Morrisons is preparing to pull down the shutters on 100 loss-making convenience stores in a move that places hundreds of shop-floor jobs in jeopardy, with the Bradford-based grocer pointing the finger squarely at Labour’s tax and wage agenda for tipping the sites into terminal decline.

Britain’s fifth-largest supermarket said the shops, all of them legacy outlets from its 2022 rescue of collapsed convenience chain McColl’s, had been “challenged for a number of years” despite remedial action. The closures will be phased in over the coming months, with affected staff entering consultation.

In an unusually pointed statement, a spokesman for the group said the situation had been “exacerbated in more recent years by significant cost increases resulting from Government policy choices, which have made returning these stores to profitability even more difficult”. While bosses stopped short of naming specific measures, the timing leaves little room for ambiguity.

From 1 April, the National Living Wage rose by 50p to £12.71 an hour for those aged 21 and over, with the 18-to-20 rate climbing 85p to £10.85 and the apprentice rate up 45p to £8. Layered on top is last year’s increase in employer National Insurance contributions, which lifted the headline rate from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent and dragged the secondary threshold down from £9,100 to £5,000 — a double whammy that has fallen most heavily on retailers reliant on part-time labour.

The British Retail Consortium has warned that the combined hit added some £5bn to industry wage bills last year alone, and that as many as 160,000 retail roles could be lost over the next three years as employers re-engineer their cost base. Morrisons’ announcement is the latest data point in that grim arithmetic.

The McColl’s portfolio has proved a persistent thorn in chief executive Rami Baitiéh’s side. Morrisons paid roughly £190m to take the chain out of administration in May 2022, and almost immediately moved to shutter 132 of the worst-performing sites while converting the remainder to its Morrisons Daily fascia. The latest round of closures suggests that conversion alone has not been enough to fix the unit economics on a stubborn rump of stores.

It is also the third significant restructuring announcement from the grocer in recent months. Earlier this year, Morrisons confirmed it was closing 103 cafés, florists, pharmacies and Market Kitchens in a sweeping shake-up of in-store services, and last month staff were told the company was consulting on up to 200 head office redundancies at its Bradford headquarters as part of an artificial intelligence-driven productivity drive.

Despite the closures, Morrisons was at pains to stress that its convenience strategy is far from in retreat. The group still operates around 1,700 convenience stores alongside 497 supermarkets and employs roughly 95,000 people. It said it remained on the front foot when it came to opening “hundreds more” franchise convenience stores in the coming years, arguing that pruning the underperforming tail and bolting on capital-light franchise sites would leave its convenience estate “stronger overall”.

For SME owners watching from the sidelines, the message is sobering. When a £20bn turnover supermarket cannot make the numbers stack up on stores carrying its own brand, smaller independents operating on slimmer margins will be feeling the squeeze even more acutely. The Treasury’s own minimum wage uplift, unveiled in last autumn’s Budget, was billed as a pay rise for the lowest earners; for many small employers, it has become a stress test of their viability.

The Department for Business and Trade has been approached for comment.

Read more:
Morrisons to shut 100 convenience stores as supermarket blames Labour’s ‘policy choices’ for rising costs

Higher gilt yields and a £10.3bn debt servicing bill have wiped further fiscal headroom from Rachel Reeves’s plans, leaving the Chancellor with little wriggle room before the autumn Budget, and SMEs once again braced for the consequences.

Britain’s public finances opened the 2026/27 financial year on the back foot, with public sector net borrowing climbing to £24.3 billion in April, the highest April reading since the pandemic shutdown of 2020 and £3.4 billion above the £20.9 billion pencilled in by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Figures published on Friday by the Office for National Statistics showed the bill was £4.9 billion, or roughly a quarter, larger than the same month a year earlier, when borrowing came in at £20.2 billion and already prompted warnings about the fragility of the Treasury’s fiscal arithmetic.

The standout figure, however, was not the headline overshoot but the cost of servicing the national debt. Interest payments alone reached £10.3 billion in April, the highest on record for the opening month of any financial year. Britain is now spending more than £100 billion a year keeping its debt pile rolling, broadly equivalent to the annual schools budget for England.

Gilt yields tighten the noose

The figures land at a delicate moment for the gilt market. Yields on 10-year UK government bonds, the standard proxy for the cost of fresh state borrowing, touched a fresh post-2008 peak last week before retreating modestly after Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor widely viewed as a potential prime ministerial challenger, publicly committed to respecting the fiscal rules should he take the top job.

That intervention steadied nerves in the City but did not undo the damage. Bond market analysts pointed out that the recent yield spike — chronicled in earlier reporting on 10-year gilts breaching the 5 per cent threshold for the first time in 18 years, will work its way into May’s borrowing figures and beyond, since each rise in yields lifts the coupon Treasury must offer on new issuance.

Higher yields will also eat into the £22 billion of headroom the Chancellor restored at the November Budget. As Business Matters has previously reported, that buffer was already exposed to political U-turns, weaker migration assumptions and softer growth, a combination that has historically been enough to push a chancellor towards either tax rises or spending cuts.

IMF endorsement, but with a warning

The International Monetary Fund, wrapping up its 2026 Article IV mission to the UK earlier this week, applauded the deficit reduction targets baked into the government’s fiscal rules and the recent decision to make the autumn Budget the sole fiscal event. But the Fund also warned that any attempt to dilute the path of consolidation would risk a sharp reaction in the gilt market, precisely the dynamic that has rattled investors over the past fortnight.

For all the pressure on the Treasury, there was a sliver of good news in the data. The ONS revised down its full-year borrowing estimate for 2025/26 by £3 billion, taking it to the lowest level since the pandemic six years ago. Tax receipts were also higher than a year earlier, though the gain was more than offset by additional spending on benefits and other day-to-day running costs.

Grant Fitzner, the ONS’s chief economist, struck a sober note: “Borrowing this month was substantially higher than in April last year and although receipts increased compared with April 2025, this was more than offset by higher spending on benefits and other costs.”

SME implications: cooler tills, costlier money

For small and medium-sized businesses, the read-across is twofold. First, the cost of credit. Gilt yields underpin the swap rates that determine fixed-rate business loans and commercial mortgages, meaning that the higher cost of government borrowing is already feeding through to the lending desks of the high street and challenger banks. Owner-managers refinancing this summer should expect quotes to come in stickier than they would have done in the spring.

Second, demand. Separate ONS data published on Friday showed retail sales volumes contracting by 0.4 per cent in April after a feeble 0.1 per cent gain in March, a reminder that the consumer engine is sputtering even before any further fiscal tightening lands in the autumn. Hospitality, fashion and homewares operators in particular will be watching May’s figures closely.

The political calculus is sharpening too. With the fiscal buffer thinning, the Treasury’s scope to extend business rates relief, freeze fuel duty again or shelter SMEs from further employer National Insurance rises looks more constrained by the week. Whether the Chancellor opts to plug the gap through fresh revenue measures, departmental squeezes or by quietly loosening the fiscal rules will define the autumn for Britain’s 5.5 million small businesses.

For now, the message from April’s numbers is blunt: the debt interest bill is no longer a line item to be glossed over in the Budget Red Book, it is the story.

Read more:
April borrowing surges to £24.3bn as debt interest bill breaks month record

Britain’s biggest car manufacturer has, for the first time in its history, cracked open the door to assembling Range Rovers and Land Rover Defenders on American soil, a move that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, and one that has been forced squarely onto the agenda by Donald Trump’s tariff regime.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the Solihull-based jewel of the West Midlands automotive cluster, has confirmed it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Stellantis, the Franco-Italian-American group behind Vauxhall, Peugeot, Fiat, Jeep and Chrysler, “to explore opportunities to collaborate on product development in the United States”. Both companies were tight-lipped on the detail, but the framing in their joint statement — references to “potential transactions” and “complementary capabilities”, left City analysts in little doubt that something rather more significant than a polite engineering chat is on the table.

For an industry that has spent the past 18 months trying to second-guess the White House, the timing is hardly accidental. Under the UK-US Economic Prosperity Deal struck in May 2025, British carmakers can export a maximum of 100,000 vehicles a year to America at a preferential 10 per cent tariff rate; anything above the quota is hit with a punitive 27.5 per cent levy, according to the House of Commons Library briefing on US trade tariffs. For JLR, which produces well in excess of 300,000 cars a year and has traditionally sent roughly a third of them across the Atlantic, the maths are brutal. The cap is, in effect, a glass ceiling on its single most lucrative export market.

PB Balaji, JLR’s chief executive, framed the move as strategic evolution rather than retreat. “As we continue to evolve JLR for the future, collaboration will play an important role in unlocking new opportunities,” he said. “Working with Stellantis allows us to explore complementary capabilities in product and technology development that support our long-term growth plans for the US market.”

His opposite number at Stellantis, Antonio Filosa, was similarly measured: “By working with partners to explore synergies in areas such as product and technology development, we can create meaningful benefits for both sides while remaining focused on delivering the products and experiences our customers love.”

From solihull to Ohio?

The industrial logic is compelling. JLR has already paused shipments to the US once this year as the tariffs bit, exposing the fragility of a model that depends on shipping high-margin luxury SUVs across the Atlantic. Stellantis, by contrast, runs an enviable network of assembly plants across Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, much of it underutilised since the wider slowdown in mid-market American demand and a strategic retreat from its all-electric ambitions, as chronicled in the group’s recent €22bn write-down.

Plugging JLR’s premium product into spare Stellantis capacity would, in theory, give both sides something they badly need. JLR would get a tariff-free route to the world’s most profitable luxury car market. Stellantis, whose Jeep, Ram and Chrysler brands sit firmly in the mass-market middle, would gain access to a slice of the premium pie that has long eluded it. The Wrangler-style Defender pairing in particular looks an obvious fit; the Range Rover, retailing at well over $100,000 in the US, less obviously so.

What both companies will be acutely aware of is that the perceived “Britishness” of the marques is itself part of the product. When Ford bought Jaguar for $2.4 billion in 1989 and added Land Rover from BMW for $2.7 billion in 2000, eventually merging them into JLR in 2002, the American giant pointedly refused to build either brand on its home turf. To do so, Ford executives privately argued, would dilute the very quintessence customers were paying for. Tata of India, which scooped up the business in 2008 when Ford was on its knees in the global financial crisis, has stuck broadly to the same line, investing heavily in UK production, including the Defender it now also builds in Nitra, Slovakia, which is itself caught by the Trump tariffs.

Takeover by stealth?

The City will inevitably read the small print of any MoU through the lens of consolidation. JLR is, by global standards, a minnow, the largest automotive employer in Britain, certainly, but a fraction of the size of Volkswagen, Toyota or indeed Stellantis. The argument that its long-term independence is unsustainable in an industry being reshaped by electrification, Chinese competition and tariff walls has been doing the rounds in Mayfair for the best part of a decade.

The language of the memorandum, “potential transactions”, “synergies”, “complementary capabilities”, is precisely the vocabulary of deals that begin as joint ventures and end, several years later, in full-blown mergers. It would be a brave SME supplier in the West Midlands who bet against further integration in the medium term.

For Tata, the calculation is delicate. JLR remains a strategically important asset and a significant contributor to group profits. But the family-controlled Indian conglomerate has shown before, most notably with Corus, the former British Steel, that it is unsentimental about underperforming foreign acquisitions when the global economics turn. A US production deal that quietly evolves into a deeper relationship with Stellantis would, in that light, be neither a surrender nor a surprise.

The wider british picture

JLR is not alone in its predicament. Mini, Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin all export a disproportionate share of their UK output to the United States, and all are now operating inside the same 100,000-vehicle British quota. None of them has the volume to justify its own American assembly line. If JLR, by far the largest of the group, succeeds in finding a tariff workaround through a partner, expect others to consider whether contract assembly inside the US, perhaps via the same Stellantis route, might be the only way to defend their American sales.

For the West Midlands, the political optics are uncomfortable. The Solihull plant remains the spiritual home of Land Rover and one of the largest manufacturing employers in the region. Any meaningful shift of premium production to the United States, even at the margins, will inevitably raise questions in Westminster about whether the UK has done enough to anchor high-value manufacturing onshore, particularly given the size of the public guarantees that have already flowed JLR’s way in the wake of last autumn’s cyberattack.

The official line from Coventry, of course, is that this is about growth in the US, not retrenchment in the UK. As ever in the car industry, the truth will be in the binding contracts that follow this opening, deliberately non-committal MoU, and in how aggressively Mr Trump’s trade negotiators decide to police the rules of origin around any vehicles that emerge with Range Rover or Defender badges on the bonnet.

For now, though, a Rubicon has been crossed. After more than 75 years of insisting that Range Rovers and Defenders could only be properly built within sight of a damp British hillside, Britain’s flagship luxury carmaker has formally acknowledged that the road to its biggest market may, in future, run through an American factory gate.

Read more:
Jaguar Land Rover eyes American tie-up with Stellantis to sidestep Trump tariffs

British families planning a getaway this summer could find the cost of flying creeping up again, after it emerged that Treasury officials are quietly drawing up plans for a £1bn VAT raid on the fees airports charge airlines, a move the industry has branded a stealth tax on holidaymakers and exporters alike.

The proposals, being worked up inside HMRC, would impose the standard 20 per cent rate of VAT on top of the per-passenger charges levied by airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester for the use of runways, terminals and ground services. Those fees are almost always passed straight through to passengers in the ticket price, meaning the burden would land squarely on travellers and the small and medium-sized businesses that depend on affordable air travel to reach overseas customers.

At Heathrow, where the regulated charge currently sits at around £24 a head, the change would add close to £5 to the cost of every passenger — before a single penny of Air Passenger Duty, fuel surcharge or booking fee has been added. The official APD rates published by HMRC already range from £15 to £106 for an economy seat depending on distance, and rose again from April under increases pencilled in at the Autumn Budget.

A retrospective sting

What is alarming airlines and airports most is not just the prospect of a new levy, but the possibility that Whitehall might backdate it. Industry sources tell Business Matters that ministers are exploring whether to apply the charge as far back as four years, the maximum permitted under current legislation, generating an immediate windfall for the Exchequer running to around £1bn from Heathrow alone.

Heathrow generated £1.13bn in revenue from passenger charges last year, while Gatwick reported £607m and Manchester Airports Group, owner of Manchester and Stansted, recorded £470m. Factoring in smaller hubs, the total VAT take could comfortably top £1.5bn, although officials have yet to clarify whether the tax would bite on both outbound and inbound legs.

One airline industry insider described the plan as “a stealth tax on families at a time when the cost-of-living crisis means many people are already struggling to afford a holiday”. The warning lands alongside fresh evidence that Britons are already tightening their belts on travel, Barclays data recently showed holiday spending falling for the first time since the pandemic as cost-of-living and Iran conflict fears bite.

Reeves giveth, HMRC taketh away

The disclosure could hardly come at a more awkward moment for the Chancellor. Even as her officials sharpen the pencil on aviation VAT, Rachel Reeves was on her feet in the Commons unveiling a £1bn cost-of-living package designed to take the sting out of the school summer holidays.

From 25 June to 1 September, theme parks, zoos, museums, cinemas, soft play centres and theatres will charge a reduced 5 per cent rate of VAT in place of the usual 20 per cent. Children’s meals are included in the cut, which the Treasury values at £300m. The Government claims the measure will shave £20 off a theme-park day out for a family of four, £1.50 off cinema tickets and £2 off a family meal.

Fuel duty will be frozen for the rest of the year, free bus travel will be offered to children throughout August, and import taxes have been trimmed on a basket of staple foods. The energy-intensive chemicals and ceramics sectors, meanwhile, will share a £470m lifeline aimed at protecting jobs in some of the country’s most exposed manufacturing hubs.

Ms Reeves told MPs the package would be paid for by raising “hundreds of millions of pounds a year” from oil and gas majors such as BP and Shell, with the Office for Budget Responsibility due to assess the impact at the autumn fiscal event. Broader support on household energy bills was held in reserve, with the Chancellor signalling that targeted help would follow in the autumn “if bills continue to rise”.

The hospitality and visitor economy were quick to welcome the move. Fiona Eastwood, chief executive of Merlin Entertainments, which operates Alton Towers and Legoland, confirmed the discounted rate would apply to both admission tickets and children’s meals. Kate Nicholls, chair of UKHospitality, said it was “the quickest and simplest way to lower prices and boost consumer confidence”.

Aviation cries foul

The aviation sector, however, is in no mood to applaud. An Airlines UK spokesman said: “The UK is already one of the most overtaxed aviation markets in the world and, as the cost burden increases, we risk becoming even more uncompetitive. The only people cheering a move like this would be those running rival airports overseas.”

Industry analysis backs the point. The Office for Budget Responsibility already forecasts APD will raise close to £5bn a year by the end of the decade, while Airlines UK research suggests mandatory taxes can account for as much as half the price of an off-peak short-haul ticket. Bolting VAT on to airport charges would compound a tax burden that low-cost carriers say is already pushing routes, and the SME-friendly connectivity that comes with them, into mainland Europe.

Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, was blunter still: “Any additional tax on aviation is a tax on doing business, a brake on exports or an attack on hard-working families. No government on the side of growth would indulge this idea.”

The proposals may also collide with international aviation rules, which broadly exempt airfares from VAT. Heathrow is understood to be taking specialist tax advice, while one industry source characterised the work inside HMRC as a “fishing trip” by officials looking for new revenue. “It’s a very technical conversation, with HMRC trying to work out if they can capture additional tax revenue,” the source said. “The question is whether it’s going to move forward and, if it does, whether it is going to hit passengers.”

What it means for SMEs

For Britain’s small and mid-sized businesses, the stakes are real. Air freight, sales travel and trade-show attendance all sit downstream of airport economics, and any uplift in landing charges feeds quickly into per-trip costs. It is also the second time in twelve months that the regulator has tangled with the Heathrow pricing model, earlier this year Heathrow was forced into a bigger cut of passenger landing fees by the Civil Aviation Authority, capping charges below the level the airport had sought.

Airports are unlikely to absorb a new VAT charge in-house. Heathrow has been lobbying loudly for measures to restore competitiveness, including the reinstatement of VAT-free shopping for international visitors, warning that the UK is losing ground to European rivals on tax. Adding a fresh 20 per cent layer to its core regulated charge would, the airport believes, run directly counter to the Government’s own growth narrative.

A government spokesman insisted there was no formal policy change in train, telling reporters: “The Government is not considering any changes to tax rules in this area. HMRC routinely engage businesses on how existing tax rules are being applied.”

That is unlikely to settle nerves in boardrooms in West London or aboard the airlines. For now, families booking summer flights can enjoy a temporary VAT cut at the theme-park turnstile, but the smart money in the aviation lobby is on a rather chillier autumn at the airport check-in desk.

