When a small business finally enters the market, it has the difficult task of establishing itself amongst the major corporations that dominate the industry. It can be challenging for new business owners to find ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors. However, with some creativity and proper planning, there are ways to set yourself apart.
Whether you choose to increase your brand awareness through clever marketing campaigns, build a positive reputation with your local community, or stand out from the crowd with eye-catching and personalized product labels unique to your customers, implementing effective business strategies will allow you to gain a favourable edge over your closest competitors.
Personalise Your Services
Small businesses have the wonderfully unique ability to be more customer-centric compared to larger companies. Use this to your advantage by taking the time to understand the requirements of each customer via a consultative approach to deliver a flexible and personalized solution to meet their needs.
Small businesses have the opportunity to provide efficient, creative, and dynamic personalized services to their customers, which often allows you to build an emotional connection with them, securing their continued loyalty to your brand.
Increase Brand Awareness
Work closely with your marketing team or social media consultant to increase brand awareness across the platforms that best cater to your target audience. The more people know about your company and the value and quality of the products or services you offer, the more likely they are to become customers.
Don’t fall into the trap of strictly advertising to your chosen market. Try engaging with prospective customers by trialling new marketing strategies that could potentially allow you to appeal to a different target audience. However, ensure your main focus remains on a target market that is guaranteed to translate into actual sales.
Focus on Your Strength & Expertise
Many experienced entrepreneurs highlight the importance of focusing on how your expertise, experience, drive, and agility will enable you to do things that larger companies can’t, ultimately allowing you to gain a competitive edge over a more established business.
Engage in ADAP conversations, which give you the opportunity to focus on what matters to your audience and detail the different ways you can deliver goods or services in a uniquely effective way.
Identify Business Trends
An effective way of staying ahead of your competitors is by researching and implementing new and upcoming business strategies before they can. One of the most popular ways to gain an advantageous edge is through marketing channels.
Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends on social media platforms and other digital spaces allows you to embrace alternative marketing approaches that can set you apart from other companies and showcase your product or service to a brand-new market.
Start Local to Build Reputation
The biggest mistake you can make when launching a new small business is trying to do too much too quickly. Don’t be afraid of starting slowly and remaining local to build a favourable reputation and community.
By offering exceptional customer service, quality products, and a money-back guarantee policy, you illustrate your belief in your product. This helps your customer base trust your company and the products they hope to receive. They, in turn, will begin to market your business for you through word-of-mouth promotion and via their social media platforms.
Improve Your Quality
Finding ways to constantly improve the quality of your business is an important way to stay at the forefront of your chosen business market. Utilizing customer reviews and valuable feedback will give you a clear and honest idea of where your business may need improvement.
As your budget allows, consider introducing higher-quality materials to your product making and expanding your customer service team to better meet your customers' needs. By regularly assessing your company's overall quality and business practices, you will be able to mitigate and eliminate any potential problems before they become serious issues that could tarnish your reputation.
Establish a Positive Workplace Culture
It is important to articulate and showcase your business's purpose, vision, and core values to build appeal and credibility with potential customers and future employees. A key aspect to fully embracing this strategy to build a competitive edge is how a small business actively practices the culture and promises it claims.
By facilitating and building a creative, progressive, supportive, and healthy work environment, you motivate a workforce to perform their jobs to the best of their abilities and create a visual representation of the positive impact you want your brand to make.
Prioritise Networking
As a business owner, your network can be one of your greatest strengths. Maintaining a strong networking culture that constantly allows you to meet new people and establish new connections within the industry is an essential part of growing any business. After all, you never know what meeting one new person will lead to or what potential exposure and valuable business connections it could carry.
Create Meaningful Content
Create meaningful and memorable content that shows your current and potential customers the value your business can offer them. This can be done through a podcast, vlog, a published article, or through a social media campaign that allows you to build credibility, trust, and authority within your industry.
