily movements are on the account and means that with an invoice discounting or ABL transaction, you are gaining the benefit of a ‘factoring view’ – without your client even having to do any work.

Using the accurate, dependable information transferred by OSMO® to your systems, you will be able to identify a looming cash crisis at an early stage that could otherwise result in a major fraud. You’ll be in a position where you can spot unusual sales patterns immediately – events that might signal fresh air invoicing, such as rapidly increasing turnover, a steep reduction in debtor days or an increasing number of credit notes.

OSMO® delivers live alerts, bespoke reports, automation of the audit trail, daily reconciliation, reproduction of invoices and improved collect out performance, enabling you to manage operational and transactional risk even more effectively.

I have been reading Jack Trout’s “In Search of the Obvious, the antidote for today’s marketing mess”.

The inside flap contains the context:

“The search for any marketing strategy is the search for the obvious.

We are in an era of killer competition. Category after category is perceived as a commodity. This fact is the central reason the critically important function of marketing is such a mess. It′s also why the average chief marketing officer barely lasts beyond two years in the job.

In this book, marketing guru Jack Trout clears up the confusion that surrounds the marketing profession. Instead of focusing on segmentation or customer retention or search engine optimization or data mining, marketers should be searching for that simple, obvious differentiating idea. Marketers not looking for the obvious had better have a very low price.

This search should begin with what Trout considers the best book ever written on marketing—even though it was published in 1916 and isn′t about marketing.

Entitled Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Business Man, it lays out the five tests of an obvious idea that will lead you to the right marketing strategy for any product”

And here are the Five Tests:

1. The problem when solved will be simple – the obvious is nearly always simple, so simple that generations of people looked at it without seeing it
2. Is the time ripe?
3. Does it check with human nature? i.e. would everyone understand it, without requiring any specialized knowledge?
4. Does it explode in people’s mind? i.e. “why didn’t I think of that?”
5. Put it on paper – does it still make sense when put on paper?

Most successful mashups whether they are produced as apps, widgets or dashboards rely on the above truths.

It goes without saying that technological evolution has fuelled every major business revolution, from agrarian to industrial. But every major business shift was spurred on by innovations that were seemingly unpredictable, yet visible to those with keen foresight. I’ve been reading some of the ideas emanating from the corridors of The Dashis Group recently and they echo with a number of my own thoughts on the subject of Social Business Design:

“Content and data are everywhere. People are creating and curating content like never before. As data storage becomes cheaper, businesses are storing, archiving and mining more data than previously possible. The increasing openness of APIs and data portability make more enterprise data available for both consumers and employees to consume. Free flow of data also allows business partner relationships to be readily analyzed and optimized.”

Exploiting these trends requires more than simply adopting new technologies. It requires forward-looking organizations to embrace change, mapping these trends to the strategic goals of the business.

In February, I wrote a book review on “Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.” Since then, I have been tracking other commentator’s reviews. I particularly  enjoyed this post on CIO Zone by Lisa Yoon:

“There’s a difference between information and insight, as the book illustrates early on. Information tells you what happened; insight examines how and why it happened. Information is the skinny on what ‘s going on now; insight proposes what actions to take next based on the current situation.”

The reality is we need both – without accurate, recent information, it is extremely unlikely we will gain the level of insight we require as the basis for executive decision-making.

CIO Technology briefing is always a useful source of authoritative comment and helpful in testing the temperature of a market at any one time.

In an article entitled, “Global banking brands need to re-think attitudes to IT”, David Skinner highlights the major issues: “Major world banks have been at the forefront of using IT and technology services for 20 years. They have developed sophisticated procurement functions such as smart sourcing; they were early adopters of the offshoring model as captive owners and users of third parties; they engaged in transformation projects to deliver business process change; and they have tried to manage contracts efficiently by creating large governance teams and innovative scorecards to measure performance.

But at the end of the day have they captured as much value as they could have done from these initiatives? Has being at the forefront and being early adopters of many technologies led to better value for money than other industry sectors?”

To the team at Vision Critical, the answer is, “it depends on what technologies.”

If your organisation would seriously value a technology solution that involves the effortless transfer and total visibility of  the most accurate customer financial information available, that will not only help you save time and money but will also enable you to increase the value of your sales at less risk – all with minimal impact on your IT infrastructure – then Vision Critical would really value a conversation.

I have been reading the latest blogs from gtnews Treasury Insider and I was struck just how cash flow forecasting has stirred up debate and comment on the site, from corporates, banks and consultants alike.

While debates rage on regarding forecast frequency, the involvement (or more specifically lack of involvement) from subsidiaries and the varying mathematical models behind creating successful forecasts, the response concludes that the “accuracy and transparency of cash flow information will be critical.”

A recent blog on the site in connection with this topic stated: “I admit that I am quite confused when it comes to the topic of cash flow forecasting. I have read all the great articles that have been written over the years and tried my best to understand the mathematics behind cash forecasting techniques. I don’t need convincing of the importance of the topic. With reduced liquidity and credit available, it is important to know what cash there is today within the company. It is vital to understand what cash we will have or will need in the short term as well, so we can plan for it.”

As a burning issue, cash flow forecasting just gets hotter.

If Abraham Maslow had constructed a hierarchy of needs for businesses, “intelligence” would surely have been at the base as a fundamental need for survival.

Leveraging a financial organisation’s source data assets is the platform to creating specific ‘views’ to drive the business forward effectively and efficiently from a management perspective. Turning data into information and therefore actionable intelligence (decision making), creates true business transparency at an organisational level.

In the first instance, the key is always to look directly at the source of data origination. With OSMO®, automated, effortless transparency and transfer of financial information from the borrowers’ accounting systems to the individual lender’s systems is satisfying a vital business need.

Transparent business information and intelligence is needed now more than ever. The current economic conditions mean financial organisations need both immediacy and business transparency to make the best decisions.

Financial organisations benefit from knowing how to react rapidly to the changing business environment and market landscape.

Now is the time to find – and act on – the right opportunities for your business. This  requires five key criteria to be met:

1. Visibility: Understand your business opportunities and risks through accurate, automated real-time information

2. Right: Use the data to highlight both risks and opportunities within each ledger and portfolio

3. Now: Opportunity is fleeting, act now not in months. Risk requires early warning – automated data feeds give you access to information ‘news’ as it breaks to help you spot potential incidences of fraud.

4. Cash: Instant information in relation to a company’s cash movements facilitates powerful forecasting – find out more about CashCaster from Vision Critical for your customers and how cash captures opportunity.

5. People: Get everyone in your organisation focused on opportunity through the power of real-time, right-time information.

According to the Economist, the quantity of information in the world is soaring: “mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes.”

Apparently, the video footage from American drone aircraft in 2009 sent back around 24 years’ worth of video footage. They are now saying that this year they expect to produce 10 times as many data streams as their predecessors, and that those in 2011 will produce 30 times as many.

The Economist observes that the data deluge is already starting to transform every aspect of our lives  today, including business, government and science’ The publication comments that: “Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is hard enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still.”

They conclude that “The best way to deal with the drawbacks of the data deluge is, paradoxically, to make more data available in the right way, by delivering  greater transparency in several areas.” Our thoughts exactly.

Data profiling is the detailed examination of the structure, relationships and content of existing information sources to help create an accurate picture of the state of corporate data.

There are three essential  components of a data profiling discovery exercise that, when combined, create a clear picture of the nature and scope of potential data quality issues:

Structure – Do the data patterns match expected patterns? Does the data match the corresponding metadata?

Data – Are the data values complete, accurate and unambiguous? Is the data standardised according to established conventions?

Relationship – Does the data adhere to specified required key relationships across columns and tables? Are there inferred relationships across columns, tables or databases? Is there redundant data?

I was reading an excellent article by Liz Benison of Capgemini at CIO UK today.  This states that the ideas behind Business Information Management (BIM) are common sense and logical and straightforward rather than rocket science. The article then makes the point that those organisations that have pioneered BIM ideas are reaping immense rewards from applying them. The three step sequence described in the feature is as follows:

“Step 1 concerns Business Performance Management. It seeks to provide a consistent framework within which business decisions can be made with confidence, and which enables strategy to be translated into action. It puts the focus on accurate, usable metrics and on pinpointing those who will be responsible for producing, monitoring and achieving them.

Step 2 produces an Information Strategy with the focus on actively managing information to support better decisions. It puts in place processes for the governance of information, for its sharing inside and outside the organisation, and for ensuring that a single, consistent view is gained.

Step 3 involves a Solution Centre approach that ensures business and IT people work together to design, develop, deploy and support information across the organisation. It also addresses any skills deficiencies acting as roadblocks on the effective use of information, and any ‘cultural deficiencies’ impeding appreciation of just how central information is to meeting business objectives.”

The Futurist magazine’s annual Outlook recently published their forecasts for 2010 and beyond. Here are some of the more interesting predictions:

Quantum computers will arrive by 2021 that use spinning electrons rather than silicon-based chips to process data, which will increase speed astronomically.

Search engines will become human-like by 2050. With the “semantic web”, artificial intelligence (AI)-based search engines will comprehend web users enquiries like a human research assistant.

We may not need screens in the future. Mathematicians in Finland have already produced a blueprint for instruments that would project  3-D floating images, using nanomaterials that bend light, and can be focused anywhere.

