October “Ask The Experts” Lee Hancocks talks about Trade Credit Insurance

2 November 2017

Would you be surprised to hear that for a typical company, 40% of current assets at any one time are outside its direct control? This is because these assets reside in the company’s sales ledger. We work in direct partnership with a leading provider of trade – related credit insurance, who provide Credit Intelligence to help you manage this risk.

A credit management solution combining credit insurance, allows access to proprietary credit information through our credit intelligence services and debt collection services within the UK and overseas. This provides peace of mind to our customers, allowing them to trade with their own customers safe in the knowledge that if their customers won’t pay, we will.

Additionally: –

•  Assesses clients’ customers in order to give them the confidence to do business
• Monitors clients’ customers and warns them if their financial situation deteriorates
•  Monitors the countries in which they are trading for signs of political situations that may prevent a debt from being paid
•  Gives them access to our exclusive First Source Credit Opinion Service
•  Helps to collect the clients’ overdue accounts that have been insured with us, with the opportunity to pass all accounts for collection
•  Shields their business against the harmful effects of bad debt caused by insolvency or protracted payment default of a customer
•  Provides access via online systems, enabling clients to monitor and manage all the key aspects of their credit insurance policy.

Bad debt facts

• If one of your customers goes into liquidation, 76% of the time you will receive nothing
• If you are lucky enough to receive anything it averages only around 7.5p in the £
• Over 50% of all UK insolvencies involve established, prompt paying customers
• Each year the average company will lose 3 of its active customers due to insolvency

• Credit insured businesses have been proven to be more profitable than those without credit
• Total UK unpaid/unsecured credit losses of over £1.9billion for second half of 2016
• 76% SMEs wrote of debt in the last 12 months totalling just under £50bn
• Every year UK subcontractors are forced to write off more than £16,000 each, due to unpaid work
• Over 20,000 business failed last year (1 in every 5 minutes) and 22% are due to bad debt
• Insolvency rate grew by 15% in June-September 2017

Credit insurance can help

• Improve cash flow
• Focus sales effort for secure business growth
• Secure trade finance
• Avoid risk and reduce bad debt
• Enhance trading relationships with your suppliers
• Give you greater peace of mind

Economy

• Impact of Brexit with weakness of sterling meaning rise in imported materials, food, products
• Increase in living wage and business rates
• Expected increase in interest rates which it has been researched will put an end to 80,000 businesses
• 400,000 of businesses have admitted to being in severe financial distress
• Increase in construction and retail insolvencies which is normally a tell-tale sign of what is to come

To talk more about Credit Insurance or any of our other services, please call Lee today on 01905 611951 or email marketing@hazeltonmountford.co.uk