Connect with us

International

Companies In UK Are Hitting The Wall At Fastest Rate Since Global Financial Crisis

Companies In UK Are Hitting The Wall At Fastest Rate Since Global Financial Crisis

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

As…

Published

on

Companies In UK Are Hitting The Wall At Fastest Rate Since Global Financial Crisis

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

As the price of everything, including debt, continues to soar, life is getting harder and harder for the UK’s heavily indebted businesses...

Business insolvencies in the UK surged by 57% in 2022, to 22,109, according to the latest data from the Insolvency Service, a UK government agency that deals with bankruptcies and companies in liquidation. It is the highest number of insolvencies registered annually since 2009, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis.

Last year “was the year the insolvency dam burst,” said Christina Fitzgerald, the president of R3, the insolvency and restructuring trade body. Insolvencies peaked in the fourth quarter, underscoring the compounding pressures on companies grappling with surging costs and rapidly slowing economic activity.

“Supply-chain pressures, rising inflation and high energy prices have created a ‘trilemma’ of headwinds which many management teams will be experiencing simultaneously for the first time,” Samantha Keen, UK turnround and restructuring strategy partner at EY-Parthenon and president of the Insolvency Practitioners Association (IPA), told the Financial Times. “This stress is now deepening and spreading to all sectors of the economy as falling confidence affects investment decisions, contract renewals and access to credit.”

Other headwinds include soaring interest rates, falling consumer demand, nationwide strikes, lingering Brexit-induced supply chain issues, an epidemic of quiet quitting and both chronic and acutely bad government.

Closest to the Edge

None of this, of course, should come as a surprise. Of all the large economies in Europe, the UK’s is arguably closest to the cliff edge. As newspaper headlines trumpeted this week, the UK economy this year will probably fare worse than Russia’s sanction-hit economy, according to the IMF’s latest forecasts. But then the same could be said of many other European economies, including Germany and Italy.

Stagflation is gradually settling in across the continent. With energy prices still high (though not as high as feared some months ago), the specter of deindustrialization continues to loom over the EU’s industrial powerhouses, Germany and Italy. And the frantic efforts of central banks to bring inflation back under some semblance of control risks triggering not just an economic crash but also a financial one, as Nouriel Roubini warned in October:

It is much harder to achieve a soft landing under conditions of stagflationary negative supply shocks than it is when the economy is overheating because of excessive demand. Since World War II, there has never been a case where the Fed achieved a soft landing with inflation above 5% (it is currently above 8%) and unemployment below 5% (it is currently 3.7%). And if a hard landing is the baseline for the United States, it is even more likely in Europe, owing to the Russian energy shock, China’s slowdown, and the ECB falling even further behind the curve relative to the Fed.

As economic conditions deteriorate, life gets harder and harder for Europe’s heavily indebted households and businesses. As I cautioned in late August, Europe’s entirely self-inflicted energy crisis risks tipping legions of small businesses over the edge. In the UK, as just about everywhere else, many small in-person businesses only managed to weather the lockdowns of 2020-21 by taking on huge amounts of debt:

[In the UK] the only way the debt gets cancelled is if the business in question goes into insolvency. According to research published by the Bank of England in November 2021, 33% of small businesses [had] a level of debt more than 10 times their cash in the bank, versus 14% before the pandemic. Many of those businesses had never borrowed before and some would probably not have met pre-pandemic lending criteria.

In total, £73.8 billion has been lent under the UK’s coronavirus emergency lending programs — the equivalent of 3.5% of GDP. Almost two thirds of that money — £47 billion — went to 1.26 million small businesses — in a country of roughly 5 million businesses. Through the Bounce Back Loan program SMEs were able to borrow up to 25% of their revenues to a maximum of £50,000. The loans, interest-free for 12 months, are administrated by private-sector banks, but are 100% backed by the government.