Read more:
Labour eyes £1bn VAT raid on airport charges in stealth blow to family holidays

Britain’s largest online retailer has waded into one of the most uncomfortable debates in Westminster and the boardroom: who, exactly, is to blame for almost a million young people sitting outside the labour market?

The answer, according to Amazon’s UK country manager John Boumphrey, is not the young people themselves.

In a candid interview with the BBC’s Big Boss series, Boumphrey said the prevailing narrative that Generation Z lacks motivation, resilience or grit simply does not square with what his managers see on the warehouse floor. “We have to stop blaming young people,” he said, arguing that the education system is no longer “producing young people who are ready for work”.

Coming from the man who runs an operation employing 75,000 people across roughly 100 UK sites — half of them recruited straight out of school, college or unemployment — the intervention will sting employers who have spent the past 18 months grumbling about a “soft” younger workforce.

A million reasons to pay attention

The numbers behind Boumphrey’s comments are sobering. Almost a million 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are now classified as NEET — not in education, employment or training — a figure that has hovered uncomfortably close to seven-figure territory for more than a year, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the same time, the headline unemployment rate ticked up to 5 per cent in the three months to March, from 4.9 per cent a month earlier.

For SME owners, who account for the lion’s share of first jobs in Britain, the picture is grimmer still. Hospitality has retrenched, graduate schemes have thinned and entry-level vacancies in retail have collapsed, leaving fewer of the rungs school leavers traditionally use to climb into work. Business Matters has tracked the trend through the year, including in our recent report on how the NEET rate is closing in on the one-million mark.

Boumphrey’s argument is that the diagnosis matters. “I think too often you read about young people that somehow they lack motivation, they lack resilience, they lack the will to develop skills,” he said. “That is not our experience. We work with some individuals who are probably furthest from work and that’s where we actually see the biggest transformation.”

The case for compulsory work experience

His proposed remedy is unfashionably practical: make a stint of work experience mandatory for every over-16 in the country.

He argues that even a single week on a real shop floor, in a logistics hub or in an office teaches the soft skills schools struggle to deliver. “If you get a T-level student, they come in for a week, they understand the value of teamwork, of communication and problem solving,” he said. “It’s not a motivation problem, it’s a system problem, and that requires a system response.”

The T-level itself, introduced in 2020 and structured around a mandatory industry placement of at least 315 hours, has been quietly absorbed by larger employers but remains a foreign concept to many smaller firms. As Business Matters has set out before, T-levels carry real upside for SME employers willing to host a placement, not least because they create a low-risk pipeline of pre-trained recruits.

The Amazon paradox

The irony, Boumphrey concedes, is that his own business cannot find enough of the workers it needs. Amazon has just over 100 premises in the UK, including 30 fulfilment centres, and is on course to add several more on the back of its £40bn UK expansion programme. Yet roles built around its newer robotic infrastructure — mechatronics engineers, robotics technicians, maintenance specialists — sit stubbornly unfilled.

“When Amazon introduced robots into its warehouses there was some concern they would replace people,” he said. “Actually, the reverse happened. We ended up employing more people. Mechatronics engineers, people who can actually maintain the robots, people who are technicians, they’re not roles that exist. We can’t find enough people to fill those roles.”

His proposed fix is regional and collaborative: business, local authorities and further education colleges sitting around the same table to map skills gaps in each travel-to-work area, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all national curriculum.

Tax, scale and the political subtext

The Amazon UK boss could hardly avoid the perennial question of tax, given the group’s scale and its political profile. He claimed the company contributed “more than £5.8bn” in the UK last year and insisted Amazon pays “all the tax we’re meant to pay”. The wider contribution, he argued, must also be measured in the 75,000 jobs the company underwrites.

Amazon now accounts for roughly 30 per cent of all online sales in the UK and, earlier this year, overtook Walmart as the world’s largest company by annual revenue. That scale gives Boumphrey a louder microphone than most when he tells policymakers and fellow employers that the country’s youth jobs problem is structural, not generational.

For SME owners watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is uncomfortable but useful. The labour market is not short of young people who want to work. It is short of pathways that prepare them to do so — and, increasingly, short of employers prepared to build those pathways themselves.

Read more:
Blame the system, not the school leavers for youth unemployment, says Amazon’s UK boss

After years of quiet desperation in Stoke-on-Trent, the kilns finally have something to celebrate. The government has unveiled a £120 million support package for the UK ceramics industry, ending a prolonged lobbying campaign by manufacturers and trade bodies who had warned that one of Britain’s oldest industrial sectors was being allowed to slip away.

The funding, announced by business secretary Peter Kyle alongside chancellor Rachel Reeves, is split evenly: £60 million in capital grants to help manufacturers invest in new equipment, energy efficiency and decarbonisation, and a further £60 million to ease the punishing operational costs that have brought several household names to their knees. Eligible firms across refractory products, clay building materials, household ceramics and technical ceramics will be able to apply when the scheme opens later this summer, according to the official announcement from the Department for Business and Trade.

For Rob Flello, chief executive of trade body Ceramics UK, the package is vindication of a campaign that has at times felt like shouting into a void. He said he was “delighted” with the decision, calling it “a fantastic recognition of the importance of the UK ceramics industry,” and confirmed that Ceramics UK had been asked to work directly with civil servants on the scheme’s design and delivery.

“We’ve got manufacturers that have been around for many hundreds of years,” Flello added. “We want to have manufacturers that are around for the next few hundred years. It’s really about making sure this money is spent wisely and well, and achieves the maximum potential it can.”

He conceded the funding had come too late for some firms, but said it had been “long fought for” and represented a hard-won breakthrough after sustained lobbying.

A sector hit by every conceivable headwind

The relief, while substantial, lands on an industry that has been battered by an unusually brutal cocktail of pressures. Gas accounts for roughly 90 per cent of the energy consumed in ceramics production, a structural reliance that has left the sector painfully exposed to the price shocks triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Previous government support targeted largely at electricity bills, manufacturers complain, has offered only marginal relief.

That frustration has been simmering for some time. Earlier this year, the trade union GMB publicly criticised the design of the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, arguing that ceramics and brickmaking had been overlooked in favour of electricity-intensive industries — a perceived snub that galvanised the lobbying effort behind the new package.

The damage of the past few years is visible across north Staffordshire. The number of ceramics firms in the area has fallen from 137 in 2018 to 123 in 2024, according to research commissioned by Stoke-on-Trent City Council and compiled by Kada and Ortus Economic Research. Denby Pottery in Derbyshire entered administration earlier this year, citing rising energy and labour costs; manufacturing at the site ceased in April with the loss of more than 100 jobs. Royal Stafford has also collapsed. Moorcroft, the storied Stoke-on-Trent maker, only survived after being rescued by its founder’s grandson last year.

Iain Martin, chief executive of Emma Bridgewater, whose own business has absorbed a £1.4 million loss against the backdrop of soaring input costs, described the announcement as “positive” after a long run of bad news.

“We’re very grateful for any support we can get,” he said. The industry, he added, had faced “quite severe headwinds in the past few years” around energy costs, labour costs and competition from overseas. “This represents a very welcome support from the government, which I think the whole industry will be very pleased with.”

He noted that “significant British brands” had “fallen over” in recent times. “There are 120 brands left and we have a future,” he said. “The money can’t come soon enough really.”

Why Whitehall blinked

The political calculation behind the funding is not difficult to read. Rachel Reeves and Peter Kyle have framed the package as part of a wider commitment to economic resilience and to safeguarding the industrial base that supplies sectors regarded as strategically critical.

“At a time of global uncertainty it’s never been more important to ensure Britain’s resilience and back the industries our country depends on,” Kyle said. “This funding will support thousands of jobs and put businesses on a secure footing for the long term.”

Reeves echoed the point, noting that “the chemicals and ceramics industries underpin our economic resilience and support skilled jobs across the UK.” The wider announcement also included £350 million for the chemicals sector, reflecting concern in the Treasury that energy-intensive manufacturing in Britain has been quietly losing ground to European rivals.

The research commissioned by Stoke-on-Trent City Council made the case bluntly: ceramics is a “vital component” of supply chains across aerospace, defence, clean energy and electronics. Advanced and technical ceramics, sanitaryware and refractory products have seen net company worth rise since 2018, with supply chain turnover up 35 per cent between 2018 and 2024 — a reminder that, properly supported, this is far from a sunset industry.

The campaign to secure the support extended well beyond Westminster. The GMB had previously pushed ministers to showcase UK pottery in British embassies worldwide, a piece of soft-power advocacy that helped keep the sector’s plight on the political agenda.

What happens next

Attention now turns to the detail. Flello and Ceramics UK will spend the coming weeks working with officials on the application process, the eligibility thresholds, and how the £60 million capital pot will be apportioned between firms still investing for the long term and those simply trying to keep the lights on.

The mood among manufacturers remains cautious. Few in Stoke-on-Trent believe £120 million alone solves a problem that has been a generation in the making, and structural questions about UK industrial gas pricing remain unresolved. But for the first time in several years, the country’s ceramics industry has reason to believe it has been heard.

“I’m really delighted for the industry,” said Flello. “I can’t wait to get sleeves rolled up and work out how we’re going to spend it.”

Read more:
Potters win £120m rescue as government finally backs Britain’s ceramics heartland

The founder of 4Networking lost a £2 million business in an afternoon, then spent four years being smeared online by a woman he had met for 30 seconds.

In an unflinching conversation with Richard Alvin, he describes the four seconds that nearly ended it all, and the platform failures he now wants the next Secretary of State to put right.

There is a moment, about twenty minutes into our conversation, when Brad Burton goes very still. We are talking about the period in 2022 when his business had collapsed, his stalker was posting fifteen lies a day across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X, and the platforms were responding to his complaints with cut-and-paste boilerplate. He is sitting at his desk in Somerset, the same desk he sat at then.

“Four seconds,” he says. “For four seconds, I thought I can’t do this anymore.” He pauses. “Luckily those four seconds happened when I was sat at my desk, as in another setting the outcome might have been different, either way it motivated me to go to the doctors and get some antidepressants. Hadn’t done them for 25 years. That just shows you how severe this was.”

It is a remark, delivered in the matter-of-fact Salford cadence familiar to anyone who has ever booked Burton for a keynote, that reframes the whole interview. Britain’s self-styled “number one motivational speaker”, the man who built 4Networking from a £25,000 debt and a pile of pizza delivery sheets in 2006 into the country’s largest face-to-face business network — was, on his own admission, four seconds from a very different ending.

We had sat down for the latest edition of the ‘In Conversation Podcast’ to talk about three things, all of them, in his view, urgent for anyone running a small business in 2026: how you rebuild when turnover goes to zero with no playbook; what happens when the professional platform you have anchored your reputation to stops protecting you; and what resilience, mental, financial, reputational, actually looks like on the other side. They proved to be the same story.

From £2.3 million to nought in a single afternoon

The first collapse was televised. On 20 March 2020, with 4Networking turning over £2.3 million a year at its peak and running 5,000 face-to-face breakfast meetings in Premier Inns and Brewers Fayre up and down the country, Boris Johnson told the country to stay at home.

“When you’re running 5,000 networking meetings in Brewers Fayres and Holiday Inn Expresses up and down the land, that’s a problem,” Burton says, with characteristic understatement. The original assumption that “this will be a short pause, we’ll be back”, turned into a “dance of the seven veils”, a fortnightly extension that he believes did more damage than honesty would have.

Burton’s response was to invoke what he calls his 24/24/24 framework. “If I can’t make a decision in 24 seconds, revisit in 24 minutes. If after 24 minutes I can’t make a decision, I revisit in 24 hours. If after 24 hours I can’t make a decision, I’ve just made a decision, it’s not important. Next.” Within days, 4Networking had become the first network in the country to move wholesale onto Zoom, under the banner 4N Online. He calls it “drawing a picture of a sandwich when you’re hungry”, a holding measure rather than a substitute. He exited the company in 2022.

That should have been the story: a textbook British SME pivot, a clean founder exit, a man in his early fifties moving on to keynotes and books. It was not.

Thirty seconds at Aston Villa

In January 2019, at one of Burton’s personal development events at Aston Villa Football Club, a woman in an audience of around 200 was introduced to him by a mutual contact and asked for a selfie. The exchange lasted less than a minute. Her name was Sam Wall.

A year later, with Britain locked down and Burton’s identity as the country’s networking-in-chief evaporating in real time, Wall began posting on social media. The first post was vague; the second referenced “a high-profile speaker”; the third named him. Within days she had 30,000 LinkedIn followers, more than Burton’s own, and was alleging he had given her death threats, poisoned her cat, slashed her tyres and put a tracker on her car. Burton was 200 miles away in Somerset throughout lockdown.

“I was 200 miles away in lockdown and being accused of poisoning her cat — and Linkedin did nothing”

“People don’t do checks and measures on social media,” he says. “It was a modern-day witch hunt. I was guilty until proven innocent.” A cease-and-desist letter, served at a cost of £3,000, was promptly photographed and posted to her feed beneath the caption: “I’m not allowing this guy to bully me into submission.” Supporters cheered her on. Speaking engagements began to be quietly cancelled. Family members were drawn in.

The legal road, when he finally took it, was as slow as it was bruising. A statement given at Taunton police station vanished from the system. Wall was arrested, bailed for 30 days, “30 days of peace”, and resumed her campaign, in Burton’s recollection, “30 days and 10 minutes later”. She forged what purported to be a stalker protection order against him and posted it online. She wrote a 22,000-word article about him on LinkedIn. By his own count, she made roughly 500 posts about him across the major platforms over four years.

In March 2025, the case finally reached a national audience. BBC Panorama broadcast My Online Stalker, presented by Darragh MacIntyre, with Burton and the Manchester tech entrepreneur Naomi Timperley as its central voices. Channel 4’s Social Media Monsters followed with a second-episode treatment of the same case. ITV covered the sentencing. In October 2025, at Minshull Street Crown Court, Sam Wall was jailed for 28 months for what Judge Neil Usher described as a “prolonged, deliberate and calculated” campaign and an “unrelenting barrage” that was “breathtaking” in its scope.

Burton’s case is one of the fewer than two per cent of stalking complaints in this country that result in a conviction.

“There is no leadership at LinkedIn”

It is the response of the platforms, and one platform in particular, that animates him now. Wall’s LinkedIn account, as of publication, remains live, and so does much of the content she posted about him. Business Matters has previously reported on the mounting pressure on LinkedIn to act.

“We contacted LinkedIn legals. We contacted support. We tagged in everybody,” Burton says. “Not a single piece of content came down. We had people from America come on Zoom calls, they wouldn’t even turn the cameras on, saying, ‘She’s not doing anything illegal.’ I said, ‘What happens if she gets convicted?’ They said, ‘If she gets convicted, do let us know and we’ll see what we can do.’ So guess what? We let them know. They did nothing about it.”

Top-tier legal advice, he says, surfaced a structural problem: LinkedIn hides behind European law jurisdictionally rooted in Ireland and corporate decision-making rooted in California. “They’ve got this double moat. Nobody wanted to champion it.” Reporting Wall’s account, by design, blocked the reporter from her output rather than removing it. “That’s not a solution.”

If he had ten minutes with the Secretary of State and LinkedIn’s UK MD, what would he ask for? “Imagine if on your platform, I called you this, and I said this about your family. Would you ignore it and block me? Or would you make some changes and get me off the platform? That is exactly what should have happened here. Your business is people, and that’s the bit that’s been lost.” He goes further: there is, he says, “no leadership” at the UK level. “Nobody stepped forward and said, ‘I’m the UK managing director. I’m going to sort this crap.'”

It is a critique that lands at a moment when the regulatory tide is turning. The Online Safety Act is reshaping platform obligations in the UK, and stalking prosecutions, although still woefully low against a high base of reported offences, are at a record high. Burton’s case is the gap between the law and its enforcement made flesh.

Building the antidote

What Burton always does, and is doing again, is build. His new venture, Motivational Business Network, has opened for paid membership at £75 a month, vetted, deliberately slow, and capped at the kind of room size where, as he puts it, “you go and put yourself in a room with 50 people who are on side and positive, and tell me that’s a waste of time.”

The product cue is something called Shine: every member receives 100 daily “Shine points” they can award to others for genuine help, the awards visible on a member’s profile as social proof. “When everyone’s shouting, no one’s listening,” he says. “We’ve got to start getting quieter. We’ve got to start talking again. Less AI, more human.”

He pauses, the Salford grin back in place. “When I built 4Networking, it was a wobbly Jenga tower. This time we’re building it slow, methodical. No rush. Let’s get it right, not right now, which goes 100 per cent against everything I’ve ever done.”

For a man who came within four seconds of a different outcome, “right, not right now” sounds less like a strapline and more like a hard-won operating principle. British business, and the platforms that profess to serve it, would do well to take the note.

Read more:
Brad Burton interview: how the UK’s no.1 motivational speaker rebuilt after lockdown wiped out 4Networking, and survived a four-year online stalking campaign

The Government’s headline-grabbing summer VAT giveaway has been dismissed as politically convenient window-dressing by the head of the UK’s night-time economy trade body, who argues that the country’s clubs, festivals and live music venues have once again been left to fend for themselves.

Michael Kill, chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA), launched a withering critique of the Great British Summer Savings scheme unveiled by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, which slashes VAT from 20 per cent to 5 per cent on a narrow band of family attractions, including theme parks, zoos, museums, children’s cinema tickets and kids’ meals, between 25 June and 1 September. The cut, ministers say, is designed to help households afford summer days out and bolster the hospitality sector through its peak trading window.

For an industry that has watched roughly a third of the country’s nightclubs disappear since 2017, however, the measure looks less like a lifeline and more like a snub. The full details of the chancellor’s family-focused VAT package made no mention of the late-night venues, festivals or grassroots music spaces that have been pleading for sector-wide tax relief for the better part of a decade.

“The Government’s latest VAT announcement is not just a missed opportunity, it is a glaring example of short-term thinking and a fundamental misunderstanding of the UK’s leisure and cultural economy,” Kill said. “While positioning this as support for families, the policy completely overlooks and effectively sidelines the night-time economy, including festivals, clubs, live music venues and late-night cultural spaces that have been fighting to survive under relentless financial pressure.”

A backbone, not a footnote

Kill’s frustration is rooted in hard numbers. NTIA data shows the UK lost roughly 1,940 licensed clubs between 2015 and 2025, a 26 per cent decline, while 26 per cent of British towns that previously had at least one nightclub now have none at all. Industry research published earlier this year warned that, without urgent intervention, Britain risks losing 10,000 late-night venues and 150,000 jobs by 2028.

The festival circuit is faring little better. More than 40 UK festivals were scrapped in 2024, with a similar tally lost in 2025 and a fresh wave of 2026 cancellations, including Red Rooster, Stone Valley South and WestworldFest, already announced as operators buckle under soaring production costs, post-pandemic debt and softer ticket sales.