Provide exceptional customer service to your current clients and encourage them to share your business with friends and family.
A financial planner works with varying financial backgrounds, including government officials and regular people. Since financial planning requires a superb level of expertise, an Online Graduate Diploma in Financial Planning is necessary. A financial planner with a degree is highly regarded as they can help with finances, provide insight and educate clients effectively. This guide will look at the benefits of opting for a financial planning career.
What Is A Financial Planner?
Financial planners are trained individuals that work with people and businesses to create a financial plan. They also help their clients achieve the set milestones. A financial planner helps people save and manage money by:
- Offering budgeting tips
- Helping reduce debts and credit card loans
- Real estate planning
- Ideas and tips for investment
- Tax management
- Mortgage assistance
- Insurance management
Advantages Of A Career In Financial Planning
Profitable Career
Financial planning may be a tough job that requires full attention and effort, but it does prove fruitful in the end. The average financial planner's annual salary is nearly $65,765. You can consistently achieve more if you gain new business projects yearly. New and recurring projects combined can help you attain a substantial income. A financial planner’s salary is either based on individual project fees, commission, or a combination of both.
Stable Industry
Opting to be a financial planner secures your future. The industry is steady, and the unemployment rate is low. The variety in this platform ensures a suitable job role for all kinds of individuals. Working as a financial planner can land you in various places, including boutiques, brand offices, and even business firms. You can also work independently and offer services to more than one kind of business.
Emotionally Rewarding
Apart from profitable income, a career in financial planning has emotional benefits too. The sense of being the person who helps ease other people's problems can be gratifying and can boost self-esteem. This kind of emotional reward is usually absent in other types of careers. Helping people manage their loan debts and aiding financial management is undoubtedly a good deed.
People suffering from depression and anxiety from financial troubles can find peace after working with you. This reduces emotional stress, health risks, and overwhelming medical bills. You can help people avoid drug problems and find a reason to be happy.
Making Dreams Come True
Financial planning can help individuals cope with better financial management, but it is also true that it can help people fulfil their wishes. As a financial planner, you can help couples, families, or individuals relieve financial stress, make smarter investments, and even save money for a home or car. Through your job, you can help people accomplish their biggest dreams that would otherwise have not been possible.
Endnote
If you wish to pursue financial planning as a career, it's best to obtain the proper education to get into the industry quickly. A good degree will portray your qualification and support your expertise in the long run.
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Mark White, Financial Performance Management Specialist at MHR Analytics, outlines the steps financial specialists must take to keep projects from falling short.
It may come as a surprise, but research shows technology accounts for less than 1% of financial transformation failures.
Unfortunately, technology is often used as the scapegoat when the promised benefits fail to accrue from a major project. The reality is that most transformations fall short because neither an organisation’s leadership, nor its employees have developed the necessary growth mindset.
It’s here that the role of the CFO is critical in financial transformation. Firstly, to sell the transformation vision to the C-level executives and secondly, to empower and encourage the finance team and make them central to the journey. When the CFO knows the team is ready for change and understands the benefits, he or she has greater confidence in taking on the risk of transformation. Because employees let go of the past, they change with less resistance and become productive in the new situation.
At the outset it is important for the CFO to have a clear vision of what the organisation is trying to achieve and deliver. This is where the use of external expertise can make a significant contribution, helping understand the ‘art of the possible’.
Once this is understood, the organisation should set a realistic scope and matching expectations, taking small, manageable steps rather than trying to “boil the ocean”. Remember, transformation is an ongoing process and it should have no time limits.
At the outset it is important for the CFO to have a clear vision of what the organisation is trying to achieve and deliver.
As well as having the right mindset, devoting enough time to focus on transformation through strategising, training and delivering can also be a major cause of project failure. It is important to prioritise the use of internal expertise to deliver transformation, encouraging input and buy-in. But when the required know-how is absent internally it will be necessary to seek external help.
We can summarise the journey to financial transformation in a three-step process.