Architects will harness energy, for the movement of crowds in cities. MIT researchers have created a system of floor blocks that generate power when the blocks rub against each other as people walk on them.

The number of people reading books will actually increase as more books are published digitally, and available on-line.

Robots will be in the home. South Korea has mandated a robot in every home by 2020, and Japan hopes to accomplish this by 2015.

Virtual education will become mainstream by 2015, and may replace traditional education by 2030.

People will  create Avatars of themselves in significant detail to live way beyond their biological lifetimes.

The power to make things invisible may be soon at hand. Optical cloaking, bending light will be perfected, rendering far away objects invisible.

The Prime Minister announced today that £200m from the UK Innovation Investment Fund (UKIIF) will be used to benefit digital, life sciences and advanced manufacturing businesses.

This follows an announcement last month that £125m from the UKIIF will be invested in low carbon and clean tech sectors, bringing the total UKIIF investment to £325m.

The UKIIF today completed first closing on this £200m UK Future Technologies Fund with fund managers the European Investment Fund (EIF). EIF have raised £100m to match Government funding. They will now make their first investments in UK venture funds, investing in technology-based businesses where there are significant growth opportunities, driving the UK economy forward and creating highly skilled jobs.

Speaking to the Global Investment Conference, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said:

“Our new £325 million Innovation Investment Fund – launched as part of Building Britain’s Future – shows our commitment to the industries and the technologies that will create the skilled jobs of the future.

“This fund, seeded by the Government, is bringing private venture capital to growing enterprises. It is already providing £125 million of funding to high tech, low carbon businesses. From today, a further £200 million will be available for life sciences, digital and advanced manufacturing.”

Science and Innovation Minister Lord Drayson said:

“Despite a tough market, the UK Innovation Investment Fund goes from strength to strength. Private funds have matched the Government’s investment and money can now flow into promising technology companies. This is just the boost these companies need as the economy returns to growth.”

The UK Innovation Investment Fund was announced last June by the Prime Minister as part of the Government’s strategy for Building Britain’s Future. The European Investment Fund and Hermes Private Equity and were each confirmed as fund of fund managers for two separate funds of funds. Backed by £150m investment by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department of Health, it has already attracted private investment to more than match this amount with the total first closing of £325m.

Chief Executive of the European Investment Fund, Richard Pelly said:

“The leveraging of the UK government’s funds and expertise coupled with our experience in the EU venture capital market will help us to support the next generation of high growth, high tech businesses”.

The Government appointed Capital for Enterprise Limited (CfEL) to advise on the development of the UKIIF and to lead the process of selecting and appointing the investment fund managers. CfEL negotiated the fund with EIF as part of the Government’s continuing drive to support young British businesses.

The UKIIF will target small growing businesses, start ups and spin outs including pre-profit and pre-revenue stages of development.

Evidence shows that venture capital-backed companies significantly out perform other companies in terms of their ability to create wealth and generate the spill-over benefits including export performance and the creation of high skilled jobs vital to the economy.

We are awaking to a new world order marked by a wave of expectation (if not regulation) requiring greater transparency, more self-sufficient customers with rising expectations, and greater competition from traditional and non-traditional players.

According to a recent Accenture survey of bank executives and private equity firms, the winners in financial services by 2012 will improve the customer experience, reduce non-strategic costs, optimise their pricing and overcome vulnerabilities to risk.

The recent interest among banks in core platform transformation is being driven by factors such as emerging foreign competitors, direct non-traditional (online)
financiers and M&A activity.

Accenture say that banks should start the transformation process by assessing what benefits and savings can be derived from their core platform architecture – determining, for example, how they can lay the infrastructure to enable the selling of bundled products and otherwise increase share of market and share of wallet. They added that banks also need a well-defined release strategy that balances speed of implementation with delivery risk and cost.

Accenture has found that some organisations opt for the “big bang” approach, in which they effectively cut over to all new systems at once. Others find it more appropriate to break up the effort into manageable releases—by product, customer group, branch or other capabilities—to reduce operational and delivery risk.

To fend off growing competition, banks’ technology platforms must also enable them to have a single view of their customers so that they can interact with them more efficiently and profitably.

There’s a new book hot off the press: Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results by Thomas Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris (both of Competing On Analytics fame) and Robert Morison. The sequel to Competing On Analytics, CIO Insight magazine has named the original book, one of the all-time “Top 15 Most Groundbreaking Management Books”.

The book focuses on the big picture where better decisions drive outstanding performance, improve competitiveness and help organisations differentiate themselves from the competition. It puts the ‘business’ into ‘business information’.

The book, which is case study rich, is intended to be an practical and implementation-focused guide that describes a five-step model for deploying and succeeding with analytical initiatives.

Five factors are presented as being critical if an organisation is to succeed at ‘doing analytics’. The authors group use the acronym DELTA (the Greek letter that signifies “change” in an equation):

D for accessible, high-quality data

E for an enterprise orientation

L for analytical leadership

T for strategic targets

A for analytical talent

Although not exclusively devoted to the financial crisis by any means,  there are  chapters that feature some commentary on the role of analytics in the financial services industries.

With calls for improved risk management, transparency and integrity in every boardroom, data governance is now a business imperative.

There is an inherent need for the modern financial services organisation to break the dominance of the business silos which hamper positive cultural and technical change.

Data management strategy is now a paramount consideration since it directly affects profitability and sustainability. Minimising risk and improving the integrity, speed and accuracy of information transfer and retrieval is critical to success.

The data management landscape now features technology where manual intervention and the possibility of error-risk can be eliminated. This not only allows for improved decision-making but will also enable the business to redeploy people to more rewarding and profitable roles.

Information is at the heart of every financial services organisation. As such, it should not be relegated to an administrative function or considered as a low-value, low-priority function in a departmental or divisional backwater.

Isn’t it time that data governance was brought to the top of the board agenda, if not for the sake of compliance, for the welfare of the enterprise?

The Five C’s form the underlying criteria for most types of loan: Capacity, Collateral, Capital, Conditions, and Character.

Capacity – does the applicant have sufficient income from their revenue streams to make the payment?

Collateral – are there assets that can be used if the borrower defaults? If so, the secured collateral is then sold by the lender to satisfy the debt.

Capital – do the business owners have their own money invested in the business? With more money invested, the borrower will work harder to ensure payments are made.

Conditions – do the current economic conditions have a negative or positive impact on payment?

Character – what is the applicant’s nature?  What is the background of the directors of the borrower’s business? What is their track record? What is the level of trust?

The first of these criteria, ‘Capacity’, is fundamental to the credit equation. Vision Critical enables lenders to identify if a business is right to move from conventional funding to asset based lending and the all-important effect on the cash flow and funds flow.

Through OSMO®, they can identify immediately whether a business is buying or selling more than it needs for its trading and if sales are being pre-invoiced or fresh air.

The ability to interact real-time confers many benefits. It escalates the transaction process and has dramatic implications for the speed of decision-making, both for the customer and for the financial services company.

Harnessing real-time analytical capabilities with enterprise transactional systems allows you to observe current situations and respond appropriately by:

- Predicting what customers need and want on a more personalised level
- Understanding how to maximise the availability of funds at the individual customer level
- Determining how to cost-effectively allocate marketing, sales and service resources
- Measuring the effectiveness of resource allocation decisions
- Creating product and services bundles based on behavioural and transactional information
- Driving intelligent decision-making across channels and contact points
- Aligning value delivered to customers with value generated from customer relationships.

Real-life decisions supported by real-time information. Now that’s really useful.

Just because they’re shinier, Twitter and Facebook often grab all of the media attention for being social networking powerhouses, which for B2C marketing they are!

However, with more than 55 million users (in over 200 countries, representing 170 industries) LinkedIn is the world’s largest online business social network. From a B2B financial marketing perspective, having a presence on LinkedIn can prove instrumental in building valuable contacts and influencing your target audiences – from prospects and potential employees to industry peers.

Here are just a few practical ways you can use the rich functionality of LinkedIn for your business:

Complete your profile. Include previous jobs, education history and upload a photo of yourself. Use your industry keywords throughout – so search engines can pick up on them.

Upload your existing contact list. This will tell you which people in your contact database are already members. These are the first people to connect with.

Find contacts who are already on LinkedIn. Create a mindmap on paper of the previous companies you have worked for, clients that you knew well but have lost touch with and key partners. Then write down the names of key people under those headings and invite them to connect.

Target specific companies. Search for contacts by industry, interest group, job function, or location.

Use the ‘get introduced through a connection’ feature. Ask your first-level contacts for relevant introductions to their first-level contacts. People are much more likely to trust you when you come with an endorsement from someone they already trust.

Research your prospects before meeting them. You can learn a great deal by reading individual profiles. This can give you great hooks for dialogue.

Give and solicit recommendations within your network. Ask your clients to write a recommendation that will appear on your profile and on theirs. Write recommendations for other people, even if they haven’t requested it.

Find or create Groups. You can find key contacts within your targeted industry by using LinkedIn’s Search Groups function. Taking an active part in forums will increase your networking opportunities and enable you to build your contact base and your authority within the group.

Pose questions and answer others’ questions in the Answers section.
Gain immediate views from experts within a sector. Identify if there are industry experts you need to connect with. Also, providing full and helpful answers also positions you as an authority.