“These businesses are not peripheral, they are the backbone of the UK’s global cultural reputation and a critical driver of jobs, tourism and economic activity,” Kill argued. “For years, we have consistently lobbied for a fair and meaningful reduction in VAT across hospitality, live events and cultural experiences. Instead, what we have been given is a narrow, temporary measure that cherry-picks certain activities while leaving the rest of the sector to absorb rising costs, punitive tax burdens and ongoing instability.”

The trade body has repeatedly pressed Treasury ministers for a permanent VAT cut from 20 to 10 per cent across hospitality and the cultural sector, a campaign that has gathered momentum after a string of nightclub closures prompted renewed calls for action.

Squeezed at every turn

Operators say the picture on the ground is bleak. April’s business rates reforms removed the 40 per cent Hospitality, Leisure and Night-Time Relief, pushing the typical rates bill for a £100,000 rateable-value venue from £28,800 to roughly £43,000. Combined with higher employer National Insurance contributions, a steeper National Living Wage and double-digit increases in utilities, the cumulative cost burden has tipped many otherwise viable businesses into the red.

A recent New Statesman investigation into the policies killing Britain’s nightlife painted a similarly grim picture, charting how successive Westminster decisions, from licensing reform to tax tinkering, have hollowed out the cultural infrastructure of British towns and cities.

“Festivals are being squeezed to breaking point. Grassroots venues are closing at an alarming rate. Clubs and late-night operators are facing unsustainable operating conditions,” Kill said. “And yet, once again, they have been completely sideswiped by policy that claims to support leisure and participation.”

A test of credibility

The political calculation behind the Great British Summer Savings scheme is straightforward. A targeted, family-friendly cut delivers a punchy headline, plays well with voters facing another stretched school holiday and concentrates the Treasury’s fiscal firepower on a tightly bounded window. The trouble, as Kill sees it, is that such tactical interventions cannot substitute for a coherent strategy.

“This is not just short-sighted, it is economically reckless,” he warned. “You cannot claim to support the visitor economy, regional growth and cultural output while actively ignoring the sectors that deliver it at scale. If the Government is serious about growth, it must stop delivering piecemeal, headline-driven interventions and start engaging with the full reality of the industries it relies on. That means meaningful VAT reform, long-term policy stability and a commitment to supporting the entire ecosystem, not just the parts that are politically convenient.”

Until then, Kill concluded, the summer VAT cut “will be seen for what it is: a superficial fix that fails the very industries it should be backing.”

For SME operators across hospitality and the cultural economy, the message from Whitehall is becoming uncomfortably familiar. The headline is generous; the small print is not.

Read more:
Nightlife chief brands Chancellor’s summer VAT cut a ‘superficial fix’ that abandons clubs and festivals

Rachel Reeves has rolled out a package of consumer-facing tax cuts in a bid to put more cash in family pockets and breathe life back into Britain’s battered high streets, with the centrepiece a temporary VAT reduction on summer attractions designed to keep tills ringing through the holidays.

In a statement that drew rare applause from the hospitality lobby, the Chancellor confirmed that VAT on a swathe of family activities will fall from 20 per cent to 5 per cent under a new “Great British Summer Saving Scheme”. The reduced rate will apply to fairs, zoos, museums, cinemas and children’s meals in restaurants, running from the start of the Scottish school holidays on 25 July through to early September.

Reeves also ruled out the long-trailed rise in fuel duty, suspended tariffs on more than 100 supermarket food lines and lifted the tax-free mileage allowance by 10p per mile, backdated to April 2026. Free local bus travel for children aged five to 15 will operate throughout August in England, in what the Treasury framed as a co-ordinated push to ease pressure on households during the school break. Full eligibility criteria for the scheme have been published by the Treasury.

The measures land at a critical moment for the country’s small-business community, particularly the hospitality and leisure operators who have spent the past three years absorbing rising wage bills, energy costs and business rates. As Business Matters has reported, trade bodies have warned of a “tidal wave” of closures unless ministers act, with three pubs and restaurants shutting their doors every day so far this year.

A lifeline for the high street

Michelle Ovens CBE, chief executive and founder of Small Business Britain, welcomed the move as a timely intervention before the all-important summer trading quarter. “It’s encouraging to see the Chancellor’s commitment to a summer of savings with the VAT cut on children’s meals,” she said. “Providing an important boost for small businesses during the summer period, helping to drive footfall and ease pressure on margins at a crucial time of year. As many businesses prepare to enter the most important trading quarter of the year, measures that support both families and local high streets are incredibly welcome.”

Ovens added that the package was “essential in combating the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, particularly during the summer holidays when financial pressures and childcare commitments can intensify without the support schools often provide”.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) echoed the sentiment but with sharper edges. Tina McKenzie, the FSB’s policy chair, said the timing could not be more urgent for an industry running on fumes. “Anything that helps get families out spending this summer is good news for the restaurants, pubs, soft plays and attractions that have spent years fighting rising costs and shrinking margins,” she said. “With 44 per cent of small hospitality firms based on or near the high street, a VAT cut should help put bums on seats and bring life into our town centres this summer.”

McKenzie pointed to a domestic tourism uplift as cash-strapped families switch out of foreign holidays. “Families will make extra purchases, such as drinks and merchandise, which is likely to be the biggest help to small businesses’ bottom lines,” she added.

Confidence in critical condition

The numbers behind the announcement make uncomfortable reading. According to the FSB, 94 per cent of small hospitality firms saw their costs rise in the last three months, with tax cited as one of the biggest drivers by 61 per cent of operators. A further 35 per cent expect to contract over the coming year, a figure that helps explain why this temporary VAT cut, while welcome, is unlikely to satisfy a sector that has long campaigned for a permanent reduction.

Kate Nicholls, chair of UKHospitality, which has lobbied for years for a lower headline rate, said it was “good to see the Government recognise the importance of a lower VAT rate for hospitality as the quickest and simplest way to lower prices and boost consumer confidence”. The trade body has consistently argued that aligning the UK’s rate with European competitors would stimulate jobs and investment well beyond the summer window.

For now, however, ministers have stopped short of that wider reset. The Treasury has costed the scheme at roughly £300 million, a modest sum against the backdrop of the wider Budget arithmetic, but enough, the Chancellor hopes, to keep the lights on in pubs, cafés and family attractions through what one operator described to Business Matters as “make-or-break months”.

The fuel duty freeze and 10p mileage uplift, meanwhile, address a separate but related pressure point. Rising pump prices have been squeezing tradespeople, hauliers and rural firms with no realistic alternative to the van or the car, an issue previously highlighted as a slow-burning crisis for the SME economy.

A summer test

Whether the package delivers will depend on whether smaller operators can pass the VAT saving through to customers quickly and visibly, and whether families respond. “A strong summer could be the difference between staying afloat and shutting up shop for some businesses,” McKenzie warned.

For the Chancellor, the political calculation is straightforward: a summer of cheaper days out, full coach parks and busy seaside arcades is a far easier sell on the doorstep than another quarter of grim closure headlines. For Britain’s small businesses, it is a chance, perhaps the last one this year, to turn footfall into cash flow.

As McKenzie put it, in a line that doubles as a plea: “As people plan summer days out, we’d urge them to back the small local pubs, cafés, attractions and hospitality venues that make our communities special.”

Read more:
Reeves serves up summer of savings with VAT cut on family days out

The traditional gear stick, that small, mechanical talisman of British motoring, is being quietly stripped out of new car ranges, and according to fresh forecasts it will be all but extinct by the end of the decade. The diesel engine, long the workhorse of the company car park, is heading for the same exit door.

Analysts at Vehicle Data Global (VDG) say the manual gearbox will disappear from mainstream UK showrooms inside the next three years, well ahead of the 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles. Their argument is not sentimental; it is, as the report puts it bluntly, “hard economics”. Electric cars almost universally use single-speed automatic transmissions, and as the EV share climbs, manufacturers are increasingly reluctant to carry the research, development, certification and tooling overheads needed to keep manual variants on the price list for a shrinking pool of buyers.

For the UK’s small and medium-sized businesses, many of which still run mixed fleets of combustion and electrified vehicles, the implications are more than nostalgic. The transmission and fuel choices on offer over the next 36 months will reshape how SMEs specify company cars, train drivers, calculate residual values and plan capital expenditure on vans and pool vehicles.

The numbers behind the obituary

A market-wide review earlier this year found that just 23 per cent of new cars on UK forecourts now have a gear stick, down from roughly two-thirds a decade ago. Where buyers still have a genuine choice between manual and automatic on a petrol or diesel model, only 34 per cent opted for the manual in 2025, a sharp fall from 55 per cent as recently as 2019.

Diesel’s slide has been even more dramatic. Fewer than one in 20 new cars registered in 2026 (4.8 per cent) is a diesel, down from one in two just over a decade ago, according to the latest SMMT registration data. The reputational fallout from the 2015 emissions scandal, tightening clean-air zones and the rise of plug-in hybrids and pure EVs have all combined to push diesel out of the mainstream — a shift Business Matters has tracked in detail in its coverage of how British drivers are sending a “clear signal” in support of electric cars as petrol and diesel sales nosedive.

Ben Hermer, operations director at VDG, summed up the manufacturers’ calculus. “The moment is fast approaching when the economics of maintaining a manual transmission option don’t add up, given the R&D, certification and other overheads involved in developing and refining gearboxes, even if there remains some demand in the market,” he said. “Based on current trend data, between 5 and 10 per cent of cars will theoretically still be manual by 2030. But manufacturers will be looking hard at whether maintaining manual gearbox programmes for a shrinking share of the market makes economic sense.”

Analysis by CarGurus shows the squeeze in real time: just 67 of the 292 new models sold by the UK’s top 30 manufacturers are currently offered with a manual option, down from 197 models in 2016.

What it means for SME fleets and company car schemes

For finance directors and operations managers running small fleets, three practical consequences stand out.

First, residual values for manual diesels are likely to soften faster than the wider market as supply of replacement parts thins and used-buyer appetite narrows. Owner-managers approaching a vehicle refresh in 2027 or 2028 should not assume that today’s resale benchmarks will hold.

Second, driver training and recruitment policies will need a refresh. Auto-only licence holders cannot legally drive a manual car, and as Business Matters has previously reported in its business owner’s guide to volatile fleet costs in 2026, grey-fleet and pool-car policies are already a hidden compliance risk for many SMEs. With automatic-only learners now the fastest-growing segment of new drivers, employers will need to widen their definition of an “eligible driver”, or accept a shrinking talent pool.

Third, capital allowances, benefit-in-kind treatment and total-cost-of-ownership models will tilt sharply in favour of electrified vehicles. The 2030 ban is no longer a distant policy threat; it is a 36-month operational deadline that intersects directly with vehicle replacement cycles. SMEs that delay their transition planning risk being forced into a depleted second-hand market for manuals and diesels just as supply dries up.

Learners are already voting with their feet

The driving school sector is a leading indicator. Figures from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, set out in the DVSA Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25, show that of the 1,839,753 practical driving tests taken in 2024/25, some 479,556, 26.1 per cent, were in automatics. That is up from 23.4 per cent the previous year, 19.2 per cent in 2022/23 and a mere 6.9 per cent a decade earlier.

In other words, automatic tests have moved from fewer than one in 14 examinations ten years ago to more than one in four today, and trade body projections suggest the figure could touch a third by 2027.

Despite the popular belief that they are easier, pass rates in automatics remain stubbornly lower than for manuals: 43.9 per cent versus a 48.7 per cent overall average in the last fiscal year. The catch, of course, is that an auto-only licence is a one-way door. Holders are legally barred from manual cars, which can sting when hiring abroad in markets where stick-shift rentals still dominate and automatic surcharges remain steep.

The models still flying the flag

For motorists, and fleet buyers, who still want a third pedal, the choice is narrowing but not yet bare. Dacia leads the field, offering manual transmissions across its entire six-strong combustion range (only the Spring EV is auto-only). Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Skoda and Volkswagen all still field five or six manual options, while Porsche keeps a manual 911 in the catalogue as a halo product. Jaguar, Honda, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Mini, Tesla, Land Rover and Volvo no longer offer a single manual variant in the UK.

Even Seat has thinned its line-up, with Ateca production ending in the past month. The direction of travel is unambiguous.

For SME owners weighing their next purchase, the message from VDG, the SMMT data and the DVSA’s own statistics is consistent: the era of the manual diesel, the so-called “motorway mile-muncher” beloved of sales reps under New Labour’s generous tax regime, is closing fast. The businesses that plan now for an auto-only, increasingly electrified fleet will be the ones least exposed when the showroom shutters finally come down on the gear stick.

Read more:
Manual gearboxes set to vanish by 2030 and diesel is tailgating its demise

The late Queen Elizabeth II was “very keen” that her second son, then the Duke of York, take on a “prominent role in the promotion of national interests” as the United Kingdom’s special representative for international trade and investment, according to confidential papers on his 2001 appointment released by Downing Street this week.

The cache of 11 files, published on Thursday following a successful Liberal Democrat motion in the Commons, sheds fresh light on how Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor came to occupy one of British business diplomacy’s most senior unpaid posts, a role he held for a decade and which has since become the focus of a Metropolitan Police criminal inquiry.

A royal recommendation, in writing

In a memorandum to the then-foreign secretary Robin Cook dated February 2000, Sir David Wright, the chief executive of British Trade International, the predecessor to today’s Department for Business and Trade, set out the palace’s thinking in unusually direct terms.

“The Queen’s wish is that the Duke of Kent should be succeeded in this role by the Duke of York,” Sir David wrote. “The Duke of Kent is to relinquish his responsibilities around April next year. That would fit well with the end of the Duke of York’s active naval career. The Queen is very keen that the Duke of York should take on a prominent role in the promotion of national interests.”

He added: “No other member of The Royal Family would be available to succeed the Duke of Kent. The Duke of York’s adoption of his role would seem a natural fit.”

For Whitehall officials charged with selling British plc abroad, the recommendation from Buckingham Palace was, in the language of the time, treated as decisive.

The envoy who preferred ‘sophisticated countries’

If the appointment had a regal sheen, the papers also reveal a markedly less flattering portrait of the working envoy. In a letter dated 25 January 2000, Kathryn Colvin, then head of the Foreign Office’s Protocol Division, recorded a briefing from the duke’s principal private secretary, Captain Neil Blair, on his employer’s travel preferences.

The ex-prince, the note records, “tended to prefer more sophisticated countries” and preferred “ballet over theatre”. Captain Blair also stipulated that “the Duke of York should not be offered golfing functions abroad. This was a private activity and if he took his clubs with him he would not play in any public sense”.

For an envoy whose taxpayer-funded brief was to open doors for British exporters in fast-growing emerging markets, the attitudes set out in the briefing will sit uncomfortably with the SME exporters who relied on the office to act as a battering ram into difficult jurisdictions. As former business secretary Sir Vince Cable noted earlier this year, the conduct of Andrew’s tenure deserves serious examination by investigators, not least because the role traded on the prestige of the Crown to win commercial advantage.

From soft power to criminal inquiry

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest on 19 February, his sixty-sixth birthday, has transformed what was once a footnote of royal soft power into a constitutional and commercial headache for the Government. The arrest followed allegations that the former envoy shared sensitive material with the late paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein during his time as trade representative.

Emails published by the US Department of Justice indicate that Andrew forwarded official reports of trips to Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam to Epstein in 2010 and 2011, within minutes of receiving them from his then special adviser. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has reportedly pressed US authorities to expedite the release of unredacted exchanges held in the wider Epstein files.

Detectives are understood to be considering whether to broaden the scope of their inquiry beyond the offence of misconduct in public office — a notoriously difficult charge to mount — to encompass potential corruption offences as well as alleged sex trafficking. Any prosecution will fall to the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime Division, which handles the most sensitive matters.

Lord Peter Mandelson, the former business secretary and a mutual acquaintance of both men, was himself arrested following the release of the Epstein files in the United States, accused of having disclosed sensitive information. Both men deny any wrongdoing and have been released under investigation; both maintain they had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.

What it means for British business

For owner-managers and SME exporters, the readership Business Matters has championed for more than two decades, the documents matter for reasons that go well beyond royal soap opera.

The Special Representative for International Trade and Investment was, until 2011, the public face Britain put forward to court inward investors and to bang the drum for UK companies in capitals from Riyadh to Astana. It was, in effect, a brand. The newly-published file makes plain that the appointment process was driven less by a forensic assessment of commercial fit than by dynastic convenience and palace preference.

That has implications for how the present generation of trade envoys, and the export support architecture around them, is scrutinised. UK Export Finance has spent the past three years dramatically expanding its direct support for SME exporters, precisely because the soft-power model that underpinned the Andrew era proved fragile when its figurehead became politically toxic. The unwinding of Pitch@Palace, the ex-prince’s own start-up showcase, tells a similar story.

The Government’s decision to release the file, under duress from the Liberal Democrats and against the backdrop of an active criminal inquiry, as the BBC reported earlier this year, is a tacit acknowledgement that public confidence in the way British trade promotion was conducted at the turn of the century has not survived contact with the Epstein files. As RTÉ noted in its coverage of Thursday’s release, the documents arrived “just months after lawmakers accused the king’s brother of putting his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein ahead of the nation”.

For Britain’s exporters, the lesson from these dusty memoranda is brisk and uncomfortable: the credibility of UK trade promotion abroad now depends on transparent process, not royal patronage. The sooner Whitehall internalises that, the better for the businesses that pay its salaries.

Read more:
Andrew trade envoy files: Queen ‘very keen’ ex-prince led UK plc abroad, Whitehall papers reveal

Britain’s vending, coffee services and automated retail industry has quietly become one of the most resilient and technologically progressive corners of the UK economy, generating £3.78 billion in total revenue in 2025, according to the latest Census & Market Report from the Automatic Vending Association (AVA).

The figure represents year-on-year growth of 3.3% and leaves the sector trading 5% above its pre-pandemic 2019 baseline. Crucially, it has now comfortably outstripped the wider economy: the Office for National Statistics put annual UK GDP growth at just 1.4% for 2025. To put the scale of the sector into context, the UK’s machine-served food, drinks and snacks industry is now larger than the country’s entire biomass and hydroelectric generation industries combined.

For SME operators, who make up the backbone of the trade, the headline figures are even more encouraging. Traditional Vending and Office Coffee Service (OCS) revenues together reached £3.13 billion, with product revenues climbing 6.8% year-on-year to £2.28 billion — nearly 10% above pre-Covid levels. Average operator revenues rose by 7% on the year, and 90% are forecasting further growth in 2026.

Category by category, the numbers tell their own story

Cold beverage revenues were up 15.4%, food rose 12.2%, snacks gained 5.7% and hot drinks added 4.1%. After a decade in which vending was repeatedly written off as a “tired” channel, almost every consumable category is now in positive territory.

