Credit, Collections & Insolvency News
The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has warned of the impact a prolonged recession could have on small firms. With the Bank of England lifting interest rates to a 14-year high of 3% and forecasting that the economy will be in a recession until mid-2024,/ Richard Burge, Chief Executive of London Chamber of…
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Payments to small businesses were made on average 8.2 days late in September. This is the highest late payment time since August 2020 according to the latest data from Xero, the global small business platform. Xero’s Small Business Index, based on anonymised and aggregated data from hundreds of thousands of small businesses, found that in…
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More than a third of the UK’s hospitality sector is at risk of business failure in early 2023 due to the cost of doing business crisis, according to analysis of a new survey by UKHospitality, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), the British Institute of Innkeeping (BII) and Hospitality Ulster. The organisations’ joint Q4…
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Business confidence fell by one percentage point in October, the weakest since March 2021 and a 19-month low, according to the latest Lloyds Bank Business Barometer. While business confidence remained below the long-term average of 28%, it remains above the lowest levels seen in 2020 during the first COVID-19 wave (-33% in May 2020). The…
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Global consultancy partnership Kearney has released new data showing that a rapidly increasing number of businesses have become ‘zombie companies’, namely firms that have been unable to cover interest costs on their borrowing for the past three years, based on their current operating profit. The zombie companies are at imminent risk of insolvency as interest…
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With inflation hovering at a 40-year high, managing day to day cash flow has become the primary reason for small business applications for finance, according to iwoca’s latest SME Expert Index. A survey of brokers has revealed that managing cash flow is the most common loan purpose for over two in five small businesses (42%)…
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Profit warnings issued by UK-listed companies in Quarter 3 2022 reached their highest third-quarter total since 2008, according to EY-Parthenon’s latest Profit Warnings report. In total, 86 profit warnings were issued between July and September 2022, compared to 51 in the same period of 2021, an increase of 69% and a 34% increase from Q2…
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Research from spend management cloud provider, Ivalua has revealed that more than a third of UK businesses (36%) have extended payment terms for suppliers in the last 12 months, due to the impact of COVID-19 (62%), Brexit (39%), and rising energy costs (38%). The research reveals the true impact of late payments on the supply…
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New research from insolvency and restructuring trade body R3 reveals Scottish firms had almost 1.7 million overdue invoices on their books in the last quarter. R3’s analysis of data provided by Creditsafe shows 1,696,445 invoices were overdue in Scotland in Q3 – an increase of 7.1% from Q2’s total of 1,583,353. Scotland and the West…
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More than 600,000 UK companies are in critical financial distress, according to a Red Flag report by Begbies Traynor. The latest data reveals that the number of companies rated as being in ‘critical financial distress’ continued to rise rapidly in the third quarter of 2022, jumping by 25% compared with the same period in 2021…
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Cost pressures, falling revenues and a growing reliance on debt to prop up cashflows are among the gloomy findings of the latest Small Business Index (SBI) from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). The quarterly temperature-taking survey reveals the greatest level of pessimism among small business owners outside of lockdowns, with a net confidence score…
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The cost of borrowing money has reached its highest level since 2010, according to a survey of 87 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) by Deloitte. Over half of CFOs (56%) rate credit as costly while over a third of finance leaders (39%) note that new credit is not easily available. The financial market impact of the…
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Business output and confidence fell to its lowest level since February 2021 last month as employers put the brakes on recruitment because of growing economic uncertainty according to research by BDO. The latest numbers mark the first time all four of BDO’s Business Trends indices have fallen together since the first national lockdown in April 2020.…
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