Use the special applications. Integrate blogs, Twitter updates, slideshare and even undertake surveys with your groups.

Update your status. Keep top of mind by linking out to upcoming events, blog posts, or your site. Always include something new that you’re doing. This will appear on your various Groups’ emails.

A number of people have asked me where the name OSMO® comes from.

We feel that the scientific term, ‘Osmosis’, is a powerful way of describing the extraction and transfer of customer financial information with effortless transparency.

One dictionary definition is the “diffusion of fluid through a semipermeable membrane from a solution with a low solute concentration to a solution with a higher solute concentration until there is an equal concentration of fluid on both sides of the membrane.”

The fact that the information sent from the borrower’s accounts package is  equal (identical) to the lender’s information following the transfer, highlights the accuracy and efficiency of the process.

The effortless nature of the assimilation or absorption also works in a more familiar context, e.g. “she learned French by osmosis while residing in Paris.”

For the want of sounding like Stephen Fry in an episode of QI, continuing with the etymological theme, Osmosis has its roots in the Greek, ‘endosmos’, ‘to push’.

How do you tell when a situation is right for a partnership? The longest-lived partnerships occur where each party brings something to the table that the other lacks. Here are some situations when it makes sense to partner, where for example:

A business offers a unique or desirable product but lacks access to the other’s specific niche market by ’sector’ or ‘geography’.

A potential partner has a large customer base or access to a target market but needs the product in order to complete its own offering, add significant value and, therefore, gain a competitive edge.

A business has a niche skill-set or provides a highly specialised service. Often it makes sense to outsource a function to specialists so you can focus on your core competencies.

One company is trying to break into a new market or expand, and wants to keep its capital costs or staffing costs down. For instance, one company may offer a technology product and needs consulting help for a combined software/hardware/solution sale. Instead of hiring consultants, it might partner with a group of consultants who are already skilled and looking for products to market. That way it keeps its headcount and staffing costs down.

A company can screen and evaluate acquisition targets. This is usually done by larger companies with an acquisitive appetite – a “try before you buy” strategy.

I read some inspirational tech quotes today. I thought it would be good to share them with you:

Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.
Andrew Grove

The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.
Steve Ballmer

I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail.
Eric Schmidt

We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.
Pierre Omidyar

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
Steve Jobs

Information and communications technology unlocks the value of time, allowing and enabling multi-tasking, multi-channels, multi-this and multi-that.
Li Ka Shing

Today, more than ever, transparency is critical to the provision of business information and intelligence. There are five fundamental qualitative characteristics of information transparency:

Materiality: Material items should be capable of identification at a detailed / granular level.

Accuracy and reliability: Such information should be verifiable and neutral (i.e., free from error or bias).

Comprehensiveness: Information should be comprehensive and in a suitable form for aggregation, consolidation and assessment.

Relevance and timeliness
To be useful, information must be relevant to the decision-making needs of users to enable assessment of expected risks and returns. To be relevant, information should be delivered with sufficient frequency and timeliness to give a meaningful picture of the activity in question.

Comparability
Another essential characteristic of transparent information is comparability. It should be  possible to compare information across sectors, geographies, timescales and by relative trends in financial position and performance.

OK, I know it’s Friday but I couldn’t help thinking of OSMO® as an ‘Avatar’ when I saw the movie poster again this morning.

For those who haven’t seen it,  the film Avatar is a stunning and vivid depiction of an entire fantasy world unimaginable without serious help from a visionary director, 1,000 special effects artists, a $300M budget and a pair of 3D glasses.

However, there’s one feature of the movie that’s more realistic than you may think: the idea of using avatars in the workplace. In the film, protagonist Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine, is assigned to field duty assuming the form of an alien Na’vi on the moon Pandora.

As strange as it may sound, thousands of real-world employees are beginning to use avatars as part of their regular jobs. Research has shown how employees at American companies like IBM, Accenture, Cisco, State Farm, Intel, BP and Wells Fargo log into virtual worlds and use avatars to brainstorm with colleagues, recruit employees, sell to customers, attend leadership training, manage programs, direct operation centers, and collaborate with company groups around the world.

They  occupy avatar bodies to collaborate, compete, diagnose, search, inspect, calculate, audit, analyse, schedule, organise and communicate.

So don’t be surprised to see OSMO at a virtual meeting soon!

The poem, “The Rock”, by T.S. Eliot says something quite profound about the data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy developed by Russell Ackoff.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in the information?

So, what is “knowledge” in the DIKW pyramid? For Ackoff, knowledge transforms “information into instructions.” Milan Zeleny, who came up with the hierarchy a couple of years before Ackoff, says that knowledge is like the recipe that lets you make bread out of the information-ingredients of flour and yeast (with data as the atoms of the ingredients).

The European Committee for Standardisation’s official “Guide to Good Practice in Knowledge Management” says: “Knowledge is the combination of data and information, to which is added expert opinion, skills and experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used to aid decision making.”

At Vision Critical, our emphasis is on knowledge being “actionable” because of the business context, and on knowledge being a refinement of information because that’s how our client’s extract real value from data.

In markets such as Asset Based Lending, we have observed that commitment to organisational and process-driven capabilities to see vital strategic projects through is the most difficult for a competitor to duplicate. These lenders are dedicated to delighting clients, they engage employees, they establish reputations amongst their shareholders and they have excellent client lifetime value.

These capabilities essentially become the lender’s identity. They define what it is good at doing and, ultimately, what the company and the brand embodies. Here are eight of the most basic capabilities an organisation needs to emphasise:

•    Talent: attracting, motivating, and retaining competent and committed people to take forward a project and implement it.

•    Speed: making important changes happen fast.

•    Shared mindset: ensuring that customers and employees have positive images of and experiences with the organisation.

• Accountability: the disciplines that result in high performance and ensuring ROI plans are met fully.

•    Collaboration: working across boundaries to ensure both efficiency and leverage.

•    Learning: absorbing and spreading business intelligence with impact.

•    Leadership: embedding decision-makers throughout the organisation who deliver the right results in the right way.

•    Inventiveness: leveraging new technologies to facilitate process optimisation and save time and money.

I’ve just finished writing my regular column for this month’s Business Money magazine, this time on the topic of “2020 Vision – The Next Decade”. However, in order to accommodate the sub-headings required in the interests of clarity, I have had to ‘lose’ a paragraph .

I have retrieved the ‘lost paragraph’ and have posted it in full below as well as  expanding on a few of the discussion points it raises:

Many comparison sites and product directories scour the Web in order to assemble data on particular topics. They aggregate the data and present it in a  templated ‘at-a-glance’ format to facilitate customer choice.

These ‘accumulated pools of data’ have the potential to form the raw material for alternative information-based business opportunities. Importantly, these by-products may yield powerful, actionable information for even more profitable applications.

The one caveat here is that the sword can cut both ways; today’s Web-based aggregators which lack strong brands and value propositions may well find themselves aggregated tomorrow.

However, by way of illustration, McKinsey describes a scenario as to how these same principles can be applied very successfully to proprietary information: “A retailer using digital cameras to prevent shoplifting could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores and could also use these insights to improve its layout or placement of promotional displays. It might also sell the data to its vendors so that they could use real observations of consumer behavior to reshape their merchandising approaches.”

Rich Barton, the founder of Zillow,  describes the above process somewhat prosaically as shining “a light up into the dark reaches of the supply curve.”

What information do you have that once ‘repurposed’ would illuminate a new business opportunity or solve a business information need for your clients?

Text-based payments support for the earthquake relief efforts in Haiti has been nothing short of phenomenal.  The donations were made simply by texting “Haiti” to a special number and this then shows up as a charge on the mobile phone bill.

The proof of the power of ‘easy’ is that by January 15th, $11 million in donations had been received via text donations alone.  At $10 per transaction, that comes out to an astonishing 366,000 mobile payment transactions per day.

In an on-line recording of a Q&A session, Calvin Grimes, banking technology provider Fiserv’s mobile solutions manager, made the point that, “if use of your mobile device to pay for something is harder than pulling out a piece a plastic, consumers aren’t going to adopt it”.  Calvin goes on to state that they will need some form of a value-add (such as mobile coupons or reward redemptions) to carry mobile payments forward – which makes a lot of sense.

It will be interesting to see if the current wave of text-based donations ultimately serves as a “tipping point”, ushering in a broader awareness of mobile payments.

The parallels to the B2B financial sector are valid. The ability to use existing interfaces makes mobile payments incredibly easy, with rapidly-spiking adoption as a result.

Adoption of mobile payments approaches that require customers to buy, install, learn and acclimatise to new mobile devices, software and more complex interfaces will obviously take that much longer. Simplicity, as so often the case, is the key to widespread market adoption.

Thank you for your encouraging comments regarding our New Year’s advertisement in Business Money. We’re glad you enjoyed it as much as we did dreaming it up and hope you will join us in following the further adventures of OSMO® in the months ahead.

Next month, Vision Critical’s OSMO® character goes from keeping in shape to preparing for the 6 Nations. Please keep a look out for our rugby-themed ad – here’s a preview of the wording:

“Want to improve your information handling?
More accurate passing and receiving from OSMO®

As an Asset Based Lender in today’s economy, you need to be able to run with the new business ball without being tripped up by increased risk and operational costs.