Smart fridges: the breakout format

The standout story of the year is the standalone smart fridge, which grew by roughly 50% in twelve months to reach 2,850 units in the field. These cashless-by-design units open with a tap of a bank card or mobile app, then automatically charge customers for whatever they pick up, using a combination of RFID tags, weight sensors and onboard cameras.

Their rapid roll-out reflects a structural change in the British workplace. With staffed canteens increasingly uneconomic in offices where attendance fluctuates wildly through the week, operators are filling the gap with technology that runs 24/7 and requires no till. The format is benefitting directly from the rise of hybrid work models, which has fundamentally reshaped what corporate occupiers expect from their food and beverage provision.

Micro-markets — open-plan, self-checkout convenience stores typically installed in larger offices, are following a similar trajectory, with installations up 8% to 785 sites.

Cashless: 95% coverage and twice the spend

Perhaps the most striking commercial story sits inside the payment terminal. Cashless technology is now fitted to 95% of all pay-vend machines in the UK, up five percentage points on 2024, and around 30% of the estate now accepts no cash at all.

Of all transactions on cashless-enabled machines, 84% are now cashless, with 62% completed by mobile phone, up from a barely-there 8% in 2017. Chip-and-PIN, by contrast, has collapsed from 47% of cashless transactions in 2017 to just 3% today. The trajectory mirrors a wider consumer shift, with Britain having decisively opted to pay with phones as the value of banknotes in circulation slips.

The commercial case is, frankly, no longer arguable. Cashless customers spend on average 100% more per transaction than those paying with coins — a multiplier that has itself doubled since 2018. With regulators now consulting on whether contactless card limits could go unlimited, the gap between coin and card looks set to widen further still.

Premiumisation and the rise of the £2.89 cup

The Coffee-to-Go segment turned over £645 million from a base of 33,200 machines, an 8% increase in fleet size. Pricing tells the premiumisation story: the average Coffee-to-Go cup sells at £2.89, against just £0.56 for a traditional vended hot drink, a 5.2x premium that operators are increasingly able to justify by trading up the quality of the serve.

Bean-to-cup machines continue to take share within traditional vending, and over 40% of new tabletop machines now ship with fresh liquid milk modules to deliver barista-style drinks at the press of a button. On the responsibility side, the AVA reports that 80% of cold drinks now meet low-sugar health standards, while single-use plastic cups have all but disappeared from the channel.

A cloud over a sunny report

David Llewellyn, chief executive of the AVA, said the 2025 Census confirmed an industry that “has not simply recovered from Covid, it’s transformed in the process.” He added: “This industry has always been underestimated, and while the rest of retail has been struggling with customer demands, vending and automated retail has been quietly growing by investing in technology that actually aids customer experience, raising its game on quality, and finding new opportunities to shine.”

Llewellyn was less complimentary about Westminster. The government’s proposed ban on the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to under-16s, he warned, risks “potentially catastrophic” damage to operators’ top lines. “All AVA members currently adhere to voluntary guidelines not to sell these drinks in publicly accessible machines, meaning no young people are able to access high caffeine options,” he said. “We urge the government to reconsider this action and continue supporting this positive growth industry in the UK.”

For an SME-dominated sector quietly outperforming the wider retail landscape and the UK economy as a whole, the message to policymakers is clear: legislate twice, measure once.

Read more:
UK vending and automated retail sector hits £3.78bn as smart fridges and cashless tech outpace the wider economy

The Treasury faces the unenviable task of plugging a shortfall of up to £33bn after ministers conceded that the latest reset of HS2 has driven the embattled rail project’s bill towards a staggering £102bn, leaving the chancellor with little choice but to raid other budgets, raise taxes, or both.

Analysis of the Department for Transport’s revised plans for the London-to-Birmingham line, published in the wake of transport secretary Heidi Alexander’s bruising statement to the Commons on Tuesday, suggests Whitehall will need to find between £18bn and £33bn of additional public money before the end of the current spending review period. For Britain’s beleaguered small and medium-sized businesses, many of whom were promised that HS2 would unlock regional growth and faster supply chains, it is yet another reminder that the country’s record on delivering major infrastructure remains, to put it mildly, patchy.

Alexander did not mince her words at the despatch box. She branded the line, originally intended to whisk passengers between London Euston and central Birmingham in under 50 minutes, an “over-specced folly” and accused her Conservative predecessors of needlessly gold-plating a scheme that has already swallowed £44bn of taxpayers’ cash over its 17-year existence. According to the official update delivered to Parliament, the first trains will not now run before 2036 at the earliest, with services into central London delayed until at least 2040, meaning construction will have stretched across more than a quarter of a century by the time the project is complete.

It is the sixth major reset HS2 has endured in just 13 years. The latest came after the so-called Stewart Review, commissioned by Labour shortly after it entered government in 2024, lifted the lid on what its author described as a “litany of failures” inside the Department for Transport and arms-length body HS2 Ltd, where management had been allowed to “spiral out of control”. The Institution of Civil Engineers’ assessment of the Stewart Review painted a damning picture of weak governance, optimism bias and a procurement strategy that left contractors holding too few of the risks, the sort of failings that any seasoned SME owner would recognise as fatal in their own business.

The numbers tell their own grim story. Officials now expect the line to cost as much as £36bn more than the previous official estimate, on top of the £25bn of additional taxpayer cash already earmarked at last year’s spending review. That leaves between £18bn and £33bn of unfunded spending sitting awkwardly on the Treasury’s books, money which will either have to come from fresh tax-and-spend measures, from cuts to other cash-strapped departments, or, most likely, from a combination of both. Sources familiar with the matter tell Business Matters that ministers have ruled out additional borrowing on the scale needed to plug the gap, fearful of breaching the government’s self-imposed fiscal rules.

For now, Whitehall insists the Treasury’s current envelope, which covers all public spending up to 2029-30, absorbs every penny HS2 requires this decade. The pain will instead be felt at the next spending review, when chancellor Rachel Reeves – or her successor – will have to decide which other priorities give way. Whether that means leaner settlements for schools, hospitals and policing, or whether the burden falls on business and household taxes, will be the defining fiscal battle of the late 2020s. Ms Reeves had previously hoped to anchor her growth strategy on a £92bn transport investment programme, much of which is now at risk of being crowded out by HS2’s voracious appetite for capital.

It also raises uncomfortable questions about the credibility of the cost figures that have been presented to Parliament over the past decade. The same Whitehall machinery that signed off on earlier estimates is now telling business leaders to take the new £102bn projection on trust, even as transport experts begin to whisper that the eventual bill could climb higher still. Business Matters recently reported that ministers had been actively considering slowing HS2 trains in a bid to claw back billions, a move that critics argue undermines the original rationale for the project in the first place.

The political backdrop is no less awkward. The line was originally conceived as a Y-shaped network connecting London to both Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham. Boris Johnson axed the eastern leg to Leeds in 2021; his successor Rishi Sunak then scrapped the Manchester arm two years later. Each cut was sold as a saving, yet the bill has continued to climb. As one senior figure with experience of past resets put it earlier this year, Conservative ministers had wasted billions on a project that was never properly gripped – a charge the party’s frontbench is now finding difficult to rebut.

For Britain’s SMEs, the implications are stark. Construction supply chains in the Midlands and along the line of route have ridden the rollercoaster of stop-start commitments for the best part of two decades. Manufacturers, engineering consultancies and specialist tier-two contractors had built order books on the assumption that phase two would, at the very least, run as far as Crewe. Many of those orders have evaporated. Meanwhile the broader business community is being asked to believe that the same Treasury now juggling a £33bn shortfall on a single project can still be trusted to underwrite the long-promised renaissance of regional infrastructure.

The lesson, painful as it is, is one that any owner-managed business learns in its first decade: budget overruns of this scale do not just happen. They are baked in at the start by woolly objectives, scope creep, weak commercial discipline and political interference. HS2 has had all four in industrial quantities. Until Westminster develops the institutional muscle to deliver megaprojects on time and on budget, British business will continue to pay the price, both directly, through taxes and forgone investment, and indirectly, through a global reputation for infrastructure delivery that is fast becoming a cautionary tale.

Read more:
HS2 reset to punch £33bn black hole in Britain’s public finances

Facebook’s parent company has begun notifying staff worldwide that they are out of a job, with engineers and product teams bearing the brunt of a 10 per cent cull designed to bankroll a $145bn artificial intelligence spending spree.

Meta Platforms started handing out redundancy notices on Wednesday morning, kicking off one of the most aggressive restructurings in Silicon Valley this year. As many as 8,000 roles, roughly a tenth of the company’s global headcount, are expected to disappear as Mark Zuckerberg shifts the business onto a leaner, AI-first footing.

The cuts are heavily concentrated in the company’s engineering and product divisions, according to a Bloomberg report, with around 350 jobs in Dublin, Meta’s European headquarters, set to go. The Irish capital has long been a critical hub for the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, hosting thousands of staff serving customers across the EMEA region.

Even before the redundancy letters landed, the wheels of internal change were already in motion. On Monday, some 7,000 employees were told they had been redeployed to newly formed teams charged with developing AI products, agents and assistants that will be threaded through Meta’s family of apps.

“We’re now at the stage where many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, wrote in an internal memo seen by staff this week.

A $145bn bet on ‘personal superintelligence’

The job losses come as Meta pours unprecedented sums into the data centres, chips and engineering talent it believes will define the next decade of computing. At its most recent quarterly results, the company told investors it would spend up to $145bn on capital expenditure this year, more than double the $72bn it shelled out in 2025.

Where rivals such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are funnelling much of that AI capability into cloud services they can sell to corporate customers, Mr Zuckerberg is taking a different path. The Meta co-founder is pursuing what he calls “personal superintelligence” — a hyper-personalised AI assistant designed to live inside Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and the company’s growing range of smart glasses and headsets.

Meta’s Muse Spark model, released in April, is the first significant product to emerge from its Superintelligence Labs unit, which was set up last June and stocked with high-profile hires poached from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

That spending has unnerved investors and weighed on the share price. Meta’s stock is down 8.4 per cent so far this year, even as the wider Nasdaq has put on 12.5 per cent, a divergence that, as Business Matters reported after the first-quarter results, reflects mounting unease over the lack of a direct revenue line attached to Meta’s AI bill. When pressed on the return on investment of the spending, Mr Zuckerberg told analysts on the Q1 earnings call that it was “a very technical question”, a line that did little to soothe nerves on Wall Street.

A wider AI-driven shake-out in tech

Meta is far from alone in trying to wring efficiencies out of its workforce while throwing money at AI. Intuit, the American owner of QuickBooks and TurboTax, is preparing to lay off around 17 per cent of its workforce, or roughly 3,000 staff. Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare and Jack Dorsey’s payments group Block have all announced major redundancy rounds this year, with Amazon’s own 16,000-job cull framed by chief executive Andy Jassy as a way to “remove bureaucracy”.

According to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks redundancies in the tech sector, more than 140 companies have laid off in excess of 111,000 employees so far this year, already closing in on the 124,636 cuts recorded across the whole of 2025.

For UK small and medium-sized businesses, the message from the world’s most valuable technology companies is unmistakable. Capital that once funded sprawling product teams is now being redirected into infrastructure, models and a much smaller pool of senior engineers. As consultancy giants such as McKinsey trim their own ranks on the same logic, British SME owners weighing their own AI strategies face an uncomfortable question: are they investing fast enough to keep up, or being lured into a costly arms race they cannot win?

Meta and Intuit were contacted for comment.

Read more:
Meta to axe 8,000 jobs as Zuckerberg doubles down on AI race

Britain’s young workers are quietly slipping out of the labour market at a pace not seen since the pandemic, and economists at the Institute for Fiscal Studies are warning that ministers can no longer treat the slide as a passing wobble.

Fresh analysis from the IFS, published ahead of the latest Office for National Statistics labour market release, shows the share of 16- to 24-year-olds on a UK payroll has fallen by 4.3 percentage points since December 2022, a drop of roughly 330,000 young people. Payrolled employment in the age group now stands at 50.6 per cent, down from 54.9 per cent three years earlier.

To put the scale in context, the Covid-19 shock pulled youth employment down by 6.5 points, and the 2008 financial crisis prised away 5.4 points relative to the pre-crisis trend. The current decline, in other words, is no longer a rounding error, it is approaching the territory of a full-blown labour market crisis, but without the obvious headline-grabbing trigger that accompanied the last two.

The consequences are already visible in the so-called Neet figures, those not in education, employment or training. The cohort has swelled from 760,000 at the end of 2022 to roughly 960,000 by the close of last year, closing in on the one-million mark that policymakers had long treated as a symbolic red line.

A scarring effect that outlasts the slump

Jed Michael, author of the IFS report, did not mince his words. “The fall in youth employment across the UK is likely to be setting off alarm bells among ministers, not least because we know that unemployment early in one’s career can have lasting negative consequences,” he said.

That so-called “scarring effect” is well documented. Graduates and school leavers who enter the workforce during a downturn typically earn less, change jobs more often and reach senior pay grades later than peers who began in benign conditions. The hit is not just personal: lost productivity, weaker tax receipts and higher benefits bills follow young people through their working lives.

Michael’s caveat, however, is one ministers ought to dwell on. “While it does not seem to be down solely to a temporary cyclical downturn in the economy, more evidence is needed to understand the roles of minimum wage, youth mental health, AI and other factors,” he added. “Without this evidence, expensive policies to reduce the Neet rate are shots in the dusk, if not the dark.”

An unusually structural shock

The UK has historically been a star performer in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development league tables for youth employment. That advantage is eroding, and the data suggests something more than a standard cyclical slump is at work.

The pain is sharpest among 22- to 24-year-olds, typically graduates and college-leavers stepping onto the first rung of the career ladder. Employment in that group has dropped by 4.8 points in three years. The 18- to 21-year-olds have fared better, down only 1.1 points, while 16- and 17-year-olds have seen a 7.3-point slide that the IFS attributes largely to vanishing casual and part-time work alongside studies.

Geographically, the slump is broad rather than concentrated. Payrolled employment among the young has fallen by at least three points in two thirds of the UK’s regions and nations, and the share of 18- to 24-year-olds claiming out-of-work benefits has risen across the board. Cyclical downturns tend to land unevenly; this one is hitting almost everywhere.

The IFS flags two potential structural culprits worth watching: the rapid uptake of artificial intelligence in white-collar entry-level work, and the well-documented decline in youth mental health. Business Matters has previously reported on how AI and rising employer costs have already wiped out close to a third of UK entry-level vacancies since the launch of ChatGPT, a shift that disproportionately closes the door on first jobs.

On the minimum wage question, a long-standing battleground in the youth employment debate, the IFS is more cautious. Its central estimates do not point to a “sizeable effect” from recent wage floor increases, suggesting that broader structural factors are doing most of the heavy lifting.

A call to action, not a counsel of despair

Jonathan Townsend, UK chief executive at The King’s Trust, which co-funded the report, said the findings should sharpen minds in both Whitehall and the boardroom.

“These findings should concern anyone who cares about young people’s futures,” he said. “Too many young people are already out of work, education or training, and this analysis suggests we cannot simply assume the problem will correct itself as economic conditions improve.”

“This challenge is not impossible to fix. The message is that reversing the rise in young people out of work or education will take concerted action, a better understanding of what is driving it, and the right support for young people at the right time.”

Townsend added: “For an organisation whose vision is to help end youth unemployment, that is a clear call to action. We urgently need to understand what is pulling more young people away from work and education.”

The Government has begun moving in that direction, most recently with £3,000 grants for employers willing to hire unemployed young people who have spent at least six months on benefits. Whether such targeted subsidies are enough to offset what looks increasingly like a structural shift, driven by automation, wage costs and a generation’s fragile mental health, is the question the IFS has now put squarely on ministers’ desks.

For Britain’s SMEs, which collectively employ the lion’s share of young workers, the message is sobering. A generation locked out of the labour market today will be a smaller, less productive, less confident pool of talent tomorrow. The cost of inaction, the IFS suggests, will be paid not in a single Budget cycle but over the working lifetime of an entire cohort.

Read more:
Youth jobs in retreat: IFS warns Britain is sliding back to Covid-era lows

Britain’s private sector workforce is staring down its sharpest squeeze on real take-home pay since the cost-of-living crisis of 2022, as a fresh burst of oil-driven inflation outpaces a visibly slowing rate of earnings growth.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics this week show that average weekly earnings excluding bonuses rose by 3.4 per cent in the three months to March, exactly matching the average rate of inflation over the quarter. Including bonuses, the figure climbed to 4.1 per cent, although that headline number was almost certainly flattered by outsized payouts in the City’s financial services sector.

For the rank-and-file employee outside the public payroll, the picture looks considerably bleaker. Real incomes are on course to flatline through 2026, with the surge in global crude prices expected to drag annual CPI back up towards 4 per cent in the coming months. With unemployment now at 5 per cent and youth joblessness at an 11-year high, the bargaining power that working households briefly enjoyed during the post-pandemic labour shortage has all but evaporated.

“There is potential for a sharp squeeze in real wage growth in 2026,” said Peter Dixon, senior economist at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

A broad-based slowdown

Wage growth has weakened across nearly every sector of the economy, with construction wages actually contracting outright by 0.6 per cent between January and March. Builders have been hit on three sides at once, energy, transport and raw materials, since the US-Iran conflict triggered a fresh spike in oil and shipping costs.

Private sector earnings growth has slipped to 3 per cent, the slowest pace since the pandemic. Analysts at ING calculate that the rolling three-month measure of private sector pay grew by just 0.6 per cent, its weakest reading in more than a decade.

The contrast with Whitehall is stark. Public sector pay rose by 4.8 per cent over the same period, buoyed by the increase in the national living wage and by generous settlements recommended by the independent pay review bodies under the Labour government. The growing divide has reignited a long-running political row with employers warning that the gap is becoming politically and economically untenable.

A new period of falling real wages

The Resolution Foundation is unambiguous about what the figures mean for household finances. The think-tank’s latest analysis warns that Britain is on the brink of its fourth period of falling real wages in less than two decades, a record unmatched by any other advanced G7 economy.

“The UK is on the cusp of its fourth period of falling real-wage growth in less than two decades,” said Julia Diniz, economist at the Resolution Foundation. “This stuttering performance goes a long way in explaining the political and economic discontent that surrounds modern Britain.”

For lower-income households, that discontent is more than rhetorical. Edward Allenby, senior economist at Oxford Economics, warned that the inflation about to hit family budgets will be concentrated in the categories that bite hardest at the bottom of the income distribution.

“Higher inflation will likely be concentrated in essential categories, food, energy, petrol, that comprise much larger shares of lower-income household spending,” Allenby said. “These households also appear to be entering the latest energy shock in a more vulnerable financial position than the last one.”