Companies now have to pay off that debt, against the backdrop of one of the most hostile business environments of living memory. As an op-ed in The Times (of London) pointed out on Wednesday, Britain is reeling from a particularly nasty combination of supply-chain shocks:

The energy crisis has hit the country particularly hard given the extent of its reliance on gas in its energy mix. The workforce is shrinking as a result of rising inactivity due to post-pandemic ill health and early retirement as well as post-Brexit shortages of low-skilled workers in some sectors. Trade has recovered from lockdowns more slowly than comparable countries, held back by post-Brexit border controls. Investment has flatlined since 2016 with dire consequences for productivity growth.   

The result, notes the article, is that the UK is now grappling with higher and stickier inflation than most other major economies. In December, consumer price inflation (CPI) was 10.5%, just slightly below the record high of 11.1% registered in October. In January, food price inflation hit a fresh record high of 16.7%.

The Bank of England’s response was to hike interest rates for the 10th time in a row, perhaps in the deluded hope that a hard landing can still be avoided. Or perhaps the BoE just wants to bring the whole damn edifice down. Rates are now at 4%, their highest level since the topsy-turvy days of October 2008. And with each fresh hike, it becomes harder for struggling companies to service their expanding debts. This is the result:

Last year, creditors’ voluntary liquidations (CVLs) hit their highest point in the time series since records began in 1960. This is largely because the relative proportions of insolvency types, between CVLs, compulsory liquidations and other types of insolvencies, have changed in recent years. In 2020 and 2021, CVL numbers were significantly lower due to the emergency support measures provided by government, such as the furlough program, emergency loan schemes and debt moratoriums.

But that support ended some time ago and for many businesses the time has now come to start paying back the 100% debt they accrued.

The government’s Bounce Back Loans scheme was first launched in May 2020. Over the next 18 months, more than a million small companies, some of them fronts for criminal shysters, took advantage of the scheme. On signing the loan, companies were given the chance to defer their payments for the first six months. When that six months was up, they were given another chance. And then another. But at the end of the third deferment period — i.e. 18 months after the loan was first issued — crunch time arrived.

For companies that took out a loan in December 2020, that moment will have arrived in June 2022. This is one of the main reasons why the number of insolvencies has surged over the past year. And the trend is likely to continue, if not intensify, in the coming months.

An Example from Close to Home

A company not set to bounce back anytime soon is a small, niche language school run by my father. The firm specialized in providing 3-4 week work experience placements in the West Midlands for EU students aged 17-20, predominantly from Germany. The company, which was set up in 1979, thrived in the period 2010-15 with many new further education colleges in Northern Germany coming on board, but that all changed once the Brexit referendum result was known.

Between 2015-19 the prevailing uncertainty – hard Brexit, soft Brexit, Norwegian- or Swiss-style future – meant the sale potential of the company was put indefinitely on hold. Then came Covid and the cancellation of all courses in 2020 and 2021 when not one single student applied for a placement.

Funds were running low, so my father took up the opportunity of applying for a £15,000 Bounce Back Loan (BBL) in August 2020. Repayment at a modest 2.5% could be shelved for 6 months, by which time a hard Brexit had been signed off. But for the company, the sucker punch was Johnson’s decision in early 2021, in another sop to the vitriolic right-wing European Research Group, to pull the UK out of Erasmus Plus, which provided financial support to young people across the EU and beyond pursuing educational and work experience opportunities in other countries.

In 2022, the loan repayment holiday was extended to 12, then finally to 18 months. Crunch time is in two weeks’ time, but the decision has been made. The pre-referendum sales potential of £100,000 has totally disappeared, the company is insolvent and has ceased trading. The liquidation process has begun, and the company cannot repay the loan.

Similar things are now happening to small and medium-size companies across the UK, particularly in the hospitality, retail and construction sectors. And it is also likely to begin happening, if it hasn’t already, across other parts of Europe as companies, particularly small and medium-sized ones, buckle under the combined weight of excessive debt, surging costs and plunging demand.

This is already happening in my country of residence, Spain, where some €23 billion of emergency loans (out of a grand total of €122 billion) — 80% of which are government guaranteed — are at risk of default and banks face an avalanche of lawsuits for misselling the loans. It would be interesting to hear from readers in other parts of Europe about the state of play with business bankruptcies in their own respective countries.