In the competitive scrum, you need to drive your business forward by lending more. That means passing key information to you when it matters most, enabling you to read the game ahead. Tackling the challenges that are vital to your success with reports you can trust.

In a tough game, you need a safe pair of hands. Contact the Vision Critical team now to find out how OSMO® can power your success.”

According to a report on B2B Marketing Online today, over 70 per cent of European firms plan to adopt cloud-based B2B integration services in the next year as a means of reducing costs and infrastructure.

The study of over 300 senior IT managers by Sterling Commerce, an AT&T company, found that more than a third of those surveyed said cloud computing will reduce errors resulting from manual processes, adding that manual processing created the largest obstacle in their current B2B integration capabilities. Over 50 per cent of respondents also said they hope to drive down operating costs through better use of IT staff and better cost predictability.

Interesting the above key competitive advantages associated with the newly adopted cloud-based integration, mirror those of Vision Critical’s OSMO® software, highlighting a strong alignment with the most advanced thinking on B2B strategy.

“In today’s economy, companies are becoming acutely aware they need to optimise their B2B integration capability to reduce costs today and become more agile for competitive growth tomorrow”, comments David Carmichael, senior product marketing manager at Sterling Commerce.

“Achieving this at a time when few boards are prepared to entertain a project without a guarantee of an ROI, typically within a 12-month window, the ability to move from a capital expense to an operational one makes cloud-based B2B integration compelling.”

Gartner estimates that worldwide cloud services revenue will increase from $46.4bn (£28.7bn) in 2008, to $150.1bn (£93bn) in 2013. More specifically for integration as a service (IaaS), Gartner estimates that companies worldwide spent more than $1.5bn (£0.9bn) on IaaS and B2B integration outsourcing in 2009.

It was in November 2008, that we announced the fact that we had been granted a Community Trade Mark (CTM) for OSMO®. A Community Trade Mark (CTM) is any trademark which has been registered in the European Union as a whole (rather than on a national level within the EU). While other intellectual property rights have a limited duration, registered trade marks, such as OSMO® can last indefinitely.

It is with interest that I read that according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. intellectual property is now worth more than $5 trillion. Indeed, software and other intellectual property can be the most valuable assets for many technology and media companies. The competitive edge of emerging technology-related companies is their underlying intellectual property. It is said that in some cases (such as the Coca Cola trademark), the value of a company’s intangible assets far outweighs the value of its tangible assets.

Not surprisingly, asset-based lending has reflected this trend. Beyond securing obligations of companies seeking financing with more traditional collateral (such as debtors or stock), to provide the level of headroom required on larger deals, it is reported that some lenders are increasingly securing loans based upon intangible assets such as patents or copyrights, or even computer databases or the rights of software licensees and licensors. It just goes to show how tangible these intangibles can be.

Nearly two-thirds of chief executive officers (CEOs) believe that IT will play a crucial role in their business strategy during the anticipated economic upturn, a new survey has showed.

Research from technology advisory firm Gartner revealed that, out of the 200 British and American business executives questioned, 43 per cent anticipate increasing their post-recession IT investment.

45 per cent will maintain the same level of spending while 13 per cent said they were contemplating cutting the amount, Gartner’s study from the third quarter of the year showed.

Mark Raskino, research vice-president and Gartner fellow, said: “It is critical that chief information officers (CIOs) review business leaders’ rapidly changing tactical business priorities and often unstated new expectations of where IT can help as the economy turns.

“CIOs are in a good position to have that conversion right now. They should also take advantage of business leaders’ relatively positive attitude towards IT investment during budget negotiations.”

He added that the findings indicated a ‘warmer’ attitude towards IT, which CIOs should look to take advantage of during 2010.

Previous research from Gartner predicted that IT investment will rise by 3.3 per cent from 2009 to reach $3.3 trillion during next year.

On 30 November, the European Commission published a report of expert group’s opinions on e-invoicing. The group was designated to design a European e-invoicing framework which could contribute to the EU’s final decision; with particular interest needed on the requirements of small and medium sized enterprises.

E-invoicing, short for electronic invoicing is the electronic transfer of billing and payment information, via the Internet or other electronic means between the parties – businesses, the public sector, and consumers – involved in commercial transactions.

Compared to paper invoices, e-Invoices may offer huge advantages for companies – they are said to be easier to process, they reach the customer faster and can be stored centrally at very low cost. A recent report predicts potential annual benefits of up to €40 billion across Europe in the business-to-business field alone.

Main benefits of electronic invoicing

• Quicker retrieval of money from customers by reducing the time an invoice or payment is in the post;
• Reduced printing and postage costs;
• Processing is quicker and cheaper, as the information in electronic invoices can be fed directly into a company’s payments and accounting systems;
• Lower storage costs.
• Main obstacles to the wider use of electronic invoicing

E-Invoices are produced in a wide range of formats and according to many different standards. This hinders the smooth transfer of an e-invoice from one part to another and prevents the full benefits and cost savings of e-invoicing from being realised;

• Variation in national rules which govern the validity and acceptability of e-invoices in legal, financial and administrative terms. This makes their use in cross-border transactions within the EU difficult;
• Many potential users have concerns about the security of e-invoicing systems and the potential for misrepresentation and fraud.

The report, which does not necessarily represent the views of the Commission, will be open for consultation until 26 February 2010.

I was talking with a mathematician and programmer friend over the weekend about the advantages of Straight Through Processing (STP).

He described it as an initiative used by companies in the financial world to optimise the speed at which transactions are processed. This is performed by allowing information that has been electronically entered to be transfered from one party to another in the settlement process without manually re-entering the same pieces of information repeatedly over the entire sequence of events.

The purpose of STP is to create efficiencies, eliminate mistakes, and reduce costs having machines process trades instead of people. As technology has improved, and as financial services companies struggle to reduce costs, the popularity of STPs has increased substantially.

He then went on to list the benefits as follows:

• Greater visibility, transparency and consistency of processes
• Higher efficiency of processes through standardization and replication
• Improved quality of processes through implementation of proven methodologies and best practices
• Improved ability to track and manage processes
• Redeployment of individuals into income generative roles
• Enhanced customer service
• Redirection of cost savings to business-building strategic initiatives
• Competitive advantage

Sounds like a familiar concept to you? I thought so!

Global IT spending by financial services firms is set to reach $357.4 billion in 2010, an increase of 2.9% over 2009, as the tentative recovery picks up, according to research from Celent.

The figure compares to a 2.5% decline in growth in 2009 and will be followed by more robust spending on IT products and services of 4.9% CAGR from 2010 to 2012.

Firms in Europe and North America account for 36% and 33.1%, respectively, of the global IT investments by financial services institutions. Asia Pacific accounts for 25.2%, with Latin America and Africa making up the remaining 5.7%.

Among all regions, the fastest growth will be seen in financial services institutions in Asia Pacific, with IT spending increasing at 5.1% in 2010 and a CAGR of 6.2% from 2010 to 2012, when it is expected to reach $101.7 billion.

Spending in North America and Europe will climb more slowly, at a CAGR of around 4.5% from 2010 to 2012. Latin America and Africa are expected to grow at a relatively modest rate of 3.2% with spending in this region of $21.2 billion in 2010.

Spending on banking activities accounts for the largest portion of total IT outlay – nearly 50%, or $163 billion in 2010. Spending on insurance and securities and investments activities are expected to reach $103.9 billion and $70.1 billion, respectively.

As more and more new technology-driven solutions emerge, lenders are arguably now serving as solutions integrators, bringing various components together to provide a seamless experience for their B2B clients. With that comes more, not less, accountability to the customer.

By focusing on the client experience and combining a consolidated information management view with end-to-end client servicing,  lenders will continue to reinforce their relevance to our clients. In the current economic environment, we see our role as supporting those progressive lenders to  leverage innovation to help them drive efficiency, reduce risk, optimise operational and sales performance, and maximise working capital availability.

As solutions become increasingly driven by technology, the value of lenders’ relationships with their clients keeps changing. It is vital to remember that technology solutions will never replace the need for relationship management or the human touch, but may in fact reinforce the need for deeper client engagement.

Technology will undoubtedly play a larger and larger role behind the scenes, which means lenders must continue to focus on maintaining human interaction with clients. Innovation can ultimately prove to be a powerful means for deepening these critical relationships. Having access to accurate, transparent real-time information allows you to anticipate client needs and solve problems pro-actively.

The Surrey snows have forced me to get some serious reading done. This weekend I read a fascinating business book with a fairly uncompromising title that promised much and to an extent at least delivered it: “The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath.”

Its premise is that some businesses – and some people – will emerge from this downturn stronger and more dominant than when it started. Others will weaken and fade. It all depends on critical choices they make right now.

Geoff Colvin, one of America’s most respected business journalists, says even the deepest recession has an upside. The best managers know conventional thinking won’t help them win in tough times. They’re taking smart, practical steps that will not only keep them strong, but will also distance them from the pack for years to come.

The dozens of top-performing leaders Colvin interviewed reject the common view that slashing costs and firing employees are all that matter. They see the recession as a rich opportunity to reinvent their organisations and lay the groundwork for future growth.

Colvin’s ten solidly grounded strategies are designed to increase competitiveness and build  long-term value.