The Bank’s dilemma

The Bank of England is now caught in an uncomfortable bind. Threadneedle Street has kept Bank Rate pegged at 3.75 per cent since the Middle East conflict broke out, but the Monetary Policy Committee has already signalled that it may have to resume tightening to head off so-called “second-round effects”, the risk that companies pass higher energy costs through to prices, and workers in turn demand inflation-busting settlements.

The wage figures suggest the second of those channels is closed for the moment. The Bank has previously indicated that it needs average earnings growth in the region of 2 to 3 per cent to hit its 2 per cent inflation target, a benchmark the latest data are converging on rapidly. The prospect of rate rises in the middle of an energy-driven inflation spike risks compounding the squeeze on households already feeling the pinch.

“A soft labour market could limit arguments that there will be notable second-round effects from the current energy shock,” said Josie Anderson, economist at Nomura.

Markets had been pricing in close to three quarter-point increases this year, taking the base rate back to 4.5 per cent, before Tuesday morning’s labour market release. That bet now looks aggressive. Andrew Wishart, economist at Berenberg, said the MPC would be “wary of pushing the labour market over a tipping point that triggers recessionary dynamics”.

“The market still prices three hikes today but the labour market is too weak to bear them,” Wishart added. “Even if energy prices remain high, we suspect that the Bank will deliver one quarter-point hike at most.”

Market reaction

Investors agreed. Yields on two-year gilts, which track expectations of the Bank Rate over the policy horizon, fell by 0.02 percentage points on the repricing, bond yields move inversely to prices. Sterling weakened against the dollar and the euro as traders trimmed their bets on UK interest rates.

For Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses, the takeaway is mixed. A pause in the Bank’s tightening cycle would offer welcome relief on borrowing costs at a moment when many SMEs are still digesting the rise in employer National Insurance contributions and the higher national living wage. But the wider story, flat real incomes, rising unemployment and cooling consumer demand, points to a more difficult trading environment through the second half of 2026, particularly for businesses with discretionary, consumer-facing revenue streams.

Whether the squeeze ultimately delivers the political backlash that the Resolution Foundation’s analysis implies remains to be seen. What is no longer in doubt is that, for the fourth time in less than 20 years, the average British worker is becoming poorer in real terms, and SME owners hoping for a confident consumer to spend their way through the next 12 months should plan accordingly.

Read more:
Private sector workers face worst real pay squeeze since 2022 as oil-driven inflation bites

The chief executive of US fintech Bolt has mounted a robust defence of his decision to sack the company’s entire human resources department, telling a Fortune audience that the team “created problems that didn’t exist” and that those issues “disappeared” the moment he showed them the door.

Ryan Breslow, the 32-year-old co-founder who returned to the helm last year after a three-year absence, insisted the move was central to his attempt to drag the one-time darling of Silicon Valley back into “start-up mode”. The online checkout software business shed roughly 30 per cent of its workforce in April, its fourth round of redundancies in as many years.

“We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist,” Breslow told delegates. “Those problems disappeared when I let them go.”

He argued that traditional HR professionals were better suited to the “peacetime” rhythms of larger, more mature businesses than to the bare-knuckle conditions of a turnaround. In their place, Bolt has installed a leaner “people operations” function, charged with employee training and day-to-day support rather than policy-making.

“We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done,” Breslow said. “There is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot.”

The remarks land at a delicate moment for the company. Bolt’s valuation has plunged from $11 billion at the peak of the 2022 fintech boom to just $300 million, according to The Information, a humbling reset for a business once held up as the future of one-click commerce.

Breslow, who stepped away from the chief executive’s office in 2022 before returning in 2025, has made little secret of his view that the workforce he inherited had grown soft on venture capital largesse.

“There’s a sense of entitlement that had festered across the company,” he said. “People who felt empowered, felt entitled — but weren’t actually working hard. And this is the number one thing that I had to battle. Ultimately, most of those people just had to be let go.”

Bolt has confirmed that fewer than 40 staff were affected by the latest cull, which it said was driven in part by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. In a company-wide Slack message in April, Breslow reportedly told employees: “Developing products and operating in 2026 is very different than it was in prior years, and we need to adapt as an organisation to be leaner and more AI-centric than ever to keep up with competition.”

The comments echo a broader trend across the technology sector, with employers from Meta to Microsoft using AI investment as cover for sweeping headcount reductions. Recent CIPD research suggests one in six UK employers now expect AI to eliminate jobs within the next 12 months, with white-collar roles bearing the brunt.

For founders of smaller British businesses watching from afar, the Breslow doctrine will provoke equal measures of admiration and unease. Few would deny that bloated middle layers can hobble a growth-stage company, and the temptation to strip back in tougher times is real. But UK employment law offers far less latitude than the at-will culture of the United States, and dispensing with HR expertise carries reputational as well as legal risks.

Employment lawyers have long warned that getting redundancy wrong can prove ruinously expensive, particularly for SMEs without the budgets to absorb tribunal claims. The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) continues to urge employers to follow a structured, transparent process, including meaningful consultation and fair selection criteria — protections that, in practice, are typically marshalled and monitored by an HR function.

Breslow’s broader argument, that growth-stage businesses must run leaner and faster in an AI-driven economy, is one that increasingly few in the City would dispute. The challenge for British founders is to translate that ambition into a culture that delivers results without falling foul of either employment law or staff morale. As the wave of AI-related layoffs sweeping global tech has shown, the line between bold restructuring and reckless cost-cutting is easily crossed.

Whether Bolt’s stripped-back, founder-led model can return the business to its former $11 billion valuation — or simply hasten its slide — will be one of the defining fintech stories of the year. As reported by Fortune, Breslow has slimmed the headcount from a peak of around 800 to roughly 100. For a man who once championed the worker-friendly four-day week, it is a striking volte-face — and one his remaining staff, and his investors, will be watching closely.

Read more:
Bolt boss defends sacking entire HR team, claiming staff ‘invented problems that didn’t exist’

Smruti Sriram OBE, the second-generation chief executive who has built Bags of Ethics by Supreme Creations into one of Britain’s most quietly influential sustainable manufacturers, has been named winner of the 2026 Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award. Alisha Fredriksson, the 31-year-old co-founder of maritime carbon-capture pioneer Seabound, takes home the Bold Future Award.

The awards, now in their 54th year and the longest-running international honours for women in business, were presented in London last night by Thomas Mulliez, president of the champagne house. The pair join an alumni list that includes Dame Julia Hoggett DBE, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, vaccine scientist Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, and Anne Pitcher, the former chief executive of Selfridges Group. Hoggett picked up the same honour at last year’s ceremony alongside Shellworks co-founder Insiya Jafferjee.

For Sriram, the award caps an eighteen-year run at the helm of a business that has done more than most British SMEs to give the much-abused phrase “purpose-driven” some commercial heft. Founded in 1999 by her father, Dr R. Sri Ram, Supreme Creations has grown into a vertically integrated supplier of reusable merchandise and sustainable packaging that, on the company’s own reckoning, has displaced an estimated 30 billion single-use items. Its “Bags of Ethics” label, which guarantees full supply-chain transparency, has become something of a quiet standard in a sector still riddled with greenwashing.

The judging panel, which this year included Kristina Blahnik of Manolo Blahnik, Allwyn UK managing director Bridget Lea, Ada Ventures co-founder Matt Penneycard and The Dots founder Pip Jamieson, cited Sriram’s work scaling a globally integrated supply chain alongside her commitment to social impact. More than 80 per cent of the workforce at the group’s factory in Pondicherry, southern India, is female; partnerships with the British Fashion Council and the Royal Forestry Society have raised millions for environmental and educational causes.

“As a second-generation entrepreneur, my journey has been shaped by a strong foundation of values, kindness, purpose and business acumen from my family, and especially my father, who founded the business in 1999 and is still very much involved,” Sriram said. “These eighteen years have been a professional and personal evolution, with a strong belief that business can and should be a force for good. To be recognised alongside such inspiring women is a reminder of what is possible when we use our skills not just to succeed, but to serve.”

She was quick to share the credit. “Our global teams from Pondicherry, and across Europe, are creative, highly skilled, and have always been showcased as partners to our clients, not just suppliers. This award is a spotlight on them, not me. They are the backbone and deserve the full recognition.”

Sriram beat a strong shortlist that also featured Paula MacKenzie, the chief executive of PizzaExpress, and Kanya King CBE, founder of the MOBO Group, as flagged when the nominees were announced earlier this year.

A shipping disruptor with a 95 per cent answer

If Sriram’s award nods to two decades of patient compounding, the Bold Future Award recognises a business that did not exist five years ago. Fredriksson co-founded Seabound in 2021 with a single, audacious proposition: that shipping, the industry behind roughly three per cent of global CO₂ emissions and long regarded as “too hard to abate”, could be cleaned up with retrofittable, container-sized carbon-capture kit bolted onto vessels already at sea.

The London-headquartered start-up’s modular system uses calcium looping to trap CO₂ from exhaust gases and convert it into solid calcium carbonate pebbles that can be offloaded at port. Independent assessments, including a case study published by Innovate UK Business Connect, put potential capture rates at up to 95 per cent. Following successful pilots with Lomar Shipping and Hapag-Lloyd, Seabound has now moved into commercial deployment, with the first full-scale units serving a cement carrier chartered to Heidelberg Materials.

“I am incredibly proud of the journey we have taken at Seabound, tackling one of the toughest challenges out there: reducing emissions in global shipping,” Fredriksson said. “What began as an ambitious idea to address the climate crisis has grown into a brand new category of technology for the industry. With successful pilot projects behind us, we are now at an exciting inflection point: heading into our first full-scale deployments, with the world’s largest shipping companies and regulators actively engaging with us.”

Fredriksson’s win lands at a moment when capital for female-led climate tech is still vanishingly scarce, a recurring theme are investors such as Sustainable Ventures, which backs female founders at twelve times the industry average. The Bold Future shortlist, which also included Josephine Philips of repair-and-alteration platform SOJO and Marisa Poster of matcha disruptor PerfectTed, suggests the talent pipeline is healthier than the funding statistics imply.

A 54-year-old hymn to Madame Clicquot

The awards trace their lineage to Madame Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, who took over her late husband’s champagne house in 1805 at the age of 27 and turned it into a global business in defiance of nineteenth-century convention. More on the programme’s history and previous winners is available on the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award UK page.

“Madame Clicquot led Veuve Clicquot to become a brand of excellence and courage,” Mulliez said. “Building on her legacy, Smruti Sriram OBE and Alisha Fredriksson are shaping the future of business. Their businesses tackle global issues and their achievements extend far beyond commercial success, offering powerful inspiration to the next generation of female entrepreneurs.”

For British SMEs watching from the sidelines, the more useful inspiration may be quietly structural. Sriram’s eighteen-year build of a profitable, transparent manufacturing group, and Fredriksson’s rapid commercialisation of a deep-tech climate solution, between them sketch out two viable archetypes for bold business in the second half of the 2020s: patient and purposeful on one hand, fast and technically ambitious on the other. Both are evidently still rewarded.

Read more:
Bags of Ethics chief and shipping carbon-capture pioneer crowned at 2026 Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Awards

England’s water security is heading for a serious squeeze, and the bill for inaction will land squarely on the desks of farmers, food producers, manufacturers and the wider small business community.

That is the blunt message from a cross-party House of Lords committee, which on Thursday 21 May publishes a report warning that the taps risk running dry unless the Government moves quickly to capture, store and reuse more of the rain that already falls on these islands.

In Surviving drought: reclaim the rain, the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee argues that climate change, a growing population, leaky Victorian pipework and thirsty industries are pushing the system towards a tipping point. Britain, the peers note, is not actually short of rainfall. The problem is that far too much of it is wasted, washed straight into rivers and the sea rather than held back for the dry months that climate science now tells us to expect with growing frequency.

The figures the committee cites are arresting. If ministers fail to act, public demand for water could outstrip supply by five billion litres every day by 2055, the equivalent of around 2,000 Olympic swimming pools draining away unmet each morning. That projection sits in line with the Environment Agency’s own National Framework for Water Resources, which has previously warned of a shortfall of similar scale unless leakage is cut and new sources of supply brought online.

A warning aimed at Whitehall, but felt on the shop floor

Baroness Sheehan, who chairs the committee, says the experience of the 2025 drought should serve as an early warning rather than a one-off. “Climate change is increasing the risk of drought through a combination of hotter summers and heavier winter rains, making the capture and storage of rainwater increasingly important,” she said. “We have already had a dry start to this spring, so it is critical that action is taken now to prepare for serious drought conditions, particularly as we enter a reported El Niño year.”

Forecasters at the Met Office have signalled a likely return of El Niño conditions from mid-2026, raising the probability of hotter, drier summers. For SMEs already nursing tight margins through a sluggish economic recovery, another summer of hosepipe bans, abstraction restrictions and stressed supply chains is the last thing the order book needs.

That much was clear last spring, when Business Matters reported on how drought conditions had begun hitting UK crop production, with reservoirs running low and farmers warning of early yield losses after the driest spring in 69 years. A year on, the peers say the lesson has barely been absorbed.

Four areas where ministers are urged to move

The committee’s recommendations sit in four broad buckets, each of them with direct read-across to the boardroom.

First, the peers want a proper grip on the numbers. That means better drought monitoring and impact data, and a full environmental and economic assessment that weighs the cost of doing nothing against the long-term value of building resilience. Without that, the committee argues, capital spending decisions on reservoirs, transfer schemes and demand-management measures will continue to be made in the dark.

Second, the report calls for a whole-of-society push on demand. Awareness campaigns, tougher water-efficiency standards in new homes, and incentives for water reuse and rainwater harvesting all feature. For the SME estate, this is likely to translate into firmer expectations on water-using appliances, fittings and processes, particularly in hospitality, food and drink and light manufacturing.

Third, the committee zeroes in on sectors that rely on direct abstraction from rivers and aquifers. It urges ministers to make it easier for farms, golf courses and other appropriate operations to build local resource reservoirs, and to introduce more flexibility into the abstraction licensing regime so that catchment-based water projects can scale. For the rural economy, that flexibility could be the difference between a viable harvest and a written-off crop.

Finally, the peers want emergency planning brought up to date. They are asking the Government to publish a prioritisation plan for severe drought by autumn 2026 at the latest, alongside a wider rollout of nature-based solutions, from wetland restoration to sustainable urban drainage, in both town and country.

Why this is a balance-sheet issue, not just an environmental one

The temptation in many quarters will be to file this report alongside the broader stack of climate warnings. That would be a mistake. Water is an input cost like any other, and one that the City is only now starting to price properly. Investors, lenders and insurers are sharpening their interrogation of corporate exposure to physical climate risk, and water scarcity sits near the top of that list for any business with a meaningful UK footprint.

The point was made forcefully in a recent Business Matters opinion piece arguing that the UK economy risks collapse without urgent investment in nature, with the financial sector urged to wake up to the fact that nature loss and water stress are no longer fringe concerns but central to long-term economic stability.

There is also a competitive angle. UK SMEs are, on the whole, ahead of the curve on sustainability, with Business Matters previously reporting that nearly two-thirds of small firms are taking practical steps to cut their environmental footprint. Those firms that have already invested in water-efficient kit, leak detection and on-site capture should find themselves better placed if regulatory pressure tightens, as the Lords clearly want it to.

The bottom line

Baroness Sheehan is unequivocal in her closing remarks: “Water is the foundation of life itself. The Government must act now to secure England’s most vital resource for the future and work with the public to ensure the taps don’t run dry.”

For business owners, the practical implications are already taking shape. Expect higher water bills in catchment areas under stress, tighter rules on abstraction and discharge, growing investor scrutiny of water risk in annual reports, and new commercial opportunities for firms offering harvesting, reuse and efficiency technologies. The smart money will not wait for Whitehall to catch up. The companies that get ahead of this curve, in much the same way that the best-prepared firms got ahead of net zero, are the ones likeliest to keep producing, serving and selling when the next dry spring arrives.

The peers have laid out the warning and the to-do list. The question now is whether ministers, water companies and businesses themselves are prepared to treat rainwater as the strategic national asset it has quietly become.

Read more:
Taps could run dry without urgent action on drought, peers warn ministers

“Don’t confuse cancellation with failure.” That, famously, was the line David Letterman, the bloke who actually built The Late Show, passed to Jon Stewart years ago. And it was the line Stewart hurled back across the Ed Sullivan Theater this week, voice catching, finger jabbing, as Stephen Colbert prepared the wake for America’s number-one late-night programme.

Read that again. Number. One. As in top of the bloody pile, comfortably ahead of Fallon and Kimmel, the most watched chat show in the United States. And tonight, somewhere around 11:35pm in New York, CBS will pull down the shutters, sweep the studio and try to convince us, with all the conviction of a teenager denying he’s been at the cooking sherry, that this was, and I quote, “purely a financial decision.”

Of course it was. And I am Beyoncé.

Let us be grown-ups about this. CBS euthanised its highest-rated chat show three days after its host called the network’s parent company, Paramount, out for paying Donald Trump a sixteen-million-dollar settlement over a 60 Minutes interview. Colbert called it, with the kind of plainness America used to specialise in, a “big fat bribe”. Seventy-two hours later, the man was told he was for the chop. The merger Paramount needed waved through by Trump’s pet FCC sailed merrily on soon after. If you don’t smell something on the breeze, you’ve no nose.

Letterman, never knowingly understated, called CBS executives “lying weasels” and signed off with a parting shot, borrowed from Ed Murrow and inflected with a vowel Lord Reith would not have approved, that I cannot quote in these pages without an asterisk. Quite right too. The man invented the franchise. He owns the moral high ground and he’s busy strewing it with broken set furniture flung from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

For those of us who have written before about Colbert and the slow strangulation of political satire in the age of Trump, tonight is not so much a final episode as a final warning. The message coming out of West 53rd Street is now horribly simple: take the mickey out of the man in the Oval Office, embarrass the parent company in front of the regulators he appoints, and your career, Emmy-bedecked, network-leading, fifty-two weeks a year, is over before the band finishes the play-out.

That is not a financial decision. That is a precedent. And a vile one.

I happen to run businesses for a living. I have spent thirty years arguing that British plc should be tougher, braver, more willing to stick its hand up at the back of the room. So I am the last person to wring my hands when an American media giant decides it can no longer afford a hundred-million-dollar talk show. Late-night is unwell. Audiences are migrating to TikTok and YouTube faster than commissioners can flick the studio lights on. Even my dog has a podcast.

But that is not what happened here. What happened here is that a man told a joke about a man who cannot take a joke, and the bean counters folded the chair he was sitting on. As I argued when Trump’s tariffs began squeezing British exports, this White House treats business as an extension of grievance. CBS didn’t get cancelled by the market. It got cancelled by a sulk.

