Monthly Archives: May 2019

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Q&A Ian Rand, CEO of Barclays Business Banking

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Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Ian Rand, chief executive of Barclays Business Banking, looks down from the 30th floor of his Canary Wharf eyrie in headquarters and sighs.
Rand, the personable boss of SME lending, who has been with Barclays for over a decade, worries that there is a huge divide between most small businesses and the white-hot tech startups raising millions in the City of London beyond his window.
“A typical business is not a fintech in Shoreditch,” he says. “A typical SME is a man or a woman in a white van, with a single shop where they’re struggling to pay the rent and the rates, and they’re finding it difficult to get someone to man the till on a Saturday.”
The ex-army officer, who spends a lot of time on the road speaking to business owners (“Norfolk, Wales, Leicester and Sunderland,” he says, recounting where he’s been to in the last couple of weeks), is responsible for over one million Barclays Business Banking clients. Businesses range in size from startups through to companies with turnover of up to £10m.
Barclays, which currently has a 24pc share of the business banking market, offers a network of 1,500 relationship managers at

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Barclays business CEO worries SME lending bubble could burst

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Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Barclays Bank business banking CEO Ian Rand worries that Britain’s peer-to-peer SME lending market could be a bubble about to burst.
According to the British Business Bank, the value of peer-to-peer SME lending grew by 51pc in 2017 to £1.7bn.
However, the Barclays business banking CEO says that entrepreneurs turned down for loans by high street banks turn to alternative lenders. This could see the collapse of an alternative lender if lending criteria becomes too lax.
Rand told Small Business: “There were a lot of people that banks wouldn’t lend to who went to Wonga instead. That didn’t work out too well for them or for Wonga. I am nervous that we could be going down the same path with business lending.”
Rand said that new fintech entrants to small business lending do not have the same “duty of care” as high street banks if SMEs get into distress and cannot repay their loans. This is because some are not signatories of the Standards of Lending Practice, which all the high street banks have signed.
Distressed debtors
In the past RBS has been criticised for the small number of distressed debtors that emerged from its Global Restructuring Group recovery

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How professionals and corporations can prepare for the AI revolution

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Originally written by Partner Content on Small Business
Artificial intelligence is nothing less than the next great revolution and will have a huge impact at every level of our existence. No more so than in the business environment, both for professionals and their employers. Individuals need to raise their game in the workplace – offering value which no amount of processing power can hope to replicate – or risk being swept away in the relentless march of technology. For companies, however, the imperative is how to successfully integrate and utilise AI for the benefit of their business and customers.
If you want to win against AI, get creative
Many jobs that we humans perform can already be done by AI, more quickly and more efficiently. The only thing that is presently slowing this technological revolution is the cost, which is so high for some tasks that it is not currently economically viable to build these systems. However, the truth is that sooner or later this cost differential will turn positive, and then there will be no going back to our old comfortable ways.
So where does this leave individuals? As is usually the case, taking action now is the best strategy. Sadly, there are

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