Step 1 – set a vision
The CFO and the finance team should set the vision. Finance teams should consider where they want to be on the scale that goes from bean-counters to strategists. It’s worth canvassing the organisation for its perceptions as a starting point.
Then teams need to get into the nitty-gritty of each process, identifying where there are inefficiencies, potential barriers and what their impact will be. Some limitations may be around systems and technologies or available resources and skills. Identifying the future impact on resource and skill-sets may be difficult at this early stage, but it is worth the effort.
From here the team should set out a high-level plan for transformation, mapping key steps and quick wins, quantifying benefits, and calculating an outline cost. External expertise may well be necessary to achieve this. The output from these efforts is a strategic finance transformation plan that the CFO should sell to the CEO and the board.
Step 2 - select a technology platform and partner
Pull together detailed requirements, platform restrictions and a deployment methodology. This will result in a selection process to identify the technology platform and partner that best suits your needs.
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Step 3 - start with quick wins and then move on
The transformation team should now look for quick wins because it is critical to build confidence and momentum in the early stages. Starting with process improvements to free key staff to deliver further transformation. Once the foundations are in place, the finance team can start to effect change in the organisation, improving perceptions of its role.
Conclusion
Transformation, like time, never stops, but it does not have to start with a Big Bang event that causes shockwaves in an organisation. The transformation journey needs to begin with setting a vision for the CFO and finance team. Once this is in place, an organisation should select a technology platform and partner for delivery. Finally, it must deliver transformation as an ongoing initiative, using external expertise for guidance when required. This is the three-step approach that makes financial transformation far more likely to deliver success for the finance team and the organisation it serves. It should no longer be necessary to blame the technology.
The world of business has changed dramatically over the past couple of decades. Businesses now have access to a huge range of tools and products that are designed to improve efficiency, ensure the smooth running of the business, and make life easier. This is all thanks to the variety of inventors who have come up with great invention ideas for businesses.
If you have come up with a business invention idea, you just never know how big an impact it might have on businesses in years to come. Many people come up with some great ideas designed for businesses, but all too many decide not to pursue their ideas. This is often because they have no idea what they need to do once their come up with the idea.
Of course, this is bad news for the person that comes up with the idea, as it means they do not get to pursue their invention dream. However, it is also bad news for businesses, as they may end up missing out on an invention that could have proven invaluable.
The good news is that if you do have a business invention idea, you don’t have to give up on it because there is help at hand. Business professionals have the expertise and experience to help make your dream into a reality and to help you achieve success with your business invention idea.
What Sort of Help You Can Get
When it comes to the type of help you can get from these professionals, the assistance can be varied and invaluable. Some of they ways in which they can help you with your business invention idea include:
Ensuring You Have Protection in Place
If you have a new business invention idea, it is vital that you protect it so that someone doesn’t come along and claim it as theirs. You also need to protect against someone else coming up with exactly the same idea and achieving success with it. In order to do this, you need to ensure you have patent protection in place. This is a type of legal protection that provides security and peace of mind.
If you have a new business invention idea, it is vital that you protect it so that someone doesn’t come along and claim it as theirs.
While you may not know what steps you need to take to get legal protection in place, you can speak to business experts who will know. They can use their expertise and experience to ensure you have proper protection in place, and they will assist you with this so you can get it sorted out as quickly as possible.
Making Sure You Have the Right Prototype
Having a prototype of your creation is important for many reasons, but most people who are new to inventing don’t know where to start. There are various options you can consider when it comes to finding a suitable prototype for your needs, and the experts can help you to choose the one that is best suited to your needs.
With the right prototype, you can show other people what your invention does, how it works, and how it will benefit businesses. This can help you to gain the support of the business community, get interest from potential investors, and get the interest of the media to help you with publicity and spread the word.