That is the bit that ought to terrify British boardrooms, not just American ones. Because the chilling effect does not stop at the Hudson. Every UK media business doing deals in the United States, every studio, streamer, format house, news brand, is now reading the body language. Don’t annoy the President. Don’t let your talent annoy the President. Settle, smile, soften the gag. It is, to borrow from another television creation I have written about, Jed Bartlet’s worst nightmare arriving on a Wednesday afternoon: the executive branch quietly dictating the punchlines.

We are British. We invented taking the mickey out of the powerful. From Spitting Image to Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You to whatever Charlie Brooker fancies doing next Wednesday, satire is, for us, a load-bearing wall of national life. A democracy that cannot laugh at its leaders is not a democracy in good health; it is a banana republic with better dental cover.

Colbert, for what it is worth, will be seen off in his final week by Jon Stewart, Tom Hanks and Barack Obama, hardly the send-off you stage for a man whose ratings have gone south. Letterman is right. Cancellation is not failure. The failure belongs to CBS, to Paramount, and to every executive who decided that the easiest way to grow up was to crouch down.

The joke, on this last night, is not on Stephen Colbert. The joke is on the rest of us, if we sit politely and watch.

Read more:
Colbert’s final bow: How CBS cancelled the king of late night to keep Trump sweet

Many businesses find their legacy systems just sort of blend into the day-to-day operations. While not perfect, they manage to keep things ticking over. The thought of replacing them often feels too costly, too risky, and something that can easily be put off for another quarter.

The thing is, “good enough” systems seldom stay that way for very long.

What might begin as a minor annoyance can quietly escalate into higher maintenance bills, slower product development, nagging security worries, integration issues, and general operational slowdowns that ripple across the entire company. Many businesses often don’t fully grasp the true cost of outdated systems because the costs are hidden, spread across departments like operations, support, and security, and reflected in overall productivity, rather than showing up as a single clear line item.

When companies face aging infrastructure, specialized legacy system migration services can help reduce operational risks while bringing those essential systems up to speed—systems that perhaps no longer quite meet today’s business demands.

For many, it’s no longer a question of *if* they need to modernize, but rather *how much longer* they can really afford to wait.

So, how exactly do companies start to pinpoint the true cost of those older enterprise systems?

Now, the direct costs of older infrastructure are usually pretty clear. Every year, businesses can point to costs such as server maintenance, support contracts, licensing fees, and hardware replacement.

The real issue, though, often lies in everything quietly happening beneath those visible numbers.

Outdated systems frequently force employees into manual workarounds, which simply slows them down daily. Teams might spend hours sorting out inconsistent reports, trying to match up disconnected data, moving information by hand between different systems, or simply waiting for clunky old processes to grind to a halt. These kinds of inefficiencies rarely show up as a line item in an IT budget, but they steadily chip away at productivity throughout the entire organization.

Technical debt, you see, often builds up quietly in these older environments, until even making a small, straightforward update turns into something risky and costly. Eventually, companies reach a point where they’re genuinely hesitant to change anything, worried that a minor tweak could unexpectedly bring down other connected systems.

This lack of adaptability, in turn, impacts a company’s growth in very tangible ways.

Something like launching a new customer portal, bringing in modern analytics, expanding eCommerce features, or simply improving the customer experience might suddenly require months of engineering time rather than just weeks. For industries that move quickly, such delays can put a company at a competitive disadvantage.

Even attracting new talent becomes tougher.

Many engineers would rather work with modern technologies than spend their days maintaining old systems with outdated frameworks and patchy documentation. Businesses that heavily depend on old infrastructure frequently find it hard to both attract and keep experienced technical professionals.

What ends up happening is that teams spend more and more of their energy just keeping these fragile systems running, instead of actually developing new features or capabilities.

So, how can businesses reduce the security and compliance risks associated with their legacy systems?

You often find that outdated systems become security weaknesses well before a company even thinks about replacing them.

A lot of these older platforms were simply built for a totally different technological era; they weren’t made to handle today’s security demands, cloud setups, or modern authentication methods.

The older the systems get, the harder and riskier it becomes to manage their security issues properly.

Some of these platforms no longer get updates or security patches from their vendors. Others run on operating systems that aren’t supported anymore, or they’re in highly customized setups that make any kind of upgrade really complicated and risky. Sometimes, companies even avoid applying patches altogether, fearing downtime or potential compatibility issues.

This just leads to long-term vulnerability.

Moreover, older enterprise systems often come with weaker monitoring, less clear audit trails, and fragmented access controls. These shortcomings make it much tougher for companies to spot threats quickly or react fast when an incident happens.

And then there are compliance requirements, which just pile on more pressure.

Fields such as healthcare, finance, retail, and logistics are facing increasingly stringent expectations for data protection, transparent reporting, and operational accountability. Legacy environments frequently struggle to meet these standards effectively, mainly because they were simply not built with modern compliance frameworks in mind.

The risks involved aren’t just technical, either. A significant security breach can throw operations off balance, erode customer trust, open up legal liabilities, and trigger costly recovery processes.

So, what’s the path forward for businesses looking to tackle the integration and scalability challenges associated with legacy software?

A lot of businesses really start to see the limits of their legacy software when they try to bring other parts of their operations up to date.

Older enterprise systems frequently struggle to integrate with modern tools, cloud platforms, and the real-time workflows we expect today. Their APIs might be restricted, old, poorly documented, or simply non-existent. Getting data to sync between different systems often turns into a slow, unreliable chore, pushing teams towards manual tasks or quick-fix workarounds.

This, of course, creates friction between departments.

Sales teams might be operating with partial customer data. Inventory visibility could be inconsistent across different sales channels. Reports might always seem a step behind actual business activity. And marketing automation might end up relying on manual exports, simply because the systems can’t talk to each other correctly.

As a business grows, these issues usually just compound.

Systems that were initially built for smaller operational volumes frequently struggle to handle growing traffic, bigger datasets, and more intricate business demands. During periods of expansion, company acquisitions, or significant digital transformation efforts, these scalability limitations become impossible to overlook.

A common approach is to try to fix things by simply adding more tools on top of the old infrastructure. While this can offer a temporary band-aid, it often just makes things more complex and adds to the technical debt in the long run.

Modernization, however, offers companies an opportunity to clear away years of accumulated complexity, rather than constantly trying to work around it.

With modern architectures, cloud-native infrastructure, and API-driven systems, organizations can integrate more smoothly, scale up quickly, and adapt far more easily as their business needs evolve.

How can organizations go about modernizing their legacy systems without bringing their day-to-day operations to a halt?

One of the main reasons businesses often put off modernization is simply the fear of interrupting everything.

The idea of replacing systems that are essential to daily operations, customer transactions, inventory management, or financial processes can understandably feel quite risky.

However, modernization doesn’t always mean ripping everything out and replacing it all at once.

Many businesses are now adopting phased modernization strategies that help reduce operational risk while gradually enhancing the underlying infrastructure.

This approach might involve:

• updating one module at a time
• moving workloads in smaller steps
• operating both the old and new systems side-by-side for a period
• bringing in middleware during the transition phases
• or focusing on the systems that pose the greatest risk first

The key is to gain more flexibility without causing major interruptions to core operations.

Typically, successful modernization projects start with a thorough audit of the current setup. Businesses really need to get a clear picture of all their dependencies, integrations, operational risks, and technical limitations *before* they begin making architectural choices.

Setting up pilot environments is also crucial. Testing modernization approaches under controlled conditions allows teams to confirm everything works as expected before rolling it out across the entire business.

Data migration, in particular, demands extremely careful planning. If not handled well, it can lead to downtime, inconsistent reporting, or data integrity issues that impact numerous departments.

For many companies, this quickly stops being solely an IT concern and becomes a broader operational challenge.

That’s often why many organizations choose to collaborate with experienced modernization partners who truly grasp enterprise migration strategies, phased rollouts, and complex, integration-heavy environments. Companies such as nCube assist businesses in modernizing essential systems by offering scalable engineering teams and migration approaches focused on operations, all designed to minimize disruptions.

So, how exactly can modernized enterprise systems actually boost business performance?

Modernization isn’t just about the technology itself. A lot of the time, it fundamentally shifts how quickly a business can adapt and expand.

Modern enterprise systems can boost operational efficiency across several areas simultaneously.

Teams find themselves spending less time on manual workarounds, wrestling with disconnected data, or repetitive processes. Reporting gets quicker and more precise. Departments end up collaborating more smoothly because their systems share information far more reliably.

The customer experience often improves, too.

With modern systems, it becomes simpler to support omnichannel strategies, offer real-time inventory insights, deliver personalized experiences, and provide quicker service. Companies can respond to evolving customer expectations without completely overhauling their infrastructure every time a new need emerges.

Scaling up also becomes significantly simpler.

Cloud-native and modular environments empower organizations to expand their infrastructure more efficiently, sidestepping many common bottlenecks in older systems.

Often, long-term maintenance costs also come down. Businesses can dedicate less effort to managing delicate infrastructure and more to driving growth initiatives.

Perhaps most importantly, modern systems enable companies to react much more quickly as their business landscape shifts.

This kind of flexibility is becoming invaluable in industries where customer expectations, operational pressures, and technological standards are all changing rapidly.

The hidden costs of outdated enterprise systems rarely hit all at once.

Instead, these costs build up over time through operational inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, increasing maintenance expenses, integration headaches, and generally slower innovation. What might initially seem like the cheaper option to maintain can, surprisingly, become much more expensive in the long run.

For many businesses, the real risk isn’t modernization itself. It’s actually taking too long to tackle that aging infrastructure, which is already dragging on their operations.

Ultimately, modernization is about building systems that are simpler to scale, easier to integrate, more secure, and readily adaptable as the business itself changes and grows.

With careful planning, a phased implementation approach, and the right migration strategy, companies can update their most critical systems without bringing operations to a standstill, laying a much more robust foundation for future expansion.

Read more:
The Hidden Cost of Maintaining Outdated Enterprise Systems

Tamara Ashjian is a seasoned insurance claims leader with nearly 20 years of experience across complex and evolving risk areas. She began her career as a litigation attorney after earning a BA from UCLA and a Juris Doctor from Whittier Law School. This legal foundation shaped her clear, practical approach to problem-solving.

She later moved into insurance and quickly advanced into senior roles at AIG and Ironshore Insurance. At Ironshore, she managed the West Coast environmental claims unit, handling high-impact cases tied to environmental, property, and professional liabilities. These roles helped her build a strong reputation for managing complex claims with structure and focus.

In 2016, she shifted into cyber insurance at NAS Insurance Services. This move marked a key turning point in her career. Following the company’s acquisition by Tokio Marine HCC, she went on to lead the Cyber & Tech Claims department as Vice President. There, she oversaw cases involving data breaches, cyber extortion, and regulatory liability, while also building and scaling the department over nearly a decade.

Tamara Ashjian is known for her direct leadership style and steady approach. She focuses on clarity, teamwork, and practical execution. Her career reflects adaptability and deep industry insight in a fast-changing space.

Let’s start at the beginning. What first shaped your approach to work and career?

I grew up in Los Angeles in a household where education and work ethic was very clear. My mother was a teacher and my father worked in the photo finishing industry, a long time family business. There was consistency. You showed up, you did your job, and you took pride in it. That stayed with me.

You began your career in law. What drew you to that path?

I studied Philosophy at UCLA, which really trains you to think critically. Law felt like a natural next step. I went on to earn my JD from Whittier Law School and started out as a litigation attorney. It was a great training ground. You learn how to analyse problems, manage pressure, and communicate clearly. Those skills ended up being very transferable later on.

What led you to transition from law into insurance?

It wasn’t a dramatic shift at the time. It was more about applying the same skill set in a different environment. Insurance claims, especially at a higher level, involve a lot of legal thinking. You are assessing risk, reviewing facts, and working through complex situations. Moving into insurance felt like a practical extension of what I was already doing.

You held senior roles at AIG and Ironshore. What stands out from that period?

At AIG, I served as Vice President of Claims Services, and that gave me exposure to large-scale operations. Then at Ironshore, I managed the West Coast environmental claims unit. That role was particularly formative. Environmental claims can be very complex. You are dealing with multiple parties, regulatory issues, and long timelines. It taught me how to stay organised and focused, even when situations are layered and evolving.

In 2016, you moved into cyber insurance. What motivated that shift?

At the time, cyber was still developing. It wasn’t as structured as it is now. There were new types of claims emerging, and not a lot of established playbooks. That actually made it interesting to me. I joined NAS Insurance Services, which was an MGA and  cover holder for Lloyd’s London, and it gave me the opportunity to work in a space that was still being defined.

How did your role evolve after NAS was acquired by Tokio Marine HCC?

The acquisition in 2019 brought more scale and resources. I stayed on and eventually became Vice President of Cyber & Tech Claims. Over about nine and a half years, I helped build and lead that department. We were handling everything from data breaches and cyber extortion to regulatory liability and technology errors and omissions. It was a period of steady growth, both for the team and for the industry.

What does leading a Cyber & Tech claims team actually involve day to day?

A lot of it comes down to managing complexity. Every claim is different. One day you might be dealing with a ransomware situation, the next it could be a large-scale data breach. You need strong processes, but you also need flexibility. It’s not just about the technical issue. There are real people and businesses behind these cases, and that adds another layer of responsibility.

You spent years building that department. What was the biggest challenge?

Scaling in a sustainable way. It’s easy to grow quickly, but harder to build something that works long term. We had to hire the right people, create consistent workflows, and make sure we could handle increasing volume without losing quality. “You can’t rush that kind of growth,” as I often say. It really is step by step.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I would say it’s practical and direct. I don’t believe in overcomplicating things. The goal is always to solve the problem in front of you. I also rely heavily on the team. Claims work is collaborative by nature. You need good communication and trust. Without that, it becomes very difficult to manage complex situations effectively.

Cyber risk has changed a lot over the years. What shifts have you noticed?

The biggest change is how widespread it has become. Early on, it was more contained. Now, it affects organisations of all sizes, across all industries. The types of incidents have also evolved. You’re seeing more sophisticated attacks and more regulatory involvement. It’s a space that doesn’t stand still.

Looking back, what has kept you grounded throughout your career?

Staying focused on the work itself. It’s easy to get caught up in titles or changes, but at the end of the day, you are there to do a job. For me, it’s always been about handling situations properly and supporting the people involved. Outside of work, I try to keep things balanced. I enjoy reading, hiking, and travelling. That helps me reset.

You’re currently between roles. How are you thinking about what comes next?

I’m taking the time to reflect on everything I’ve worked on so far. The industry continues to evolve, especially in cyber. I’m interested in roles where I can apply what I’ve learned and continue to build. At the same time, I’m not in a rush. After nearly two decades, it’s important to be thoughtful about the next step.

What has your career taught you overall?

That you don’t always have a clear roadmap. My path went from law to environmental claims to cyber. Each step built on the last. “You just focus on doing the job well,” and the rest tends to follow.

Read more:
An Interview with Tamara Ashjian: From Law to Cyber Claims Leadership 

A decade ago, international expansion was something UK SMEs spent years building towards. Today, your business could be paying suppliers in Poland, hiring developers in Portugal, and invoicing clients in California before you hit your second birthday.

The barrier to going global has collapsed, but most SMEs are still using banking infrastructure designed for domestic-only businesses – and that mismatch costs real money.

Multi-currency accounts and modern payment platforms have made it technically possible to operate across borders from day one. Knowing they exist and actually setting them up efficiently are two different things.

Your high-street business bank account works perfectly well when everyone you deal with uses pounds sterling. The moment you start receiving euros or paying in dollars, you’re exposed to exchange rate markups, transfer delays, and fees that aren’t always transparent.

These hidden costs add up quickly. They’re often buried in the fine print or disguised as “competitive rates” that turn out to be anything but.

Why UK SMEs Are Going Global Earlier Than Ever

UK small and medium-sized enterprises are expanding internationally far sooner than previous generations of businesses. A growing number now have cross-border revenue, remote international staff, or global customers within their first year of trading.

Several factors have converged to make this possible. Post-Brexit trade realities pushed many UK businesses to look beyond Europe for growth opportunities.

The pandemic accelerated remote work, making it normal to hire talent from anywhere in the world. Digital payment platforms and e-commerce marketplaces removed traditional barriers that once made international trade feel out of reach.

Key enablers driving early internationalisation:

• E-commerce platforms that handle currency conversion, international shipping, and localised checkout experiences
• Freelance marketplaces connecting UK businesses with contractors across multiple time zones
• Digital banking tools offering multi-currency accounts at accessible price points
• Government export support through schemes like UK Export Finance designed specifically for smaller businesses

Global e-commerce sales continue to grow substantially, creating immediate access to international customers. You no longer need physical offices abroad or dedicated export departments to test foreign markets.

The shift in global trade patterns means you’re now competing with – and selling to – businesses worldwide from day one. Supply chains have diversified, and accessing international suppliers or customers has become part of standard business planning rather than a later-stage expansion strategy.

The Hidden Costs Traditional Banking Doesn’t Show You

When you send a £50,000 payment to a European supplier through your traditional bank, you might see a modest £25 transfer fee. What you don’t see is the £1,200+ disappearing into the foreign exchange margin – a markup quietly embedded in the conversion rate itself.

Traditional banks rarely advertise their FX spreads. Instead of the mid-market rate you’d find on Google, they offer you a rate that’s 2-4% worse, pocketing the difference as profit.

This means every international payment loses money before it even leaves your account.

Common hidden charges include:

• FX markups baked into “fee-free” international transfers
• Wire transfer fees charged by both sending and receiving banks
• Double conversion charges when payments route through correspondent banks
• Weekend and holiday spreads that widen when markets close
• Payment amendment fees if details need correcting mid-transfer

The time cost matters too. Your finance team spends hours reconciling payments across currencies, chasing transfers that take 3-5 days to clear, and explaining unexplained shortfalls to suppliers who received less than invoiced.

Many SMEs lose thousands annually without realising it. Research indicates that UK small businesses collectively forfeit substantial sums to these concealed charges, yet most business owners only notice their monthly account fee.

Where Traditional Business Banking Falls Short

Most high-street banks were designed for businesses operating primarily within their home market. Their infrastructure reflects decades of domestic-first thinking, which creates tangible problems when you begin trading across borders.

Currency management is one of the most glaring gaps. Many traditional banks don’t allow you to hold multiple currencies in separate sub-accounts.

Instead, they force automatic conversions at unfavourable exchange rates whenever foreign revenue arrives. This means you lose money simply by receiving payment.

Access to local banking infrastructure is another limitation. If you need a local IBAN for European clients or a US account number for American customers, most traditional banks either can’t provide these or make the process prohibitively expensive and slow.

Opening a business account in another country typically requires physical presence, mountains of paperwork, and weeks of processing time.

The fee structures are rigid and often opaque. You might face:

• High fixed fees per international transfer
• Percentage-based charges that scale with transaction size
• Unfavourable exchange rate margins (often 3-5% above the interbank rate)
• Monthly account fees for multi-currency services

Processing speed remains frustratingly slow. Standard international transfers can take 3-5 business days, which creates cash flow complications when you’re managing inventory, paying suppliers, or dealing with time-sensitive opportunities.