As I noted in my previous article, Europe’s Energy Crisis Is Tipping Legions of Small Businesses Over the Edge, if small business begin failing en masse, the effect on the economy is likely to be colossal. After all, small and micro companies make up the vast majority of businesses worldwide, representing around 90% of businesses and around half of employment globally. A mass extinction event could also trigger another crisis for Europe’s ever-fragile and fragmented banking system while also turbo charging wealth disparities.

Just as importantly, as I note in my book Scanned, “small businesses are the cornerstone of local communities, providing basic products and services, creating jobs, allowing local economies to flourish, and providing spaces and places for people to meet and engage with each other.” A world without them will be a much poorer one. It will also be a world even more dominated and controlled by corporations.

Tyler Durden Sat, 02/04/2023 - 08:10

Read More

Continue Reading

International

COVID-19 lockdowns linked to less accurate recollection of event timing

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing…

Published

on

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing new insights into how COVID-19 lockdowns impacted perception of time. Daria Pawlak and Arash Sahraie of the University of Aberdeen, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 31, 2023.

Credit: Arianna Sahraie Photography, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing new insights into how COVID-19 lockdowns impacted perception of time. Daria Pawlak and Arash Sahraie of the University of Aberdeen, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 31, 2023.

Remembering when past events occurred becomes more difficult as more time passes. In addition, people’s activities and emotions can influence their perception of the passage of time. The social isolation resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns significantly impacted people’s activities and emotions, and prior research has shown that the pandemic triggered distortions in people’s perception of time.

Inspired by that earlier research and clinical reports that patients have become less able to report accurate timelines of their medical conditions, Pawlak and Sahraie set out to deepen understanding of the pandemic’s impact on time perception.

In May 2022, the researchers conducted an online survey in which they asked 277 participants to give the year in which several notable recent events occurred, such as when Brexit was finalized or when Meghan Markle joined the British royal family. Participants also completed standard evaluations for factors related to mental health, including levels of boredom, depression, and resilience.

As expected, participants’ recollection of events that occurred further in the past was less accurate. However, their perception of the timing of events that occurred in 2021—one year prior to the survey—was just an inaccurate as for events that occurred three to four years earlier. In other words, many participants had difficulty recalling the timing of events coinciding with COVID-19 lockdowns.

Additionally, participants who made more errors in event timing were also more likely to show greater levels of depression, anxiety, and physical mental demands during the pandemic, but had less resilience. Boredom was not significantly associated with timeline accuracy.

These findings are similar to those previously reported for prison inmates. The authors suggest that accurate recollection of event timing requires “anchoring” life events, such as birthday celebrations and vacations, which were lacking during COVID-19 lockdowns.

The authors add: “Our paper reports on altered timescapes during the pandemic. In a landscape, if features are not clearly discernible, it is harder to place objects/yourself in relation to other features. Restrictions imposed during the pandemic have impoverished our timescape, affecting the perception of event timelines. We can recall that events happened, we just don’t remember when.

#####

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278250

Citation: Pawlak DA, Sahraie A (2023) Lost time: Perception of events timeline affected by the COVID pandemic. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0278250. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278250

Author Countries: UK

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.


Read More

Continue Reading

Spread & Containment

Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare…

Published

on

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare sector. Specifically, they sought to automate the routine messages and calls that often lead to administrative burnout, like calls about scheduling, prescription refills and searching through physician directories.

Several years after graduating, Krush and Cohen productized their ideas with Hyro, which uses AI to facilitate text and voice conversations across the web, call centers and apps between healthcare organizations and their clients. Hyro today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Liberty Mutual, Macquarie Capital and Black Opal, bringing the startup’s total raised to $35 million.

Krush says that the new cash will be put toward expanding Hyro’s go-to-market teams and R&D.

“When we searched for a domain that would benefit from transforming these technologies most, we discovered and validated that healthcare, with staffing shortages and antiquated processes, had the greatest need and pain points, and have continued to focus on this particular vertical,” Krush told TechCrunch in an email interview.