Here are some highlights:

* Reset priorities. Easy to say, harder to do. Pursuing the lofty goals set in good times can be disastrous now.
* Reevaluate people and steal some good ones. Mass layoffs are a tempting way to cut costs, but great companies often find smarter alternatives. And if your competitors are dumb enough to fire their best people, grab them.
* Keep investing in the core. Trim the fat from your budgets but not the muscle. The best companies actually increase some spending in a recession, funding the areas that make them unique and valuable.
* Don’t rush to cut prices. Many companies assume they must – yet the long-term damage often outweighs the short-term boost.

Colvin shows how these strategies work, using examples of major companies that have applied them with inspiring results.

There are obviously many more strategies that are being adopted with real success right now. We’d be really interested to hear more about your success stories.

Bruce Raine, President of IPBS commented “Continuing to invest in efficient integrated IT systems makes sense even during an economic downturn.” he says.

By carefully implementing more efficient systems, financiers will benefit from “lower transaction processing costs, increased accuracy and reduced operational risk.  By eliminating unnecessary manual processing significant cost savings can also be generated.  Resources can be redeployed to other client relationship activity and there is the possibility to reduce headcount through natural attrition without affecting service levels.”

Investing in up to date modern technology that can deliver exactly what the customer needs is an essential step in developing a lean IT infrastructure that can reduce costs, increase efficiency, mitigate risk and ensure financiers simply remain competitive. Those that continue to review their business processes and update their systems will reap the benefits. Costs will be contained and any future business expansion can be accommodated using existing systems without the need to increase staffing overheads.

Whilst organisations are under pressure to reduce costs, it is important that this is done without impacting on the performance of the core business. The current environment offers an opportunity for financial organisations to seek our new solutions and assess areas of weakness.  By continuing to research appropriate technology, businesses can put themselves in the best possible position to thrive as the economic recovery builds momentum.

It accurately predicted the rise of the home computer and the mobile phone. But it also suggested that plastic grass and robotic secretaries would be commonplace in the modern world.

Most people of a ‘certain’ age will remember ‘Tomorrow’s World’, a technological BBC news show that brought us stories of the latest developments and the ways in which our lives would be changed in the future. It was a sad day when this show was cancelled, since it rewarded viewers with some tantalising glimpses into the future.

It is vital that those who develop and manage technology in the financial services sector have an eye to the future in such a fast moving environment. Today, we are faced with a wide variety of distributed media in order to glean information, including blogs, user generated content and video.

So many new technologies are ready to make a big impact this year. Some of them will be brand new, but many have been gestating and are now ready to hatch. It has never been more important to keep up with developments. What do you think is coming our way in 2010? Please let us know and join in the conversation.

If 2009 served to highlight the shortcomings of governments and entire industries, 2010 is centered on the solution, which can only be determined by the implementation of transparent practices. I have featured some bon mots on the topic below that lend a variety of fresh perspectives on Vision Critical’s concept of ‘effortless transparency’:

“Greater transparency is an unstoppable force. It is the product of growing demands from everybody with an interest in any corporation – its stakeholder web – and of rapid technological change, above all the spread of the Internet, that makes it far easier for firms to supply information… With greater transparency will come greater accountability and better corporate behaviour. Rather than engage in futile resistance to it, firms should actively embrace transparency and rethink their values and generally get in better shape.”
Don Tapscott, The Naked Corporation

“Transparency is vitally important in what can be a very opaque process in Brussels. We’ve decided to open this up so people can understand the issues.”
Horacio Gutierrez

“With the Internet world, we can have people make both sides of the (lending) market, bringing more transparency and efficiency. It can be both more capitalistically efficient and socially beneficial.”
Chris Larsen

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it’s the transparency that counts.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“Our objective is to deepen and expand the market, reduce (price) instability, and boost transparency and efficiency.”
Darmin Nasution

“Along the way, there also have been major innovations and probably his best one is transparency: Recognizing the need to communicate continuously with markets in deciding how policy will be formulated.”
David Jones

“The condition in which nothing is hidden. This is an essential condition for a free market in securities. Prices, the volume of trading, and factual information must be available to all.”
Finance Dictionary

“A basic tenet of a healthy democracy is open dialogue and transparency.”
Peter Fenn

“I think it’s a good thing that there are bloggers out there watching very closely and holding people accountable. Everyone in the news should be able to hold up to that kind of scrutiny. I’m for as much transparency in the newsgathering process as possible.”
Anderson Cooper

“A comprehensive range of measures was agreed to increase transparency of financial activities, ensure better international supervision and prevent excessive risk taking. It is crucial this plan is implemented.”
Alistair Darling

“It’s time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.”
Barack Obama

Have you ever been in a conference room with a white board and someone using a marker and talking innovation? It all looks so easy. The stock price is £4, we’re going to drive it to £80 in two years – let’s not get bogged down in the detail – who has some bright ideas?

James A. Gardner has plenty of bright ideas in his book, “Innovation and the Future Proof Bank” and one of the most basic is that ideas are nowhere near enough for innovation. His ideas won’t fit on a white board, and they don’t lend themselves to some simple solution.

The former innovation chief at Lloyds TSB bank in London and a sophisticated blogger at BankerVision, he has been working in this innovation business for years. He has recently moved into government and now is a Director in Corporate Information Technology at the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK, where he is accountable for innovation, architecture and strategy.

Here is an excerpt from “Innovation and the Future Proof Bank”: “Controlling change is a mantra for IT organisations in banks. Given the opportunity to avoid a change, most IT Chiefs will do so. Unfortunately, though, almost everything an innovator does is likely to need a system change. This presents the key dilemma for an innovation professional: how to represent a change (which will likely have small short term returns) in a way that avoids it being subordinated by changes which have significant and immediate benefits.”

It isn’t every day that you come across a technology that offers sustainable returns above and beyond the investment timeframe. Yet, you can have OSMO® working for your organisation every day with minimal impact on your IT infrastructure. Which just goes to show: You can introduce radical change to future proof your operations, without the fear generally associated with changing your systems.

The economic tumult of the past two years has affected every facet of corporate operations, including IT.

In McKinsey’s fourth annual survey on information technology strategy and spending, they asked chief information officers (CIOs), chief technology officers (CTOs), other executives in the IT function, and additional C-level executives about their companies’ business technology agendas, the impact of the recession on their IT organisations, and their approaches to developing and executing IT strategies.

Today, we’re looking  forward to the fruits that 2010 will bring – described by technology commentators as ‘IT in the new normal’. Projections for operating budgets follow trends seen in last year’s survey. More than 60 percent of respondents expect IT operating expenses to decline or hold steady, reflecting a continued focus on “resetting” operating costs for an uncertain future.

Expectations for new investments, however, paint a different picture. More than 45 percent of respondents expect to increase investments, while about 20 percent see them holding steady. When there is a payback, it seems businesses are willing to invest; many of these investments are geared toward improving business operations, both to lower costs and improve effectiveness, echoing respondents views on where IT is offering value to the business.

Digging deeper into the data, financial-services firms lead all sectors with their spending and investing plans, a finding that may reflect improving business conditions in that industry. Thirty-three percent of financial-services respondents expect to increase operating expenses in 2010 (up from the 15 percent who expected increases last year), and 61 percent are considering an increase in new investments (up from 40 percent last year).

Vision Critical has the power to tip the balance even more in the favour of financial-services firms – by increasing investment in our technology, lenders will actually reduce their operational costs.

Words from the world of technology and social media are among those picked as the “Words of the Tear 2009″ in a list commissioned by Oxford University Press.

Tweetup – noun: a meeting or other gathering organised by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter. [from tweet + up on the pattern of MEETUP].

Hashtag – noun: a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets.

Tag cloud – noun: a visual depiction of the word content of a website, or of user-generated tags attached to online content, typically using colour and font size to represent the prominence or frequency of the words or tags depicted.

Slashdot effect – noun: the slowing down or crashing of a small website due to a huge increase in traffic when the website is linked to another, much more popular one.

Unfriend/defriend – verb: to remove from one’s ‘friends’ list (e.g. on a social networking website).

Bossnapping – noun: (in France) the prevention of senior managers from leaving company premises for a period of time by their employees, in order to protest about large-scale redundancies and cutbacks.

Zombie bank – noun: a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support.

Geoengineering/ecohacking – noun: the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming.
Jeggings – plural noun: close-fitting leggings made of fabric that resembles denim in appearance [from jeans + leggings].

Minute mentoring – noun: a system of advising aspiring professionals based on the format of speed-dating.

Phantonym – noun: a word that looks as it if means one thing but in fact means something quite different. [from ‘phantom + antonym] (for example fulsome, used by President Obama to mean ‘full’, when in fact it is now chiefly used in reference to excessive flattery).

Staycation – noun: a holiday spent in one’s home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions.

Simples – exclamation: used to say that something is very easy to achieve [from the 'compare the meerkat' TV advert].

Great Recession – noun: term for the current recession, modelled on the Great Depression.

Freemium – noun: a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content.

Paywall – noun: a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers.

With 2009, and the decade, drawing to a close, we’ve trawled back over a year’s worth of IT-related quotes to find just which ones really stood out, for the right or wrong reasons.

“In 2010, IT needs to step up and boldly announce to the world, “We have value.” IT is being held hostage by misguided attitudes about the value it can create. It needs to be like the young Caesar, who told his pirate kidnappers that they needed to double the ransom they were asking.”
Thornton A. May

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.”
Bill Gates

“If there’s no hardware or software in the cloud we are so screwed. But it’s not water vapour, all it is, is a computer attached to a network. What are you talking about? I mean, what do you think Google runs on? Do you think they run on water vapour? I mean, cloud? It’s databases and it’s operating systems and its memory and microprocessors and the internet. But all of a sudden, no it’s none of that, it’s the cloud! What are you talking about?”
Oracle chairman and CEO Larry Ellison

“Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.”
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock.

“After changing our passwords, I tried to pass the incident off to my wife … as a teachable moment. To which she deftly replied, ‘Well, it is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more internet banking for you.”
FBI Director Robert Mueller on being banned from online banking by his wife after a (nearly successful) phishing attack.

“The internet today is an open platform where the demand for websites and services dictates success. You’ve got barriers to entry that are low and equal for all comers. And it’s because the internet is a neutral platform that I can put on this podcast and transmit it over the internet without having to go through some corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship. I don’t have to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the internet as we know it. They say they want to create high-speed lanes on the internet and strike exclusive contractual arrangements with internet content-providers for access to those high-speed lanes. Those of us who can’t pony up the cash for these high-speed connections will be relegated to the slow lanes … We can’t have a situation in which the corporate duopoly dictates the future of the internet and that’s why I’m supporting what is called net neutrality.”
Barack Obama

In turbulent markets, ‘Organisational Agility’, which Don Sull, a professor of management practice at the London Business School, defines as “the capacity to identify and capture opportunities more quickly than rivals do”, is invaluable.

He continues: “Traditionally, managers have been equated with ship captains, peering through a telescope deep into the future, setting a long-term vision, and proceeding steady as she goes. In the new normal, however, managers must proceed through an impenetrable fog that obscures any view of the future. By building the organisation’s strategic, portfolio, and operational agility, managers can position their companies to succeed, come what may.”

However, none of this is possible without ‘Informational Agility’, the automated provision of accurate and transparent real-time information on which to base business decisions. The organisational and operational benefits include the ability to offer higher levels of funding, to manage your risk more effectively and to reduce operational costs. By being able to get closer to clients, identify areas of concern immediately,  see things before they happen and act more quickly on changing circumstances, OSMO® from Vision Critical delivers true Informational Agility.

Recently, many financial companies have increased the frequency of their strategic and operational reviews and drawn, ad hoc, on different sources of data in order to understand the broader market context. They should not let these practices lapse as the economy recovers. Rather, companies ought to institutionalise the collection of real-time data, supplement these with periodic first-hand observations in the field, and disseminate information widely throughout the organisation. The fundamental premise is that the most reliable source of predictive financial information is within the accounting package.

Why not talk to us to see what can happen when you add Informational Agility to your operational ability?

As financial organisations mature, they often face declining growth as innovation gives way to inertia. In order to achieve consistent levels of growth throughout their corporate lifetimes, firms must attend to existing core businesses while still considering areas they can grow in the future. The three horizons framework featured in the commentary on corporate strategy entitled The Alchemy of Growth, provides a structure for companies to assess potential opportunities for growth, without neglecting performance in the present.

Horizon one represents those core businesses most readily identified with the company name and those that provide the greatest profits and cash flow. Here, the focus is on improving performance to maximise the remaining value. Horizon two encompasses emerging opportunities, including rising entrepreneurial ventures likely to generate substantial profits in the future but that could require considerable investment. Horizon three contains ideas for profitable growth down the road – for instance, small ventures such as research projects, pilot programs, or minority stakes in new businesses.

The Alchemy of Growth seeks to cut through the uncertainty executives face in making their companies grow by drawing lessons from the experiences of 30 of the most successful growth companies. By analysing how successful companies devise and implement growth strategies, the authors found that linking together a series of measured steps in a “staircase” of sequential growth can deliver extraordinary results.

Although culturally suited to a technology solutions oriented organisation, such as Vision Critical, this plate-spinning approach to growth strategy applies equally to the lending environment.   This structured approach offers a lens for positioning growth efforts within your organisation, while staying focused on your core strengths today.

I was reading today’s Metro on the tube and I came across an article, ‘Transforming into a brand new reality’.

It was based on the views of Simon Sankaraya, aka Sanky, a founding partner of interactive agency AllofUs and D&AD Deputy President.

Sanky sees brands getting very excited about an emerging technological trend recently. “Augmented Reality (AR) combines real-world images with computer-generated content on screen,’ he says.  A basic form of it has been in use in broadcast for a while – like when weather reporters stand in front of changing weather maps (lately full of rain clouds).

It made me think of the juxtaposition of the OSMO character within a real world setting – ‘Augmented Reality’ sums up Vision Critical’s new ad campaign perfectly.

At a time where trust and transparency are at the fore of financial communications more than ever before, the use of proof points is now essential to sustaining confidence.

Business Money Editor Bob Lefroy once commented: “It was a master stroke being first to the party with the revolutionary IDeal discounting product, one that makes use of Vision Critical’s real time reconciliation systems. It allows greater exposure levels with much lower administration costs making the product a ferocious competitor in term of flexibility, cost and service.

The figures reflect this. Factoring business is down overall but just look at the discounting numbers with sales and advances up 31% and client numbers up 25%. Average loan size is up 5%, operational efficiency measured by the client/officer ratio has improved 50% since 2002.”

This contained a wide range of proof points. Within the space of a few paragraphs, we learn that:

1. Vision Critical works with BLUE-CHIP CLIENTS.

2. The level of third-party ENDORSEMENT is two-fold, that of the respected editor of the leading industry trade magazine and that of the client.

3. The product was FIRST to market with Vision Critical’s innovative technology.

4. An aggressive MARKET LEADERSHIP position established by messaging such as ‘master stroke’, ‘first to the party’ and ‘ferocious competitor’.

5. The client demonstrates SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANTAGE, as evidenced by the ‘revolutionary’ product reference (n.b. this approach can also be applied to patents, unique processes, industry secrets and guarantees).

6. The entire proposition is supported by HARD FACTS, unequivocal evidence of customer advantage – ’sales and advances up 31%’, ‘client numbers up 25%’, ‘Average loan size is up 5%’, ‘operational efficiency measured by the client/officer ratio has improved 50%.’

7. There has been sustainable improvement demonstrated by BEFORE AND AFTER COMPARISONS – ‘improved 50% since 2002′.

What proof points are important to underline your strengths? Could Vision Critical be one of them?

As the holiday season approaches, confidence among IT decision makers has made its greatest leap of the past 18 months as evidenced not only by our own survey but also that of CDW IT Monitor. Fuelled by IT investment expectations and emerging signs of good news about hiring, IT confidence has clearly returned to levels last seen before the start of the financial crisis in August 2008.

According to the latest CDW IT Monitor, almost half (48 percent) of corporate IT decision makers anticipate budget increases in the next six months, rising nine percentage points since October. In addition, more than three quarters (76 percent) of both corporate and government IT decision makers expect to replace or install new software in the next six months, the highest reading on record for the IT Monitor. The overall IT Growth Monitor, which measures anticipated IT investment, rose four points from 63 to 67, the largest gain in the past 18 months.

“There are a number of dynamics in the marketplace that, when combined, create a greater sense of optimism—especially during a time of the year when people traditionally feel more hopeful,” said Thomas E. Richards, president and chief operating officer, CDW. “However, some uncertainty lingers as potential federal legislation remains under debate. It will be interesting to see how confidence levels behave as these developments continue to take shape.”

Initial positive signs are also beginning to emerge for the IT job market. Twenty-two percent of corporate IT decision makers plan to hire additional staff in the next six months, an increase of 10 percentage points since October. Also, within the large business sector, 34 percent expect staffing increases, up 18 percentage points since the last IT Monitor.

The overall CDW IT Monitor index score increased two points from October to stand at 72, the highest reading since before the 2008 collapse of the financial markets, a strong supporting indicator of returning confidence and improved sentiment in the IT industry.

Today, Robert Peston, BBC’s business editor commented today in a piece entitled, “Can Banks Save the Planet”, that: “If the current entente between G Brown and N Sarkozy ruled the world, we would be well on the way to a global tax on financial transactions.”

He adds that “In a recent joint statement, the unlikely double act said that the “revenues from a global financial transactions tax” – perhaps better known as a Tobin tax – could help defray the costs of transition to a low-carbon economy, especially for developing countries.”

Whether it is the banks’ role to save the planet or even their responsibility is one matter, the other is how it could possibly be administered. Peston goes on to say that “If such transactions could be identified with confidence, then taxing them might be harmless to the prospects for sustainable economic growth or even a good thing.”

He concludes: “What would be required is solid data…Unless and until such data can be collected, the debate on whether a transaction tax could or should be implemented is probably going nowhere.”

The widespread implementation of OSMO® for automated and transparent transactional data extraction and transfer at source would effectively solve the levy information issue in one fell swoop. Transparency and taxation in perfect union.  Messrs Brown and Sarkozy, we await your conference call with pleasure,

I’ve just received my copy of the Business Money Plus email, that gives a  personal account of the ABFA Conference and also features the Vision Critical Technology Survey results just beneath Bob Lefroy’s review.

The survey findings have received coverage in some exciting and impressive quarters, notably Yahoo Finance which boasts an astonishing 58,433,000 visitors per day, IT News, European Internet Network News and World News Report. We have also come to the attention of the Twitterati with some key influencers ranging from independent technology commentators through to financial corporates such as BNP Paribas’ Latelier.