Providing You With Access to Resources and Tools
As a new inventor, it is always helpful to ensure you access relevant tools and resources. This can help you to learn more about the world of inventing, and it can benefit you both now and in the future. However, many new inventors find it difficult to determine which tools and resources to turn to and how beneficial they are. If you are not careful, you could end up being exposed to information that is inaccurate or out of date, which can then have an impact on the steps you take with your invention.
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When you turn to professionals, you can gain access to valuable tools and resources that provide you with information and assistance. The ability to access these tools and resources with speed and ease means you will also save yourself a lot of time and stress. So, you can benefit from more time to focus on your invention.
Offering a High Level of Support and Guidance
As mentioned earlier, one of the reasons many people give up on their business invention idea is because they have no idea where to go for support and guidance. It can be a scary experience entering the world of inventions for the first time. If you have nobody experienced to turn to, it is often tempting to just forget all about it and get on with your normal life.
With around the clock access to support and guidance from experienced professionals, you can look forward to pursuing your business invention dream. You will always have help and advice at hand, so you never have to feel stuck or feel alone. This can make a huge difference to how much you enjoy your invention journey and how likely to are to achieve success.
Making Your Invention Journey More Pleasurable
Getting help from the experts can help to boost your chances of success when it comes to your business invention idea. However, it can also help to make the whole journey far more pleasurable and far less stressful. This is why it is well worth finding out more about how these professionals can help you.
Artificial intelligence has already made a significant, positive impact on the financial services ecosystem and we can only expect this trend to accelerate in years to come. AI has the potential to radically transform businesses but only if they deploy it with appropriate diligence and care. A 2020 report by EY and Invesco anticipates that AI will expand the workforce in fintech by 19% by 2030 as the industry stands to be one of the largest to benefit from the efficiency gains and innovation the technology can bring through operational optimisation, reduction of human biases and minimisation of errors in anomalous data. Alex Housley, CEO and founder of Seldon, further analyses the recent changes in the role of AI and the impact it is set to have on the finance sector in years to come.
Talent Shortage Within FS
According to a report by Bloomberg, listings for AI-based jobs within the financial sector increased by approximately 60% from 2018 to 2019. This demand for workers with AI expertise is not only seen within the financial industry but across a variety of other professional sectors, such as e-commerce, digital marketing and social media. The jobs market has had little time to respond, resulting in a shortage in access to talent. A study by SnapLogic found that whilst 93% of UK and US organisations are fully invested in the use of AI as a priority in their business, many lack access to the right technology, data, and most importantly, talent to carry these goals out. This ‘skills shortage’ is a major obstacle to the adoption of AI in business, with 51% of those surveyed acknowledging that they don’t have enough individuals trained in-house to make their strategies a reality. Machine learning can offer benefits in many forms and different businesses have varying needs. There is no ‘one size fits all approach’ when adopting and deploying AI, which can make it a costly process for many organisations not equipped with the right tools.
Fortunately, there is ample opportunity to enhance the responsibilities of numerous roles within their organisation or let employees get on with more strategic work. SEB, a large Swedish bank, uses a virtual assistant called Aida which is able to handle natural-language conversations and so can answer a trove of customer FAQs. This means customer service professionals have been redeployed to focus on complex requests and their more meaningful responsibilities. Even employees currently working within the industry are looking to broaden their skills to become more versatile across new technology-driven roles. In particular, financial services companies are looking to upskill their data scientists and analysts. They have the base skill set required and can do tremendously well with the right engineering support. Deploying artificial intelligence within a business’s infrastructure means it can take care of mindless, repetitive tasks and free up employees to focus on other, more rewarding parts of the business, maximising automation and cutting costs.
There is no ‘one size fits all approach’ when adopting and deploying AI, which can make it a costly process for many organisations not equipped with the right tools.