To Krush’s point, the healthcare industry faces a major staffing shortfall, exacerbated by the logistical complications that arose during the pandemic. In a recent interview with Keona Health, Halee Fischer-Wright, CEO of Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), said that MGMA’s heard that 88% of medical practices have had difficulties recruiting front-of-office staff over the last year. By another estimates, the healthcare field has lost 20% of its workforce.

Hyro doesn’t attempt to replace staffers. But it does inject automation into the equation. The platform is essentially a drop-in replacement for traditional IVR systems, handling calls and texts automatically using conversational AI.

Hyro can answer common questions and handle tasks like booking or rescheduling an appointment, providing engagement and conversion metrics on the backend as it does so.

Plenty of platforms do — or at least claim to. See RedRoute, a voice-based conversational AI startup that delivers an “Alexa-like” customer service experience over the phone. Elsewhere, there’s Omilia, which provides a conversational solution that works on all platforms (e.g. phone, web chat, social networks, SMS and more) and integrates with existing customer support systems.

But Krush claims that Hyro is differentiated. For one, he says, it offers an AI-powered search feature that scrapes up-to-date information from a customer’s website — ostensibly preventing wrong answers to questions (a notorious problem with text-generating AI). Hyro also boasts “smart routing,” which enables it to “intelligently” decide whether to complete a task automatically, send a link to self-serve via SMS or route a request to the right department.

A bot created using Hyro’s development tools. Image Credits: Hyro

“Our AI assistants have been used by tens of millions of patients, automating conversations on various channels,” Krush said. “Hyro creates a feedback loop by identifying missing knowledge gaps, basically mimicking the operations of a call center agent. It also shows within a conversation exactly how the AI assistant deduced the correct response to a patient or customer query, meaning that if incorrect answers were given, an enterprise can understand exactly which piece of content or dataset is labeled incorrectly and fix accordingly.”

Of course, no technology’s perfect, and Hyro’s likely isn’t an exception to the rule. But the startup’s sales pitch was enough to win over dozens of healthcare networks, providers and hospitals as clients, including Weill Cornell Medicine. Annual recurring revenue has doubled since Hyro went to market in 2019, Krush claims.

Hyro’s future plans entail expanding to industries adjacent to healthcare, including real estate and the public sector, as well as rounding out the platform with more customization options, business optimization recommendations and “variety” in the AI skills that Hyro supports.

“The pandemic expedited digital transformation for healthcare and made the problems we’re solving very clear and obvious (e.g. the spike in calls surrounding information, access to testing, etc.),” Krush said. “We were one of the first to offer a COVID-19 virtual assistant that deployed in under 48 hours based on trusted information from the health system and trusted resources such as the CDC and World Health Organization …. Hyro is well funded, with good growth and momentum, and we’ve always managed a responsible budget, so we’re actually looking to expand and gather more market share while competitors are slowing down.”

Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Read More

Continue Reading

International

How to hone your leadership skills, and what your company can do to help

In the rapidly changing, ambiguous and unpredictable world of work, future leaders must be able to learn fast.

Published

on

By

Leadership potential. GaudiLab/Shutterstock

The UK labour market has finally started to see a fall in vacancies following a post-COVID spike in open positions. But there are still more than a million job vacancies, which are “damaging the economy by preventing firms from fulfilling order books and taking on new work”, according to the British Chambers of Commerce.

A recent survey by this business lobby group found four-fifths of firms can’t recruit the people they need. Companies often look outside for external candidates to fill senior roles, but this overlooks current employees who may have the potential to move up within an organisation – even if they do not know it yet.

Overlooking employees often happens when management plays it safe, rather than risking giving “one of their own” an important new assignment. The resulting untapped employee potential can leave people feeling underused and frustrated. You need to be given opportunities to stretch, learn and develop to fulfil your potential at work.


Quarter life, a series by The Conversation

This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life. You may be interested in:

Expert advice for budding UK entrepreneurs during a cost of living crisis

Trust is important if you want to succeed at work - here’s how to build it

Why menstrual leave could be bad for women


Human resource managers use potential – and in particular, leadership potential – to identify the employees that could be their organisation’s future leaders. In the business world (and often in academic research too), the term “high potential” typically means you are able to develop further and faster than others in a similar situation.