Gartner have back up our findings with a  report of their own. Hot foot on our own published results, their survey highlights that 71% of respondents claim revenue growth as a key aim in 2010, not cost-cutting. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs have acknowledged the importance of IT in the building of a post-recession strategy.

According to the survey, 62% of CEO respondents described the role of IT as key in their respective post-recession strategies, whilst 71% of respondents claimed turnover growth was a key objective in 2010. Cost-cutting proved the most important objective in last year’s survey, and it falls to the fifth most important driver over the next 12 months.

“With business leaders progressively shifting their time and attention away from the introspection of restructuring and tactical cost cutting, and back towards customer value propositions and servicing during 2010, IT leaders should propose new ways in which technology can be used to support existing and new customers. They should also discuss talent-management issues and consider special provisions for key talent,” said Mark Raskino, research vice president and Gartner fellow.

“Business leaders are gasping for growth after a long period holding their breath, and they are expecting to increase the importance of IT in their post-recession approach. It is critical that CIOs review business leaders’ rapidly changing tactical business priorities and often unstated new expectations of where IT can help as the economy turns. CIOs are in a good position to have that conversion right now. They should also take advantage of business leader’s relatively positive attitude towards IT investment during budget negotiations.”

Backing up CEO claims of IT’s importance in 2010, is news that 43% of respondents will increase the level of IT investment next year, with a further 45% maintaining 2009 levels. Just 13% of respondents admitted they’d decrease IT spending next year. Raskino commented positively: “These findings reinforce Gartner’s IT spending forecast of 3.3 per cent growth in 2010. With this warm attitude to IT, CIOs should stand their ground if peers attempt to gain investment share at IT’s expense.”

He added: “Now is the time for CIOs and their teams to help power economic recovery and make a major contribution to the future prosperity of their businesses.”

The findings endorse our own research and strengthen the case for confidence in respect of technology investment in 2010.

The following breaking story, based on recent independent research commissioned by Vision Critical, will hit the official financial newswire circuits tomorrow am. Here, we reveal the findings:

Technology is the critical focus area for financiers for 2010, according to a new independent research study commissioned by Vision Critical, leading software provider to the commercial finance industry.

The UK Financial Technology Survey conducted in November 2009, reveals that 83% of firms see technology solutions as a major source of competitive advantage for next year. Furthermore, half of those surveyed said that technology produces better returns than other investments.
Respondents span a wide range of financial sectors, ranging from asset based lending, supply chain management, risk and compliance to e-invoicing and payments.

CEO of Vision Critical, Oliver Chadwick comments: “It is encouraging to note that so many successful organisations attribute technology as a major source of competitive advantage. There is no doubt that technology solutions are enabling firms to add value to their clients as well as dramatically improve business integration and process delivery.”

When asked, “In which areas do you believe technology investments have the greatest positive impact on your organisation”, 91% stated that better integration of existing applications was paramount, followed by better alignment with strategic goals (55%).

According to the survey, the main reasons that financiers are now investing in technology solutions are: streamlining business processes, analysing business information and enhancing the service provision to clients.  90% of respondents ranked these reasons as important to very important in terms of weighting.

These were followed closely by minimising human error (80%), minimising risk exposure and knowledge capture / management (77%).  Reducing headcount was also cited by 70% of respondents.

Lenders measure their return on IT investments mainly by cost savings (81%) and staff productivity (75%), followed by speed of process (72%) and revenue generated (65%).

The technologies that firms are investing in are concerned primarily with visibility and transparency, evidenced by unprompted responses such as “business integration”, “data integration and data quality” and “better access to clients’ data”. Unsurprisingly, “risk management” and “fraud” also top the IT agenda of financiers today, with “automation of processing”.

The most innovative uses of technology in financial services mentioned comprise areas such as: “Electronic extraction and transfer of data from clients’ systems to funders” and “The creation of a true single view of the client, including their exposures and their products”, both of which have been driven by Vision Critical’s OSMO^® product, powering over 8 million transactions in the UK alone.

I used to think that people who spoke about “spending money to save money” were justifying their Christmas shopping spree or that shiny new executive car purchase. But as I have met more and more of our clients, it’s become very clear that the higher up in the organisation a person sits, the more attention is now being paid to how money is being invested to gain tangible savings for which there is a sound business case.

During the recent ABFA conference, Alastair Wilson, Head of the Bank of England’s Financial Institutions Division, discussed the importance of the banking sector rebuilding its balance sheet while supporting the recovery through lending to the real economy. What is abundantly clear is that companies and UK PLC must continue to invest in technology, if not accelerate that investment.

Executives want to know how the money is being spent from their budgets to gain return-on-investment (ROI) and to maximise and prioritise their IT budgets. Coming into 2010, C-level executives are not afraid to spend money now to save money in the long run. In fact, if there is going to be a strong or high payback, they want to spend the money as fast as possible to realise the economic returns as soon as possible.

I’ve noticed that during challenging economic times, too often the lower-level positions in an organisation translate corporate belt tightening initiatives from the top as times of “no spending” or “no budget.” This is all too often an incorrect interpretation and it can be misleading. The directive from above may instead be about asking the organisation to review how existing budget is being spent today compared to other ways it may be allocated to gain a greater ROI.

2010 is not the time to stop spending, neither is it the time for prevarication! The bottom line is that the smart money is on spending to save money, and that budget can usually be found if there is a will to achieve real returns!

Gartner, always one to beat the rush, tends to predict their strategic technologies earlier than most. One of the strategic technologies heralded for 2010 is ‘Advanced Analytics’.

Optimisation and simulation is about using analytical tools and models to maximise business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. Gartner describes this as as a ‘third step’ in supporting operational business decisions.

“Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimisation and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.”

Using our new product, ‘CashCaster’, we can now build a picture that will predict the cash flow and funds flow movements of a business in the coming 30 to 60 days. The information produced by OSMO^® identifies if that business is right to move from conventional funding to asset based lending and the forecast effect on the cash flow and funds flow.

Advanced Analytics – sounds like ‘Cashcaster’ to me!

Maurice Craft, managing director of Regency Factors and Chairman of the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA), presided superbly over the Annual Conference, “Back to Basics”.

His conclusion in his key note speech that reputation is vital, underpinned the entire conference theme.

In this economy, protecting a financial firm’s reputation is both the most important and most challenging task facing senior executives today, according to a recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Furthermore, there is broad agreement that reputation risk has increased significantly over the last five years for several reasons, including a string of high-profile market failures as well as tightening regulatory pressure.

Dr. Majorie Dijkstra of the Reputation Institute gives a four-step process for managing reputation risk, summarised below:

1. Risk identification – assessing the gap between stakeholder’s perceptions and beliefs and the actual performance of the company.
2. Prioritisation (risks and stakeholders) – assessing the probability of risks and the impact of the risk on reputation.
3. Mitigation – assessing the best response based on controllability of risk, the impact of risk on the business across stakeholders and the cost of implementing the strategy.
4. Monitoring – closely monitoring changes in stakeholder’s beliefs and expectation that may affect reputation.

Our view is that corporate reputations and integrity of information are linked. Those companies that care about their reputation, similarly care about the quality, accuracy and integrity of the information upon which they base their business decisions.

Vision Critical not only delivers assured integrity and transparency of information on transfer, it provides the information in real-time, enabling financiers to lend more, with greater certainty and speed – more securely. These are the four key factors that will influence economic recovery, the generation of confidence and the sustainability of the financial sector in the eyes of SMEs and the Government.

I’ve just come out of Philip Learmont’s session at the ABFA Conference, ‘Reducing Risk and Cost with Document Automation’.

It is not just that he is a genuinely good bloke (I enjoyed a great fish and chip supper with him and the guys from Vision Critical last night) but that he conveys a strong message to the industry with clarity and purpose as to the competitive advantages of e-based solutions throughout the ‘Order to Cash Process’.

All too often, document management is seen as an ‘end of life’ activity, whereas dematerializing it as early as possible in the process permits a step change in processing at cost, cash flow, risk and process levels.

The savings are obvious, not only in terms of postage but also in staff costs. The cash flow benefit is similarly compelling: Transparency in terms of debtor activity, focus on those who need chasing, speed of same day delivery, communication and query capability, supporting information such as linked PODs and copy invoices. Philip then outlines risks and mitigation through e- based solutions.

The technology is now available to the receivables and ABL markets to achieve effective document automation. This is certainly proven in other markets and there is the potential for strong first mover advantage.

As Oliver Chadwick recently mentioned in his column in Business Money magazine: “If all 8 million transactions processed by OSMO^® had all been sent as traditional invoices, it would have resulted in 51 metric tons of paper. That, in turn, represents 960 trees which have been saved, in addition to 113 barrels of oil, 231,785 kilowatts of electricity, 138 cubic metres of landfill space and 1,515 kilograms of air pollutants. Consider that across Europe, there are currently some 15 billion paper invoice transactions and you can see the scale of both the problem and the opportunity for the commercial finance industry. It is time that everyone involved in the receivables industry started taking CSER generally and e-invoicing specifically very seriously indeed.”

Add this to the comments made by Philip and it becomes a very persuasive story indeed, which at least one female audience member described as ‘seductive’.

2010 must surely be the toughest year to call since Bob Lefroy started Business Money.

I think we all look forward to the economic session at the ABFA Conference today for an informed glimpse into the future.

A number of people I spoke to yesterday at the ABFA Welcome Reception, sponsored by Vision Critical, predicted that next year will see a continuation of the refinancing and turnaround focus we have witnessed throughout 2009. Asset Based Lenders say that they are receiving actual or anecdotal evidence from corporate advisers of percolating trickles of transactional activity.

As a conference theme, ‘Back to Basics’ speaks of a solid platform and reminds us that we can’t be complacent. Stephen Wells of De Vere & Co added the caveat that we may not so much be at the top of the V but at the mid point of the W. Certainly, the unprecedented shock of the past two years should theoretically lead to a more balanced, less risky pathway to growth – one in which the short-term returns may be lower, but the long-term rewards for management success will be a lot more sustainable and secure.

Mat Heritage of Vision Critical was rather more bullish and feels that the conference theme should be ‘Opportunity Knocks’. Hughie Green aside, tough times can open up opportunities.

Recessions upset the status quo: Often both gains and losses can be more pronounced than usual. Recession can be the optimum time to overtake competitors. Successful athletes often choose times of maximum stress to mount attacks, increasing their pace on severe inclines. In a similar vein, proactive marketing includes both the sensing of the existence of the opportunity (a tough hill and fatigued opponents) and an aggressive response (possessing the necessary strength or resource) to the opportunity.

At this time, clients also put much more thought into their choices – which means they may be unusually open to a financial marketer’s messages. In a more collaborative, less transactional world as we have right now, closer relationships with customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders are paramount.

Downturns have the tendency to greatly magnify benefits and accelerate rewards. Invest in the right technology and you can increase process efficiency, drive down operational cost and gain early warning against risk at a time when you need to most. Invest in marketing and you will gain a greater share of voice during ‘quieter’ times with sustainable benefits and the opportunity to position your organisation ready for the the upstroke of the W.

Opportunity knocks? I believe so.

Here are three of the hottest Tech Trends for 2010:

Altiances (Alternative Alliances)
While it makes sense to build partnerships in good times, the rationale for alternative alliances is even stronger during a time of economic challenges. Strategic alliances allow firms to create new bundles of value, increase distribution, expand into new markets, test new approaches, fill market gaps, reduce overhead, leverage resources and share risk. Can Vision Critical form that vital link between your partners to deliver superior value or even a brand new hybrid product or service?

Apcceleration (Application Acceleration)
2010 will be the year where financiers start to get their heads round useful mobile marketing applications. By that, we are not talking about old-school WAP web sites. It may be idea led or data (mash-ups) led but it’s the right time for financial organisations to start to make the most of the app revolution and accelerate development now to steal a march on the competition. What role could Vision Critical play in the effortless and accurate provision of source data for your apps.

Tribalogy (Tribal Technology)
The creation of passionate groups or tribes around a common interest, market, product or geographic reach using social media technologies will become even more important in 2010. The recent Tribalization of Business study by Deloitte has found that 94% of businesses will continue or increase their investment in online communities and social media next year. What technologies will reach your target tribes? What are their information needs?

For most people, the “Real-Time Web” is synonymous with the exploding number of live social activities online, from tweets on Twitter to status updates on Facebook to the sharing of news, web links and videos on a myriad of other sites. It’s a whole new layer of innovation that’s opening up on the web.

As a lender, there is no doubt about the premium you place on timely information. Today, it has reached a point where the value of information diminishes in direct proportion to how old it is. The converse is true and accurate, timely, actionable information can make all the difference between profit and loss on a transaction. Information’s growth and absorption has grown at an exponential rate.

We live in a world in which the newspaper is in danger of becoming obsolete in favour of digital media where you can break stories in a matter of minutes. But minutes are not fast enough for our information-hungry communities anymore. For example, if it takes us several minutes to break a story, it may be too late – Twitter probably has already broken the story and thousands of people are already discussing its ramifications.

However, the Real-time Web goes way beyond Twitter to a fundamental re-thinking of the way the Web works through to the way content is transferred, filtered, organised and archived online. We’re reaching a point where the flow of information has become so heavy that the only way to really keep track of it is via real-time web tools. The fact itself has huge consequences shaping the way that businesses operate and what they expect from clients, suppliers and internal processes. But there are some major disadvantages to the real-time evolution. With faster information, there need to be more filters and checks to ensure its accuracy.

This trend brings up two very important questions. First, is the Web going to become more and more of a real-time phenomenon, where speed matters most of all? Secondly, is it sustainable and can you filter the information so that it does not overwhelm?

On the first question: the general trend seems to be towards real-time. As long as demand for information exceeds supply, faster information will be valued by our society.

The answer to the second question is the most difficult one to answer. We can only read and listen to so much at a time. There may very well be a tipping point where the need to quell the information flow is heightened, but as long as the technology exists and develops, real-time will continue to move forward. We should expect faster information, faster technology, and more filters to help us control it.

Real-Time solutions from Vision Critical exploit all of the opportunities afforded by the medium described above, with none of the problems associated with Real-Time Web. Since OSMO^® draws real-time information from the original source, i.e. the accounts package, without manual intervention, the integrity of the information is peerless. The software allows complete connectivity with minimal impact on infrastructure. The transparency and visibility of business information makes OSMO^® the automatic choice to create innovative solutions for any lender, capturing the spirit of the Real-Time Web in its purest form.

The filters and analytical tools that check the validity of the information, combined with accurate real-time reporting resolve the main problems discussed above and address the lenders’ requirements for an early warning of incidences of potential fraud. The ability to develop bespoke reports and to drill down to invoice-level granularity also harnesses the power of the medium and eliminates the negatives normally associated with it.

We started by talking about social media in the context of Real-Time Web. With these advantages, it’s hardly surprising that OSMO^® is the lenders’ friend.

It’s always healthy to look back at New Year predictions at this stage of the year and see how these compare with reality. Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, kicked off the year with an impressive list of disruptive ‘technology resolutions’, at least three of which are being adopted by lenders we know today, from social networking to Cloud computing and web mashups.

As always, technology pushes finance and finance pulls technology, ultimately propelling them both in the same direction. Gartner’s other technology-related predictions were more sobering and these range from ‘consolidating systems’, ‘mothballing projects’ and ‘curtailing data centre expansion’. After all, things that can be delayed will be delayed in a recession, right?

Wrong! Now is the perfect time for change, for that counter-intuitive action that will give you an edge over your competitors. Whilst some players will focus upon highly conservative cost saving projects with low short-term returns on investment, others are now seizing the opportunity to make a difference.

Watch this space for details of the Vision Critical Technology Survey coming soon…

We’re looking forward to the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA) Conference more than ever this year. And, before you say anything, it’s not just because we’re sponsoring the Welcome Reception (albeit that it’s a great reason to attend in its own right)!

Unmissable and unforgettable were at least two of the ‘Un’s’ that were mentioned last time we were sponsors. Venice was really special for all sorts of reasons, not least the spectacular palace in which the reception was hosted. Admittedly, these are more sober times (an odd phrase for a reception sponsor), but no less exciting – so have no fear – we’ll definitely be keeping the hospitality flowing.

The theme of the 2009 conference is ‘Back to Basics’ and based in Brighton (forgive the alliteration). However, we were thinking only this morning just how much the receivables market has changed in a matter of two years and what an interesting time it is to explore opportunities, even closer to home.

In a market that has seen such dramatic change in terms of the fortunes of players large and small, 2010 certainly looks like being no exception. The market will inevitably see more refinancings, restructures and turnarounds and rumour has it that it that it will become known as the year of the pre-pack. Transactional activity may well pick up by September 2010 and there may even be the promise of tectonic plates shifting as players change hands or become absorbed.

So then, ‘Back to Basics’. Well, December is a traditionally good time to take a few paces back and have a considered view as how to grow a commercial finance operation, both organically and through acquisition, whilst reducing risk. We have a unique take on operational effectiveness, process efficiency and risk reduction through the power of information and, with OSMO^®, a proven product that demostrates our thinking. We look forward to seeing all of the people that have expressed an interest in meeting us to learn more, thank you for getting in touch.

This is also an ideal time to look forward. The conference itself is far from navel-gazing as a result. We relish the prospect of the two Turners taking to the stage. There’s a fascinating session on New Markets, New Opportunities, New Risks with Paul Turner, Head of Sustainable Development, Wholesale Banking, Lloyds Banking Group. Dennis Turner, Chief Economist of HSBC Bank plc in the City, will be giving the Key Note Speech, which will give us some up to date economic insight. Reading his biog, We thought that being a director of Fulham Football Club he must know quite a bit about highs and lows, ideally qualified to conduct an economic overview right now!

We’re also particularly keen on attending Developments in Collections Technology as well as Influence and Persuasion session, where, intriguingly Dil Sidhu of BDO Stoy Hayward LLP explores the 6 leading principles of the science behind the ‘art’ of influencing people. A 21st century take on Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People it isn’t. This is based on the latest scientific research from Harvard Business School and showcases in the arrestingly titled Technology and Motivation Zone. Whilst we are at our busiest operationally, the conference genuinely can’t come fast enough. We look forward to seeing you there and giving you a warm Vision Critical welcome!