Monthly Archives: May 2021

Hot Business News Today

SMEs plan to invest £150,000 in the coming months as restrictions ease

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Originally written by Anna Jordan on Small Business
The average SME intends to invest £150,000 in the near future as lockdown easing sparks a growth in optimism.
Those in construction (£225,000) and transport (£209,000) plan to invest even more.
The Pandemic Recovery Survey from Bibby Financial Services reveals that three quarters (75 per cent) share a positive outlook and 74 per cent believe demand will return to pre-pandemic levels by Christmas.
SMEs across the country have begun to outline their plans to return to a more open economy, with six in ten (59 per cent) seeing the acquisition of new customers as the main reason to be optimistic.
Three-fifths (61 per cent) are planning to dedicate a portion of money to staff training and development (39 per cent) and new staff (29 per cent). This means nearly a third of the UK’s six million SMEs are planning to increase their workforce – providing a powerful boost to the UK’s economy.
This coincides with a forecast from The Bank of England that is more positive than expected. The new forecast predicts that GDP will grow by 7.25 per cent this year as household spending rockets from £200m of lockdown savings.
However, there are still challenges for SMEs including

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Hot Business News Today

What winning The Start-Up Series meant for me – Matt Oldham, Unizest

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Originally written by Small Business Team on Small Business
Thousands of foreign students and migrant workers are deterred from coming to Britain because of the difficulty of obtaining a UK bank account. Often you need a UK bank account to rent somewhere to live or have your earnings paid into it, yet the rigmarole involved in setting up with a high street bank is off-putting.
Matt Oldham, CEO of Unizest, has created an e-account for overseas workers and students coming to Britain. It solves a huge problem for recruiters of the 1.5m contingent workers who come to the UK each year.
Although it hasn’t even launched yet, the Unizest team have been handpicked as one of eight winners in the latest round of The Start-Up Series Competition, sharing £1.1m between them.

Where did the idea for Unizest come from? What is the problem that it’s solving?
The idea came from some work that Tony Shawcross, one of our co-founders, and I were doing with one of our clients at the time, a large CRM organisation working in the recruitment space. They framed the challenge they had getting non-UK workers seamlessly into Britain. The problem they encountered was that it was very difficult for those workers

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