Enhancing Fraud Detection
One of the biggest use cases of artificial intelligence within financial services is fraud protection. With the rise of online banking and the exponential growth of digital payments, banks have to monitor huge swathes of transactions for fraudulent behaviour. This huge influx of data points poses major issues for the human brain but actually maximises the effectiveness of ML systems. We’ve seen significant growth in the use of deep learning, with most major retail banks now relying on machine learning tools to recognise and flag suspicious activity. To keep up with the pace of criminals and comply with stricter regulations, service providers have to look beyond traditional methods and implement hybrid strategies built around holistic understandings of behavioural and anomalous data.
Indeed, research by AI Opportunity Landscape found that approximately 26% of funding raised for AI startups within the financial services industry were for fraud or cybersecurity applications, dwarfing other use cases. This number is expected to rise as fraud detection and mitigation continues to be one the highest priorities for customer-facing organisations as consumers increasingly hand over their data in exchange for services.
Better Serving Customer Needs
Financial services companies are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver tailored services and products for their client base. For those banks mining data effectively, AI provides the ability to serve customer needs across multiple channels, and in some cases to grow operations at an unprecedented scale. Tools such as chatbots, voice automation and facial recognition are just a few of the ways banks are using AI to streamline and personalise the user journey for their customers. Importantly, consumers are increasingly literate in automated services and their expectations are constantly rising as the technology improves, meaning organisations must constantly adapt or risk being left behind.
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Chatbots and voice agents are also able to detect and predict changes in consumer behaviour, giving feedback on each interaction with a customer. All the results from customer touch-points are shared across the organisation, ensuring decisions and recommendations involving a human or machine are more intelligent and precise. Over time, these analytics mean businesses can make real-time decisions with their customers in mind, boosting engagement and personalisation.
In order to detect customer data from online purchases, web browsing and in-store interactions, banks must have AI in place to collect the data and automate decision-making. By adapting these technologies banks can connect their data, amplifying their offering effectively across all channels.
Continuous Adoption of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have already enhanced numerous capabilities for the financial sector, improving recommendations, customer experience, and efficiencies via automation. AI will continue to dominate different parts of the financial sector, and the acquisition of machine learning and data science talent will become the norm. A recent survey from the World Economic Forum attests to this, with nearly two-thirds of financial services leaders expecting to be mass adopters of AI in two years compared to just 16% today.
Acquiring the right talent to drive machine learning and AI in organisations will remain a challenge as innovation is focused in different areas and new technologies are being implemented. In lockstep with this will be the constantly evolving regulatory landscape surrounding adoption of AI in financial services as each side races to match and often contain the other. However, the multiple benefits that come from implementing AI and machine learning are clear, and it will be a key area of focus and growth for businesses within financial services over the next decade.
Also playing to the focus on expertise, 48% of the sample overall referenced ‘a third party has productised industry knowledge that we can benefit from’, among their main drivers for adopting standard products and services instead of internally solving business data challenges. In line with this focus, by far the biggest consideration respondents had when costing an external technology solution was ‘the availability of skills in the market for the approach chosen,’ cited by 49% of respondents in total.
Cost was also a big issue driving the uptake of third-party technology solutions. 48% of the survey sample ranked the fact that an outsourced solution ‘was more cost-effective’ among their top reasons for using it.
Martijn Groot, VP Marketing and Strategy, Asset Control said: “Financial services businesses are often attracted into adopting an outsourced approach by a straightforward drive to cut costs, coupled with a desire to tap into broader industry knowledge and expertise.
“Adopting third-party solutions typically allows firms to reduce costs through improved time to market and post-project continuity,” he added. “And the opportunity to take advantage of the breadth of expertise and understanding that a third-party provider can deliver gives them peace of mind and allows the internal IT team to focus more on business enablement which typically involves optimal deployment, integration and change management.”
The benefits of an external third-party provider approach were further highlighted when respondents were asked where they looked first for data management solutions. The most popular answer was ‘externally bundled with complete services offering (e.g. hosting, IT ops, business ops) as part of business processes outsourcing deal’ (28%), followed by ‘externally bundled with tech services offering (e.g. hosting, IT operations) as part of IT outsourcing deal’ (21%). ‘In-house with internal IT’ trailed well behind, with only 17% of the survey sample referencing it.
According to Groot: “The answers show that rather than just following the data and having to install and maintain it, businesses are increasingly looking for a much broader managed data services offering, which allows them to access the skills and expertise of a specialist provider.
“Firms today also increasingly want to tap into the benefits of a full services model,” he continued. “They are looking to join forces with a hosting, applications management or IT operations approach and often that is in a bid to achieve faster cycle time, reduced and more predictable cost of change and a demonstrably faster ROI into the bargain.”
(Source: Asset Control)
Farida Gibbs, CEO of Gibbs Hybrid, discusses the pressures on banks to update their processes with new technology.
Following the first increase in interest rates in ten years, banks have been under extreme pressure to pass on profits to customers. This pressure comes from a growingly savvy customer base educated in its financial rights by easier access to online news and financial advice.
Technology is changing the nature of banking much more directly. Customers now interact with their banks far beyond the branch, through online banking on computers and mobile devices, communicating with chat bots as well as real personnel, and using a variety of apps to do this. They expect their financial services providers to keep up with the pace of this change.
In January 2018 the Second Payment Services Directive will come into play, meaning banks will have to share their data with other rival financial providers and aggregator sites, and allow third-party developers into the back-end of their processes, taking payments directly without the intercession of the bank – all with the consent of the customer, of course.
In other words, aggregators and financial services providers will have access to customer’s data and be able to show them how best to spend their money, and which providers to entrust it with. Tech giants like Facebook and Amazon will be able to make payments directly, without the bank’s help.
With competition more clear and fluid, and money much easier to move around between providers, established banks will be greatly exposed to competition from FinTechs and new rival financial services companies.
A large number of new, agile FinTech challengers have emerged to challenge more established banks in recent years. Competing on grounds of personalised service, low rates, and the speed and convenience provided by taking the upmost advantage of new technology, these new providers threaten to take away the established customer bases of larger banks.
The key advantage banks have over these new challengers is their large, established customer bases. At the moment, these are relatively immobile, with customer account switching reaching a new low in September this year.
But as regulations like PSD2 begin to take effect, banks will face mounting competition from FinTech challengers, as switching becomes easier and the reasons to change providers for a better deal will become clearer. Many banks currently rely on outdated legacy systems that cannot support the pace of change required by this.
To deal with this, an increasing number of banks are turning to cloud-migration programmes, shifting their existing processes from these legacy systems to the cloud. This gives them the agility and efficiency to stay up to speed with the constantly changing innovations in technology.
But to do this they need digital expertise, in order to ease this kind of transition in an informed way. This means that more banks are turning to partnerships with outside experts, to help them modernise in the most efficient way possible.
However, although one in three people in the UK use a mobile banking app, banks should not respond to this drive for modernisation by compromising on in-person service. Many banks have seen the increased use of app-based banking as a sign to cut back on branches, with a record number of 762 closures this year in the UK.
In fact, moving processes to the cloud offers the chance to free up staff to focus on more in-person services; the other key advantage established banks hold over their FinTech competitors. This presence of real staff lends credibility that FinTechs still lack. Forty-three per cent of customers who have used a FinTech service are worried about being defrauded, according to a study by Blumberg Capital.
To future-proof their businesses, banks need to juggle the best of both worlds, making the most of their inherent advantages, whilst catching up with the speed and efficiency of tech-enabled FinTechs. A variety of established banks are now turning to outside consultants to help them do this, uploading their outdated processes to the cloud to provide a more streamlined, agile service that responds to customer’s changing demands. But in using this external expertise, they must not lose sight of what their own staff can offer. Cloud programmes allow traditional providers to get the best of both worlds: not only improving the agility and convenience of their offering, but allowing them to make the most of their personal staff.