These limitations aren’t oversights. They reflect the reality that traditional banking infrastructure was built before globalisation became accessible to smaller businesses.

The systems simply weren’t designed for the way modern SMEs operate across multiple markets simultaneously.

A Smarter Setup – How Multi-Currency Accounts Work for Small Teams

A multi-currency account lets you hold, receive, and pay in multiple currencies from a single account.

Instead of opening separate bank accounts in different countries, you manage all your foreign currency needs through one platform.

These accounts provide local-style account details for different regions.

You can receive euros with European IBAN details, US dollars with ACH routing numbers, and pounds with UK sort codes.

Your customers and suppliers pay you as if you had a local bank account in their country.

For a growing UK business with European suppliers and US customers, a multi-currency account can replace a tangle of bank fees and conversion charges with a single, transparent setup.

This lets you hold euros, dollars, and sterling without converting until you need to.

Key capabilities include:

• Multiple currency wallets within one account interface
• Local receiving details for major markets (EUR, USD, GBP, AUD, etc.)
• Hold balances in each currency without forced conversions
• Convert when you choose at rates typically under 1% markup
• Direct payments to suppliers in their preferred currency

The main advantage is avoiding unnecessary conversions.

When you receive payment in euros, you hold those euros until you need them.

If you have a supplier invoice in euros, you pay directly from that balance.

You only convert between currencies when it makes commercial sense, not every time money moves.

Small teams benefit from consolidated reporting.

Your finance manager sees all currency positions in one dashboard rather than logging into multiple banking platforms across different countries.

Read more:
Going Global on a SME Budget: Essential Strategies for Cross-Border Financial Management

Being one of the talk-of-the-town technologies, AI still remains a controversial topic. While some platforms reap plenty of benefits from AI, others become completely out of the game. Why does it happen?

Actually, there is no direct answer to this question. Typically, the first thing that comes to mind as an obstacle is budget. Of course, implementing AI tools doesn’t come cheap; even with a solid budget, you still can fail without proper knowledge on how to employ these tools for better outcomes.

Another important factor to shine in the AI era is understanding your platform’s real value. You see, if you have a portal that allows some content generation,  whether text or images, what do you think, would people choose your tool or prefer to sort things out with ChatGPT or any other relevant AI tool?

The second option looks more realistic, right? Now imagine having a platform with real user data, daily workflows, direct relationships, and so on. None of these could be simply replaced by AI. Instead, AI can be used to elevate your services.

You probably feel the difference now. Now, let’s dive into our article and find out more reasons why some platforms are getting killed in the AI era, while others keep shining.

Why Are Some Platforms Getting Killed in the AI Era?

We briefly touched upon one core reason why platforms fail in the AI era offering something that AI can simply do on its own. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

You still can fail with a solid platform in place if you refuse to adapt to AI. Take SEO, for example. For years, platforms relied heavily on search engine optimization to drive traffic and stay visible. Yet now many start to question, will AI kill SEO?

Let’s be honest, SEO won’t remain the same as we know it today. It’s already been heavily redefined by AI. Generally speaking, implementing AI tools into your SEO platform is not an option anymore. Only this way can you streamline data analytics, predict trends, optimize content, and create relevant strategies, helping client webpages appear in the AI-generated answers.

With that being said, old-school SEO methods fail. If not employ new ones, then your clients will most likely switch to competitors that offer AI-driven solutions.

Making Your Platform Outshine in the AI Era

Well, by now you understand that AI is not an optional choice to make your platform outshine — it’s a necessity. The question is how to implement it to achieve better outcomes.

You need a clear business strategy. This will help you understand market specifics, your finances, and where exactly AI fits into the picture. That’s because implementing AI without a proper plan may lead to wrong tools and features that your users don’t actually need. Working with a business plan preparation firm can help you map things out properly before making costly moves.

Now, let’s have a look at the core types of platforms that AI actually can’t replace, yet can significantly streamline.

Support Daily Workflows

If you have a platform that assists people in organizing their daily workflows, they will hardly switch to AI tools instead of your platform. However, it is crucial to combine your platform with some AI features.

Take My Hours, it is a treasure trove for remote teams that need tools to log their working hours and report task progress. This makes the entire workflow transparent and measurable for managers.

AI can elevate the performance of such platforms by automating report generation or sending reminders to those who forgot to log their hours. Moreover, AI can detect urgent tasks and notify employees about their deadlines, ensuring projects will stay on track.

Strengthen Marketing Activities

When it comes to marketing initiatives, AI can handle plenty of individual tasks, such as writing copy, analyzing data, and generating ideas. But running a full marketing strategy? That still requires solid platforms that can organize smooth collaboration with clients and keep everything in one place.

Email marketing

Take email marketing tools, for example. They are priceless in organizing smooth connections and establishing ongoing communication with customers. Adding some AI features to this type of platform,  like follow-up automation, smart audience segmentation, predictive send times, and personalized content suggestions, can make them even more priceless.

One of the best examples of such a platform is Sender. It assists in every stage of email marketing, from content creation to automated sending and follow-ups. And all of this could be done within one system.

Referral Marketing

Another marketing channel worth mentioning is referral platforms. They are in high demand today, and that is for good reasons. They assist in smoothly organizing end-to-end referral campaigns, from creation and tracking to rewarding.

One of the good examples of this end is Referral Rock. It automates the entire referral program and handles everything from tracking referrals to managing rewards. Obviously, AI can’t replace such platforms; instead, it can make them more competitive.

Invest in Reliable Infrastructure

Though AI is a pretty strong tool itself, it still needs a solid foundation to operate. So, some platforms will remain irreplaceable and even a must in the AI era.

One of the vivid examples of such platforms is hosting. Even a well-designed architecture with AI at the forefront can’t go far without hosting platforms in place. This makes hosting platforms one of the most essential players in today’s tech landscape.

With that being said, if you have a hosting platform, then you can definitely secure a spot in the AI competitive landscape. Just one thing — your platform should be secure, stable, and come with high speed. These are crucial factors for each robust hosting platform. A good example here is UltaHost, which checks all these boxes, offering reliable and fast hosting solutions that keep AI-powered platforms running smoothly.

Final Notes

Probably, it is now clear what kills platforms in the AI era and what doesn’t. The key here is investing in the right services that can’t be fully replaced with AI tools, but can be streamlined by implementing innovations. Opt for competitive services and craft AI implementation strategies, so you can reap the maximum benefits of this powerful technology.

Read more:
Why some platforms die and why others shine in AI era

Family offices in 2025 and beyond face a more complex investment environment than at any point in recent decades.

Rising geopolitical uncertainty, persistent inflation, and the digital transformation of financial markets have prompted leading family offices to rethink their asset allocation frameworks. Gold, art, private equity, and private credit are commanding larger allocations, while governance and human capital strategies are becoming as important as the investment decisions themselves.

Quick Summary

The most resilient future family office structures combine diversified alternative allocations with robust human capital programmes and data-driven decision-making. In 2025, the top alternative asset classes for family offices are private equity, private credit, gold and commodities, art and collectibles, and infrastructure.

Top picks for alternative investment strategies:

• Best overall: Multi-alternative mandate with dedicated governance committee
• Best for inflation hedge: Gold and commodity allocation of 5-10% of AUM
• Best for uncorrelated returns: Art and collectibles allocation through a specialist advisory
• Best for long-term returns: Private equity fund-of-funds with co-investment rights
• Best value: Private credit with floating-rate instruments

“The family offices that will thrive in the next decade are those that invest as seriously in their people and governance as they do in their portfolios.” (Campden Wealth Global Family Office Report 2024)

Comparison Table (Last updated: April 2026)

How to Build an Alternatives Allocation for Your Family Office

The starting point for any alternatives strategy is the family office’s investment policy statement (IPS). The IPS should define maximum illiquidity tolerance, minimum return expectations, and ESG or ethical exclusions. Without a documented IPS, alternatives allocations risk being opportunistic rather than strategic.

Human capital is an equally critical variable. The future family office requires professionals who can evaluate complex, illiquid investments, manage manager relationships, and conduct ongoing monitoring across a diverse portfolio. According to the Agreus Group 2024 Compensation Report, the median salary for a family office investment analyst in Singapore is SGD 120,000-180,000 per annum, while a CIO commands SGD 500,000-800,000.

Data resilience is the third pillar. Family offices managing diversified alternatives portfolios must invest in reporting technology that aggregates data across custodians, fund administrators, and direct holdings. Real-time consolidated reporting is no longer a luxury; it is a governance requirement for responsible stewardship of multi-generational wealth.

Families new to alternatives should begin with a fund-of-funds or a managed account with an established manager, before progressing to direct deals or co-investments as internal expertise develops.

Q: How are family offices building and retaining human capital to ensure continuity and leadership across generations?

Human capital is the most underdiscussed risk in family office management. A portfolio of alternatives, private equity, and tokenised assets is only as good as the team managing it, and talent in the family office sector is scarce, competitive, and mobile.

The most successful future family office structures approach talent with the same rigour applied to investment selection. This means: formal job descriptions and reporting lines (not informal family relationships), compensation benchmarked annually against the Agreus Group or equivalent surveys, and career development plans that give investment professionals a visible pathway within the organisation.

Retention is the harder challenge. Family offices compete with private equity firms, hedge funds, and banks for the same talent pool, and cannot always match base compensation. The most effective retention tools are co-investment rights (giving professionals exposure to the upside of deals they originate), a genuine meritocratic culture, and the intellectual freedom that a family office offers relative to a large institution.

For generational continuity specifically, the transition from a founder-led to a professionally managed family office is a critical inflection point. Families that plan for this transition five to ten years in advance, by building institutional processes that are not dependent on any single individual, consistently navigate it more smoothly than those who treat succession as a single event rather than a multi-year programme.

The 7 Best Alternative Investment Strategies for Family Offices in 2025

1. Private Equity: Core Alternatives Allocation

Best for: Family offices with 7+ year investment horizons seeking return premium over public markets

Quick Facts

• Global private equity AUM reached USD 5.8 trillion in 2024 (Preqin, 2025) | Top-quartile PE funds delivered 15-18% net IRR over 10 years | Family offices represent 10% of global PE LP capital

Pros

• Illiquidity premium over public equities
• Access to high-growth companies before IPO
• Co-investment opportunities reduce fee drag

Trade-offs

• 10-year lock-up periods | Capital calls require liquidity planning

Source: Preqin Global Private Equity Report 2025

Last verified: April 2026

2. Private Credit: Floating-Rate Yield Enhancement

Best for: Family offices seeking income above investment-grade fixed income

Quick Facts

• Global private credit AUM exceeded USD 2.1 trillion in 2024 (Preqin, 2025) | Average net yields: 10-12% in senior secured, 12-15% in mezzanine | Default rates for senior secured private credit: 1.2% in 2024 (S&P, 2024)

Pros

• Floating-rate instruments provide natural inflation protection
• Senior secured structures offer downside protection
• Semi-liquid structures (3-5 years) suit medium-term planning

Trade-offs

• Illiquidity relative to investment-grade bonds | Credit underwriting expertise required

Source: Preqin Global Private Debt Report 2025; S&P Global 2024

Last verified: April 2026

3. Gold and Commodities: Inflation Hedge and Safe Haven

Best for: Family offices seeking portfolio protection against inflation and geopolitical risk

Quick Facts

• Gold reached an all-time high of USD 3,100/oz in April 2026 (Bloomberg, April 2026) | Average family office gold allocation: 4-6% in 2024 | Gold has delivered a 10-year annualised return of 9.2% in USD terms (World Gold Council, 2024)

Pros

• Negative correlation to equities in risk-off periods
• Liquid: can be held via ETFs, futures, or physical bullion
• Creditor-proof store of value for estate planning

Trade-offs

• No income yield
• Storage costs for physical gold | Currency effects can dilute returns

Source: World Gold Council Annual Return Data 2024; Bloomberg April 2026

Last verified: April 2026

4. Art and Collectibles: Uncorrelated Returns and Cultural Legacy

Best for: Family offices seeking uncorrelated returns and intergenerational wealth transfer vehicles

Quick Facts

• Global art market reached USD 65 billion in 2024 (Art Basel/UBS, 2025) | Blue-chip art indices delivered 7.6% annualised returns over 10 years (Artprice, 2024) | Art is increasingly used as collateral for private bank lending

Pros

• Low correlation to traditional financial markets
• Cultural and aesthetic value alongside financial return
• Can be lent to museums for reputational benefits

Trade-offs

• Illiquid with transaction costs of 15-25% (auction house commissions) | Valuation opacity requires specialist advisers

Source: Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report 2025; Artprice Global Index 2024

Last verified: April 2026

5. Infrastructure: Inflation-Linked Long-Duration Returns

Best for: Family offices with 10+ year horizons seeking stable, inflation-linked cash flows

Quick Facts

• Global infrastructure fundraising reached USD 120 billion in 2024 (Preqin, 2025) | Infrastructure assets delivered 9.8% net IRR over 10 years on average | Singapore’s infrastructure fund market includes MAS-regulated core infrastructure funds

Pros

• Inflation-linked cash flows from regulated assets
• Government concessions provide revenue visibility
• Low correlation to equity market cycles

Trade-offs

• Very long lock-up periods (10-15 years) | Political and regulatory risk in emerging markets

Source: Preqin Global Infrastructure Report 2025

Last verified: April 2026

6. Build Human Capital as a Core Strategic Asset

Best for: Family offices preparing for generational leadership transitions

Quick Facts

• Staff retention in Asian family offices is the top operational challenge cited by 61% of respondents (Campden Wealth, 2024) | Average tenure of family office investment professionals: 3.2 years | Structured talent development programmes reduce turnover by 25% (Mercer, 2024)

Pros

• Institutional knowledge retained across generations
• Investment quality improves with experienced teams
• Strengthens governance and compliance capabilities

Trade-offs

• Competitive compensation required to attract institutional-quality talent | Cultural integration of external professionals takes time

Source: Campden Wealth 2024; Mercer Talent Strategy Report 2024

Last verified: April 2026

7. Invest in Data Resilience and Portfolio Analytics

Best for: Family offices managing complex, multi-asset, multi-custodian portfolios

Quick Facts

• 68% of family offices cite reporting fragmentation as a top operational risk (Family Office Exchange, 2024) | Implementation costs for integrated FO platforms: USD 100,000-500,000 | Real-time consolidated reporting platforms reduce monthly close time by 40-60%

Pros

• Single view of all assets, liabilities, and risk exposures
• Supports regulatory reporting in multiple jurisdictions
• Enables faster, more informed investment decisions

Trade-offs

• Significant upfront investment and implementation timeline | Requires data governance policies to maintain quality

Q: How are family offices developing an entrepreneurial mindset and data resilience strategies to future-proof their wealth across generations?

The future family office that will thrive across multiple generations is not simply a wealth preservation vehicle; it is an entrepreneurial organisation that treats capital deployment as an active, innovation-driven discipline. This means cultivating an internal culture where new ideas are welcomed, investment theses are challenged rigorously, and the next generation is empowered to pursue conviction-driven opportunities, not just inherit a static portfolio.

Data resilience is the operational backbone of this entrepreneurial mindset. A family office managing diversified alternatives across multiple custodians and jurisdictions is operationally vulnerable if its data infrastructure cannot keep pace with portfolio complexity. The failure modes are well documented: reconciliation errors between custodians, delayed identification of margin calls or covenant breaches, and an inability to produce consolidated performance reporting for the family council.

Building data resilience means investing in an integrated portfolio management platform, establishing data governance policies that define how information is collected, stored, and verified, and conducting annual operational risk reviews. Families that treat technology infrastructure as a strategic asset, rather than a back-office cost, are significantly better positioned to make fast, well-informed investment decisions and to onboard new asset classes such as tokenised securities as they mature into mainstream allocations.

Source: Family Office Exchange Technology Survey 2024

Last verified: April 2026

Best for Specific Use Cases

Best for Inflation Protection

Gold allocation of 5-10% combined with infrastructure and private credit with floating-rate features.

Best for Uncorrelated Returns

Art and collectibles with a specialist advisor, targeting blue-chip works with a 5-10 year hold horizon.

Best for Long-Term Return Premium

Private equity fund-of-funds with co-investment rights, diversified across geography and vintage year.

Best for Income Generation

Senior secured private credit with 3-5 year duration, targeting 10-12% net yield.

Best for Human Capital Development

Structured talent programme with competitive compensation benchmarking, mentorship, and career development plans.

FAQs

How much should a family office allocate to alternative assets?

There is no universal answer, but the Campden Wealth 2024 Global Family Office Report found that top-performing family offices allocated an average of 46% of AUM to alternatives, compared to 38% for the broader survey group. The appropriate allocation depends on the family’s liquidity needs, investment horizon, and risk tolerance, and should be documented in the investment policy statement.

Is art a mainstream investment for family offices?

Art is not mainstream in the sense of being held by all family offices, but it is a well-established allocation for UHNW families. The Art Basel/UBS 2025 Art Market Report estimates that collectors with net worth above USD 50 million allocate an average of 5-7% of their wealth to art and collectibles. Professional art advisers and specialist art finance products from private banks make the asset class more accessible.

How should family offices approach talent retention given competitive markets?

Retention requires a combination of competitive compensation (benchmarked annually against the Agreus Group or equivalent surveys), career development pathways, and a strong organisational culture. Family offices that offer co-investment rights or profit-sharing arrangements to senior investment staff report significantly higher retention rates, according to a 2024 Mercer study.

Where can I learn more about the future of family offices?

DBS Private Banking publishes the Future of Family Offices series, which covers emerging trends, governance best practices, and investment insights for family offices in Asia. Visit the DBS Future of Family Offices page for access to the latest research and events.

Learn more about DBS Private Banking family office services at https://www.dbs.com/private-banking/wealth-planning/future-of-family-offices-series.page

This article is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice. Readers should verify all information with qualified professionals and consult official regulatory sources before making any financial or wealth management decisions.

Last updated: April 2026

Read more:
Alternative Investment Strategies for Family Offices in 2026: Gold, Art, Private Markets, and the Governance Needed to Manage Risk

A workplace injury can place Long Island employees in an extremely difficult position, especially when physical pain is combined with fear about losing income, damaging professional relationships, or jeopardizing long-term job security.

Many workers hesitate to report injuries because they worry supervisors or employers may treat them differently afterward, even when the injury clearly occurred during assigned job duties. Delaying action, however, can create serious problems later by weakening medical documentation, complicating insurance claims, and raising questions about when or where the injury actually happened.