Someone with leadership potential has the capacity to be an effective leader in the future, but may need support to develop the right skills and experience to succeed. So, how can you work out your own leadership potential? Research highlights three main traits you need:

1. Growth: learning and motivation

Many studies identify the ability to learn as key to predicting future leadership effectiveness. This incorporates keenness to learn, the ability to extract as many lessons as possible from different experiences, and to adapt by applying these to enhance your future performance.

This explains why some people learn more from their experiences (and develop faster) than others. There is also a motivational component that includes drive and perseverance to achieve results, and the ambition to lead.

2. Foundational: cognitive and personality characteristics

Research shows that people who are more emotionally balanced, sociable, ambitious, conscientious and curious are more likely to become leaders.

Also, because it’s important to be able to make decisions effectively in any senior role, cognitive capabilities are key. These typically include strong judgment skills in complex and ambiguous situations, and being able to collect and evaluate information from diverse sources to reach solid decisions.

3. Career: qualities specific to the future role

Some models of potential also include “career dimensions”, which are specific skills relevant to a future role. For leadership potential, these might include qualities such as strategic thinking or collaboration.

New technology and workplace trends are among the factors that are changing how we work. This means the demands of future roles – and the career-specific qualities required to excel in them – may be quite different to those of your current job. In fact, research shows that more than 70% of today’s top performers still lack the key qualities that will help them to be successful in their future roles.

How can you develop these qualities?

As rapid change renders knowledge and skills out of date at an astonishing rate, the ability to learn is increasingly crucial to future leaders. Rather than “having all the answers”, you need to be able to find or figure the answers out. This means that leaders need the humility to know they don’t know it all, and the interpersonal skills to listen openly and learn from a diverse network of people.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, for example, New Zealand’s then prime minister Jacinda Ardern didn’t have all the answers. But she used her platform to quite literally ask for information. Ardern did a series of video interviews with different experts to get some key answers, speaking to a psychologist about coping with the stresses of the pandemic, and an experienced business mentor about supporting small businesses.

Having asked, listened and sought varied insights, leaders must then apply strong judgment and problem-solving skills to decide on the best way forward – even if there is no obvious path. This draws upon cognitive ability, but it also involves skills that can be learnt.

Man in shirt at laptop, looking forward and sitting between two other people, raising hand.
People with leadership potential ask questions and learn from their experiences. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Problems identifying potential

Unfortunately, organisations often rely upon current (or past) performance as a barometer of potential, which is far from ideal – not just because only a small proportion of current high performers also have high potential, but because people with strong potential may not currently be performing at their best. Perhaps they aren’t in the right role, or aren’t being sufficiently stretched or supported.

Either way, your employer shouldn’t conflate your current performance with your potential. This could also perpetuate the lack of diversity that persists at leadership level in many firms. Past performance is limited by opportunity. Some people, due to biases and stereotypes, may not have been offered the chance to show what they are capable of yet.

To avoid these problems, organisations need to assess their employees objectively to find those with leadership potential. This could include doing psychometric tests of their personality and cognitive and learning abilities. Simulations of typical tasks or problems could also replicate the likely cognitive demands of future leadership roles, helping to identify people who can best cope and learn from the experience.

Supporting future leaders

It’s important to remember that potential does not automatically unfold once it’s identified. Indeed, some studies claim that 40% of high-potential promotions end in failure.

However, if you’re good at learning from experiences and applying this to improve how you do things, and are motivated to progress and grow, you have a good chance of developing the career dimension qualities needed to be a future leader – and to do this faster than your peers.

But organisations must help by finding ways to stretch employees, while also building the scaffolding to support their learning and development. They should balance challenge with support through coaching, to help employees learn as much as they can from their experiences. If you want to be a future leader, you can then use these experiences to enhance your job performance and reach your full potential.

Zara Whysall also works for Kiddy & Partners, part of Gateley Plc.

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending