1. Consider Your Brand And Business

When trying to pick a location, always consider the nature of your brand and the message you are trying to convey. For example, if you have a high-end boutique, it wouldn’t be wise to place it in a rural area or college town. It needs to be in an upscale area where the general population can afford your products. On the other hand, a fast-food establishment would probably do well in a college town. Experiment with pop up shops until you find the perfect spot.

2. Keep Safety In Mind

Find a safe location for your business. Every business owner must strive to operate a business where they feel protected. Your business is doomed if the employees and customers do not feel safe, and your assets may also be at risk. Avoid areas that frequently experience burglary and theft. 

3. Follow The Demand

Having your business be in demand is important, but you shouldn’t place yourself at the centre of the competition. Ideally, you want a location with some demand for your products or services that isn’t already saturated with competitors. You will want to choose a location where there is high demand for your product or service. This can be determined by research and market analysis. Look at demographic data and trends to see where people are moving and what they are looking for. If you can find an underserved market, you may have found a great location for your business.

Another way to find areas of high demand is to look for businesses like yours that are doing well. If you can find a successful business in a location that is similar to the one you are considering, there will likely be high demand for your product or service as well.

You also need to consider the competition when choosing a business location. It is important to find an area that is not already saturated with businesses like yours. This can be difficult, but it is important to consider if you want your business to be successful. Once you have considered the demand for your product or service, you can begin to narrow down your search for the perfect business location.

4. Consider Your Suppliers And Vendors

Find a location that makes connecting with your suppliers and vendors easy. If they are very far from you, there may be delays in your regular tasks. You may also have constant issues with your inventory levels. When exploring your options, settle for a site that puts you close to raw goods. 

5. Stay On Budget

Settle for a business location that fits your budget. In addition to the rent, think of location-specific expenses as well. Most locations come with hidden costs such as renovations, taxes, economic incentives, and minimum wage requirements. If you are running a mobile business, you still need to consider the cost of vehicle licensing and permits. 

Conclusion

Location is a critical consideration when starting a business. Keeping the above factors in mind will ensure you settle for the perfect location. Do not commit to anything before doing your research. Speak with other business owners and find out what your target clients want. Compare a few options and make sure you settle for the perfect fit. If you get the location wrong, nothing else you do matters. A well-informed location strategy can fuel your success. It can streamline all your other operations. 

One area that is often overlooked is procurement. Procurement can be a complex process, but you can optimise it for your business with the right tools and strategies in place. Here's how you can do just that.

Research And Understand Procurement Terms

The first step to optimising your business's procurement process is researching and understanding the different terms associated with it. This will help you identify the right tools and strategies for your company. For example, if you're not familiar with the term procurement spend analysis, you won't be able to manage your company's spending properly.

You should also learn to differentiate some simpler terms and comparisons like invoice vs. purchase order. Invoices are what you receive from vendors after making a purchase. On the other hand, a purchase order is an agreement between your company and a vendor that outlines the terms of a sale. By understanding these terms, you'll be able to manage your company's procurement process more effectively.

Create A Procurement Policy

Once you understand the basics of procurement, you can create a procurement policy for your company. This policy should outline how your company will approach and handle procuring goods and services. Some factors to consider when creating your procurement policy include:

• The types of products or services your company needs
• How often your company will need to procure goods or services
• Your company's budget for procurement
• How your company will find vendors
• Types of contracts your company will use

By having a procurement policy in place, you can ensure that your company is getting the best possible products and services at the best possible price.

Evaluate Your Vendors

It's important to periodically evaluate your vendors to ensure that they still meet your company's needs. When evaluating your vendors, some considerations include:

• The quality of the products or services they provide
• Their prices
• How often they deliver on time
• Whether they are easy to work with
• Your company's relationship with the vendor

By evaluating your vendors, you can ensure that your company gets the best possible products and services at the best possible price.

Train And Educate Your Workforce

Your employees play a vital role in the procurement process. They are the ones who will be using the products and services that your company purchases, so it's essential that they are properly trained and educated on how to use them. By ensuring that your employees are knowledgeable about the products and services they will be using, you can help to optimise your company's procurement process.

Up Your Negotiation Game

To optimise your company's procurement process, you need to ensure that you are getting the best possible prices for the products and services you are procuring. This means you need to brush up on your negotiation skills when you're entering new procurement negotiations. There are a few key things to keep in mind when you're negotiating with suppliers:

• Make sure that you know the market price for the product or service you're procuring
• Don't be afraid to ask for discounts or special pricing arrangements
• Be prepared to walk away from the negotiation if you're not getting the terms you want

Optimising the procurement process can be challenging and time-consuming, but it's worthwhile to ensure that your company is getting the best possible deals on the products and services it needs. By following the tips above, you can be sure that you're getting the best value for your money.

Ammar Akhtar, co-founder and CEO at Yobota, explores the steps necessary to the creation of successful fintech.

The first national lockdown in March highlighted the importance of the quality and functionality of digital banking solutions. Indeed, most of us quickly became accustomed to conducting our financial affairs entirely online.

Financial services providers have needed to adapt to this shift, if they were not already prepared, and consumers will continue to demand more. For instance, Yobota recently surveyed over 2,000 UK adults to explore how satisfied customers are with their recent banking experiences. The majority (58%) of banking customers said they want more power to renegotiate or change their accounts or products, with a third (33%) expressing frustrations at having to choose from generic, off-the-shelf financial products.

Consumers are increasingly demanding more responsive and personalised banking services, with the research highlighting that people are increasingly unlikely to tolerate being locked into unsuitable financial products. This is true across all sectors of the financial services landscape; from payment technologies (where cashless options have become a necessity as opposed to a trendy luxury) to insurance, the shift to “quality digital” poses challenges throughout the industry.

Providers and technology vendors must therefore respond accordingly and develop solutions that can meet such demands. Many financial institutions will be enlisting the help of a fintech partner that can help them build and deploy new technologies. Others may try to recruit the talent required to do so in-house.

The question, then, is this: how is financial technology actually created, and how complicated is the task of building a solution that is fit for purpose in today’s market?

Compliance and regulation

The finance sector is heavily regulated. As such, compliance and regulatory demands pose a central challenge to fintech development in any region. It is at the heart of winning public trust and the confidence of clients and partners.

Controls required to demonstrate compliance can amount to a significant volume of work, not just because the rules can change (even temporarily, as we have seen in some cases this year), but because often there is room for interpretation in principle-based regulatory approaches. It is therefore important for fintech creators to have compliance experts that can handle the regulatory demands. This is especially important as the business (or fintech product) scales, crosses borders, and onboards more users.

The finance sector is heavily regulated. As such, compliance and regulatory demands pose a central challenge to fintech development in any region.

Businesses must also be forthcoming and transparent about their approach towards protecting the customer, and by extension the reputation of their business partner. Europe’s fintech industry cannot afford another Wirecard scandal.

Compliance features do not have to impede innovation, though. Indeed, they may actually foster it. To ensure fintech businesses have the right processes in place to comply with legislation, there is huge scope to create and extend partnerships with the likes of cybersecurity experts and eCommerce businesses.

The size and growth of the regulation technology (regtech) sector is evidence of the opportunities for innovations that are actually born out of this challenge. The global regtech market is expected to grow from $6.3 billion in 2020 to $16.0 billion by 2025. Another great example would be the more supportive stance regulators have taken to cloud infrastructure, which has opened up a range of new options across the sector.

Addressing technical challenges 

It is the technical aspect of developing fintech products where most attention will be focused, however. There are a number of considerations businesses ought to keep in mind as they seek to utilise technology in the most effective way possible.

Understanding the breadth of the problem

The fintech sector is incredibly broad. Payment infrastructure, insurance, and investment management are among the many categories of financial services that fall under the umbrella.

A fintech company must be able to differentiate its product or services in order to create a valuable and defensible competitive advantage. So, businesses must pinpoint exactly which challenges they are going to solve first. Do they need to improve or replace something that already exists? Or do they want to bring something entirely new to the market?

The end product must solve a very specific problem; and do it well. A sharp assessment of the target market also includes considering the functionality that the technology must have; the level of customisation that will be required from a branding and business perspective; and what the acceptable price bracket is for the end product.

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Knowing your client

In the same vein, as a vendor it is important to be specific and strategic when it comes to pursuing the right clients. A fintech might consider itself to be well-positioned to cater to a vast selection of different businesses; however, it’s important to have a very clear target client in mind. This will ensure product and engineering teams have a clear focus for any end goal.

The value of a good cultural fit should also not be underestimated. The business-to-business relationship between a fintech and its client (a bank, for example), particularly at senior levels, is just as important as finding the right niche. There must be a mutual understanding of what the overall vision is and how it will be achieved, including the practical implementation, timeline and costs.

Balancing “best tech” with (perceived) “best practice”

Leveraging the newest technology is not always the best approach to developing a future-proof proposition. This has been learned the hard way by many businesses keen to jump on the latest trends.

Shiny new technology like particular architectures or programming languages can have an obvious appeal to businesses looking to create the “next big thing”. But in reality, the element of risk involved in jumping on relatively nascent innovations could set back progress significantly.

The best technology systems are those that have been created with longevity in mind, and which can grow sustainably to adapt to new circumstances. These systems need to run for many years to come, and eventually without their original engineers to support them, so they need to be created in modern ways, but using proven foundational principles that can stand the test of time.

Curating a positive user experience

To revert back to my original point, fintech businesses cannot forget about the needs of the end customer. There is no better proof point for a product than a happy user base, and ultimately the “voice of the customer” should drive development roadmaps.

The best technology systems are those that have been created with longevity in mind, and which can grow sustainably to adapt to new circumstances.

Customer experience is one of the most important success factors to any technology business. Fintechs must consider how they can deftly leverage new and advancing technology to make the customer experience even better, while also improving their underlying product, which users may not necessarily see, but will almost certainly feel.

Another important consideration is ease of integration with other providers. For example, identity verification, alternative credit scoring, AI assisted chatbots and recommendation algorithms, next generation core banking, transaction classification, and simplification of mortgage chains – these are all services which could be brought together in some product to improve the experience of buying a mortgage, or moving home.

Progressive fintech promotes partnerships and interoperability to reduce the roadblocks that customers encounter.

The human side of fintech

Powerful digital solutions cannot be created without the right people in place. There is fierce competition for talent in the fintech space, especially in key European centres like London and Berlin. Those who can build and nurture the right team will be in a strong position to solve today’s biggest challenges.

In all of these considerations, patience is key. It takes time to identify new growth opportunities; to build the right team that can see the vision through; and to adapt to the ever-changing financial landscape. Creating fintech is not easy, but it is certainly rewarding to see the immense progress being made and the inefficiencies that are being tackled.

Even in small businesses where there are no full-fledged procurement departments, implementing spend management is still very important. To effectively implement this, you will need to collate, maintain, categorise, and evaluate spend data. The goal is often to regulate compliance and improve efficiency. Are you saddled with the responsibility of implementing spend management? Here are five effective ways you can do it:

Perform a Detailed Spend Analysis

To implement spend management effectively, the first thing you need to do is perform a comprehensive spend analysis. Through this, you will have a better understanding of what you are spending and where to make changes. The analysis will help you identify key suppliers and savings opportunities you can target. You will also be able to minimise risk and expense that come with non-compliant or underperforming vendors.

Streamline Payment Methods

A standard procurement department can easily track and manage all purchasing activity. In the absence of this, staying on top of all employee spend can be very challenging. A simple solution will be to streamline payment methods. Finding a way to feed all spend data automatically into one company bill will make things a lot easier, and it will also improve accuracy.

Define the Approval Process

In addition to streamlining payment methods, you need to define and clarify the approval process with everyone involved in procurement in your organisation. Every employee that can spend on behalf of the company must know who to approach for approval, and there must never be any form of conflict. When everyone understands the approval process and respects it, procurement will be less frustrating. Mistakes will be minimised, and no one will have to cut corners.

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Use E-Procurement Software

There are several spend management and e-procurement software that can help you implement the process. Some of these platforms can be integrated as an all-in-one solution or as individual platforms that will make your work easier and more accurate. With this software, you can effectively capture tail spend data and get the information in a comprehensive form in your dashboard. From the data you receive, it will be easier to make decisions and implement changes.

Invest In Education and Training

If you have a procurement department in your organisation, investing in education and training for every member will be beneficial in many ways. Even if you don’t have a standard procurement department, you can train everyone involved in procurement. This is even more important if you have integrated an e-procurement software. When every person on the team is well-trained and on the same page, implementing spend management becomes easier.

Endnote

Spend management is important to keep your business or organization profitable. Fortunately, you can improve the process by performing a comprehensive spend analysis, streamlining payment methods, and using a management software. For effective results, it is important that you do it right. Implementing the effective methods discussed above will help you achieve your objectives.