Understanding how to file a workers’ comp claim without jeopardizing your job requires careful attention to reporting procedures, medical treatment, written communication, and New York state filing deadlines. Strong documentation and professional communication often play a major role in protecting both workplace rights and financial stability throughout the process. During these stressful situations, guidance from a  workers’ compensation lawyer from Long Island can help injured employees avoid preventable mistakes, properly organize evidence, and navigate disputes involving benefits, medical restrictions, or employer concerns, while keeping the focus on recovery and a safe return to work.

Report It Fast

Timing matters after any workplace injury. In New York, notice must usually be given to a supervisor within 30 days, yet same-day reporting creates a stronger factual record. Before memories shift, workers’ compensation can clarify how injury notice, physician findings, and employer paperwork fit together, which often reduces avoidable errors, delays in checks, and disputes over whether the harm arose during assigned tasks. Early notice also helps witnesses recall details clearly.

Get Medical Care

Clinical evaluation should begin quickly. An examination creates a dated record, connects symptoms to the incident, and shows that the condition required prompt attention. Waiting too long may invite doubt from insurers or managers. If the employer uses approved providers, that instruction should be followed carefully. Clear descriptions of swelling, restricted motion, numbness, weakness, or sleep disruption matter because treatment notes often shape decisions about benefits and work restrictions.

Use Written Notice

Spoken reports can blur with time. A brief written notice, sent by email, text, or an internal form, gives the event a stable timestamp. Dates, locations, witnesses, affected body parts, and job duties should appear in plain language. Strong claims usually rest on clean facts, not emotion. Copies belong in a personal folder away from the workplace, along with photographs, receipts, visit summaries, and travel records for medical appointments.

Collect Evidence

Solid proof often decides close disputes. Photos of the scene, damaged equipment, wet flooring, broken ladders, or visible bruising can support the timeline. Witness names should be saved before schedules change and recollections fade. Pay records also deserve attention because benefit rates depend on earnings history. A short daily log describing pain patterns, lifting limits, interrupted sleep, or missed tasks can reinforce medical notes without sounding inflated or rehearsed.

Meet Deadlines

Every state sets filing deadlines, and missing one can damage an otherwise valid case. New York has separate timing rules for employer notice and formal claim papers. Calendar reminders help track forms, hearings, and medical visits. Paperwork should match treatment records, especially on injury dates, body regions, and work statuses. Small inconsistencies may seem harmless, yet insurers often cite them to call into question credibility or reduce payments.

Stay Professional

Job protection usually improves when communication remains calm and factual. Angry emails, public complaints, or tense hallway exchanges can distract from the injury itself. A respectful tone reduces friction as the matter moves forward. Work restrictions should be shared promptly and in writing with the appropriate supervisor. If light duty is offered, the proposed tasks warrant close review to ensure the assignment does not aggravate inflammation, delay tissue healing, or trigger new conflict.

Know Retaliation Limits

Fear of retaliation is common, yet workers are not without protection. Labor laws and compensation laws may limit the punishment for reporting a job-related injury. Employers can still address attendance, conduct, and performance, so employees should avoid giving extra grounds for discipline. Attending required meetings, answering reasonable requests, and following the treatment plan can help. Consistent behavior keeps attention on recovery, not a side dispute about workplace conduct.

Prepare for Disputes

Some cases move smoothly, while others face denials, delayed approvals, or pressure to return before proper healing. That stage calls for a stronger organization. Medical opinions, appeal notices, wage records, and appointment histories should stay together in date order. If an insurer or manager makes an inaccurate statement, the correction should be sent quickly in writing. Calm, timely responses often protect both the case and the worker’s position on the job.

Conclusion

Filing a workers’ comp claim without harming job stability depends on speed, discipline, and credible medical documentation. Early notice shows respect for workplace procedure. Prompt treatment links symptoms to the incident and records physical limits before they change. Written proof reduces the room for doubt if questions appear later. Most of all, steady communication keeps the focus on facts, recovery, and safe return to duty. Workers who stay organized are usually better protected throughout the process.

Read more:
How to File a Workers’ Comp Claim Without Jeopardizing Your Job

The best offer you can make a new customer is one where all the risk sits with you. It sounds obvious, but most businesses hedge. They ask for a card upfront, bury the exit in small print, or make the trial so limited it proves nothing.

Online casinos have been doing this better than almost anyone.

In a market with hundreds of platforms competing for the same players, operators who survived long-term built their entire acquisition strategy around one principle: let people experience the product first, with real stakes, using the operator’s money.

Ownership is Everything

Once someone has used a product and found value in it, the prospect of losing access feels worse than the cost of paying. That psychological shift is the engine behind every effective trial model, and it is why the no deposit bonus became standard practice across the online casino industry.

Players receive free credits or spins with no deposit required, they explore the platform on the operator’s dime, and the ones who enjoy it convert. The ones who don’t were never going to stay anyway. That is not a loss; it is the model working correctly.

The conversion logic is simple. Someone who has navigated a platform, found games they like, and had a real experience is a fundamentally different prospect than someone reading a banner ad. The trust is already partly built before any money changes hands.

It was Acquisition That Drove Change

Casino operators work in one of the most expensive paid media environments in digital marketing. Cost-per-click is high, competition is relentless, and players churn fast if the platform doesn’t deliver immediately. Those conditions forced operators to get precise about what they were actually spending per converted customer, and whether that number made sense against lifetime value.

The no-deposit trial gave them a predictable answer. They know what a free spin costs to offer, they know redemption rates, and they can compare the lifetime value of a player who came in through a trial offer versus one acquired through paid search. For business owners in other sectors, that kind of acquisition clarity is worth building toward.

Transparent Terms Improve Conversion Rates

A headline offer with opaque conditions is worse than a modest offer with honest terms. Early casino bonuses often had wagering requirements so steep that players felt misled even after enjoying the product, which eroded trust faster than any competitor could.

The platforms that built lasting businesses made their trial terms legible. Players could see exactly what was required to withdraw, which games counted, what the ceiling was. That transparency converted better long-term because it removed the anxiety that something was being hidden.

The same principle transfers to any sector. A trial that is hard to cancel or structured to trap users signals exactly the wrong thing about the product behind it. If the product is good, the exit should be easy.

A Lesson to Others

SaaS, retail, hospitality, and professional services all use versions of this model now, but most arrived at it later and with less precision than the casino industry did. The competitive pressure in that market forced a level of iteration that other sectors rarely experience.

If acquisition costs are climbing and cold-channel conversion is disappointing, the question is whether you are confident enough in your product to let it make the case for itself, risk-free, in front of someone who owes you nothing yet.

The Bottom Line

The no-risk trial works because it is a statement of confidence, not a discount. The businesses that execute it well are not afraid of users who leave after the trial. They are building toward the ones who stay, and those customers, the ones who experienced the product and chose to commit, are worth considerably more than anything a paid channel delivers.

Read more:
Explaining Why a No-Risk Trial Is the Smartest Move in Marketing Right Now

Ask anyone who runs a finance function in a small or medium-sized business how much of the week is genuinely strategic, and you tend to get a wry answer.

The forecasting, the cash-flow planning, the conversations with the board: that is the work that matters. But it sits behind a wall of admin. There are invoices to raise, statements to reconcile, supplier bills to key in, and month-end reports to assemble by hand.

For years that admin was simply the cost of doing business, and someone usually typed the numbers in. What has changed is not the work itself but the tools available to absorb it. A finance team in 2026 has practical, affordable ways to take the most repetitive tasks off the desk entirely, and a growing number are doing exactly that.

 The admin tax that finance teams have stopped accepting

Every finance function pays what you might call an admin tax. It is the slice of each week that goes on tasks that are necessary but add no insight. Re-keying a supplier invoice does not make the business better informed, and matching bank-feed lines against the ledger does not change the cash position. The work has to happen, but it generates no advantage.

The reason teams have started to push back is partly cost and partly risk. Manual processes are slow, but they are also where errors creep in. A transposed figure, a missed invoice or a duplicate payment each costs time to find and credibility to explain. So automating the routine layer is as much about accuracy and control as it is about speed. There is also a quieter motivation, which is retention. Finance staff who spend their days on data entry tend not to stay, but give them genuinely analytical work and the role becomes one people want to keep.

Invoicing and accounts payable: the obvious place to begin

If you are choosing one process to automate first, start where the volume is highest and the rules are clearest. For most SMEs that means invoicing on the way out and accounts payable on the way in. On the sales side, the well-trodden ground includes raising and sending invoices straight from your accounting system, chasing overdue payments with automatic reminders, and reconciling receipts against the bank feed. The software is mature and the payback is immediate.

Accounts payable is the higher-value target. Supplier bills arrive as PDFs and email attachments in no consistent format, so keying them in by hand is slow and error-prone. Modern tools can read an incoming invoice, extract the supplier, amount, date and line items, and post it to the ledger for a human to approve rather than to type. The person stays in the loop where judgement is needed and is removed from the part that is pure transcription.

Reconciliation, the task nobody volunteers for

Bank reconciliation is the work finance teams most want to hand over, and with good reason. It is repetitive, it is unforgiving of small errors, and it expands to fill whatever time month-end allows. Reconciliation is also unusually well suited to automation, because most of it follows consistent patterns. A large share of transactions match cleanly against the ledger and can be cleared automatically, so only the genuine exceptions need a human eye.

A sensible setup does precisely that. It surfaces the handful of items that do not reconcile so the team spends its attention on the discrepancies that actually matter. Done well, the value is twofold. Month-end gets faster, and the numbers become more current. When reconciliation is continuous rather than a monthly scramble, the business is always working from a near-live picture of its cash position.

 Reporting that assembles itself

The monthly reporting pack is where a great deal of skilled time quietly disappears. Someone exports figures, pastes them into a spreadsheet, formats the tables, builds the commentary and circulates the result. By the time the board reads it, the data is weeks old.

Automating the assembly of routine reports changes the rhythm. Management accounts, cash-flow summaries and the standard board pack can be generated on a schedule, pulling from live data so the figures are current the moment they land. The finance team’s role shifts from building the report to interpreting it, explaining what the numbers mean and what should happen next.

This is where automation pays its most strategic dividend. The bottleneck in most finance functions is not the analysis; it is getting to the point where analysis can begin. For organisations weighing up where to start, a clear-eyed assessment of AI finance automation and how it fits an existing accounting system is a more useful first step than chasing the longest feature list.

What good automation actually looks like

What separates a sound finance-automation project from an expensive one is worth being precise about, because the difference is not the technology.

It works with your accounting platform, not around it. If you run Xero or a comparable system, automation should connect to it directly rather than bolting on a parallel process people have to remember to maintain.

• It keeps a human at every decision point. Software should handle transcription and matching; people should approve payments. Approval is a control, not a delay to engineer away.
• It leaves a clear audit trail. Every automated action should be logged and reviewable. Your auditors, and your own peace of mind, depend on seeing what happened and why.
• It starts narrow. The most successful projects automate one well-understood process, prove it, then expand. Trying to transform everything at once is how budgets and patience both run out.
• It is honest about exceptions. No process is fully predictable. Good automation handles routine cases confidently and routes the unusual ones to a person, rather than forcing every case through the same template.

A project that meets these tests tends to deliver. One that ignores them tends to become the thing the team works around.

Turning a cost centre into a thinking function

The finance teams getting the most from automation are not the ones with the biggest software budgets. They are the ones who looked honestly at their week, identified the tasks that consumed time without producing insight, and removed those tasks deliberately, one at a time, starting with the highest-volume work. The destination is worth being clear about. It is not a finance function with fewer people, but one where the people spend their hours on the work only they can do: understanding the numbers, spotting the risks, and helping the business decide where to go next. The admin tax was always optional, and more and more finance teams have simply decided to stop paying it.

Read more:
Why Finance Teams Are Quietly Automating the Admin Out of Their Working Week

For more than two decades, SpaceX has been Silicon Valley’s most closely guarded balance sheet, a privately held empire of reusable rockets and orbiting broadband terminals whose numbers were the subject of feverish speculation but never confirmation.

On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s space and satellite group finally pulled back the curtain, and the figures suggest a company spending astronomical sums to chase an even bigger prize.

In a prospectus filed in preparation for a stock market debut that could rank as the largest in history, SpaceX disclosed revenue of $18.7bn (£14.7bn) for 2025, a 33 per cent leap on the previous year. But the headline numbers also laid bare the cost of Mr Musk’s ambitions. The Hawthorne-based group swung to a loss of more than $4.9bn, against a $791m profit in 2024, as capital expenditure nearly doubled to $20.7bn from $11.2bn the year before. Much of the increase, the company said, was funnelled into artificial intelligence development, satellite manufacturing and the build-out of its Starship programme.

The disclosure, lodged with the Securities and Exchange Commission, marks the first time the world’s most valuable private business has been forced to show its working. According to filings reviewed by CNBC, SpaceX is valuing itself at $1.25 trillion and could float as soon as next month, aiming to raise between $50bn and $75bn — a sum that would dwarf Saudi Aramco’s $29bn record listing in 2019.

For City watchers, the prospectus reads as a study in the trade-offs of frontier capitalism: vertiginous top-line growth bankrolled by equally vertiginous cash burn. Starlink, the satellite broadband arm that now serves several million subscribers worldwide and is fast becoming a fixture in rural Britain, drove the bulk of the revenue expansion. Launch services, including National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Pentagon contracts, contributed the rest. But the cost of staying ahead of rivals such as Jeff Bezos’s Project Kuiper has rarely been steeper. As we reported in October, bankers have been quietly pencilling in a valuation as high as $1.75tn once retail investors are factored in.

The group’s reach now extends well beyond rocketry. Following the acquisition earlier this year of xAI, the artificial intelligence venture behind the Grok chatbot, and the social media platform X, SpaceX has become something approaching a conglomerate of Mr Musk’s pet projects — a structure unpicked in our earlier analysis of the xAI deal. The integration costs of that combination help explain the swing into the red, but they also underline the strategic bet at the heart of the float: that rockets, satellites and large language models are converging into a single, vertically integrated infrastructure play.

A successful debut would all but guarantee that Mr Musk, already the world’s richest person, crosses the threshold to become its first trillionaire. It would also enrich a swathe of Wall Street institutions and long-serving employees whose paper fortunes have been locked up for the better part of a decade.

The flotation, if it lands as planned, looks set to unblock a pipeline of mega-listings that has been jammed since the 2021 boom went bust. Cerebras, the Californian artificial intelligence chip designer, kicked off what bankers are billing as a generational window last week, closing 68 per cent above its issue price on its Nasdaq debut and ranking as the biggest technology offering since Uber went public in 2019. Anthropic is understood to be sounding out advisers, while OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is preparing to file confidentially in the coming weeks.

For all the excitement, the prospectus also signals the risks that come with putting a company of this profile into public hands. SpaceX’s fortunes are tied unusually tightly to a single founder, whose attention has been split across half a dozen ventures and whose political pronouncements have at times unsettled customers and regulators alike. Capital expenditure of $20bn-plus a year is not easily trimmed when Starship development and Starlink’s next-generation constellation depend on it. And the firm’s profit reversal will give pause to fund managers weighing a multi-billion-dollar punt on a stock with limited room for valuation expansion.

Mr Musk and a SpaceX spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. Whether public-market investors share the company’s view of its own worth will be settled in a matter of weeks. What is no longer in any doubt is the scale of the numbers, and the audacity of the bet.

Read more:
SpaceX lifts the veil on its finances as Musk readies the biggest flotation in stock market history

After more than five years of painstaking negotiation across six capitals, Britain has finally landed its long-awaited free trade agreement with the Gulf Cooperation Council, a deal ministers say will add £3.7 billion a year to the economy and put UK exporters at the front of the queue in one of the world’s fastest-growing regions.

The agreement, struck with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, makes the UK the first G7 nation to sign a comprehensive free trade pact with the bloc. It is the fifth major deal secured by Sir Keir Starmer’s government, following accords with India, the United States, South Korea and a reset with the European Union.

For British small and mid-sized exporters, long the magazine’s core readership, the prize is tangible. Tariffs will be stripped from a wide swathe of UK goods including cheddar, chocolate, butter, cereals, medical equipment and high-end cars. The government’s conclusion summary estimates that £580 million in duties will be eliminated each year once the deal is fully in force, with £360 million scrapped on day one.

Bilateral trade between the UK and the GCC is already worth £57 billion annually. Whitehall modelling suggests the agreement could lift that figure by up to 20 per cent, raise real wages by £1.9 billion and expand UK GDP by roughly 0.1 per cent in the long run. Combined with last year’s India accord, the two deals are expected to add more than £8 billion a year to the economy by 2040.

A rare piece of good news for the Treasury

The deal lands at a politically convenient moment. With growth still sluggish and inflation stubbornly above target, ministers have been hunting for a credible pro-business win. Starmer, who has spent months pursuing the agreement on visits to Doha and Riyadh, called it “a huge win for British business” and said working people would feel the benefits “in the years ahead through higher wages and more opportunities”.

That language echoes the prime minister’s earlier push to use the Gulf agreement as a vehicle for rehabilitating Britain’s reputation as a serious commercial partner after the bruises of Brexit and the post-pandemic export slump.

Peter Kyle, the business and trade secretary, said the deal sent “a clear signal of confidence” at a moment of global trade volatility. “For this government to meet the challenges that our country faces, incremental change won’t cut it,” he said. “Major trade deals like this one are vital for moving the dial towards long-term, sustainable economic growth with benefits people and businesses can see and feel.”

What it means for SMEs

The opportunity is heavily skewed towards smaller exporters. The Gulf states import more than 80 per cent of their food, which puts British producers of dairy, confectionery, baked goods and premium beverages in pole position. Carmakers, particularly luxury marques such as Bentley, Jaguar and Aston Martin, also stand to gain from tariff removal on vehicles, where rates have typically sat at 5 per cent.

Services, which account for roughly 80 per cent of the UK economy and more than half of British exports to the GCC, will benefit from guaranteed market access. The government expects the deal to make it materially easier for British lawyers, engineers, architects and management consultants to travel, work and remain in the region. More than 400,000 business visits were made from the UK to the Middle East in 2024.

Crucially, the deal opens up a market in which UK Export Finance has been quietly busy. As Business Matters has previously reported, UKEF recently backed a £2.3m Saudi Arabia export contract for Hertfordshire-based Masters Speciality Pharma, the sort of mid-sized deal that the Gulf agreement is designed to multiply.

The British Chambers of Commerce gave the agreement an unusually warm welcome. William Bain, the BCC’s head of trade policy, said the deal was “great news for the UK economy” and would “open up new opportunities for inward investment, exports and supply chains”.

“There is great potential to expand our trade with this key region, which already generates £57 billion a year for the UK economy,” he said. “Securing long-term economic benefits with close trade partners, like the GCC, is vital for tens of thousands of UK firms with high ambitions on export growth.”

The Department for Business and Trade’s own benefits breakdown shows manufacturing, financial services, professional services and food and drink as the four sectors set to gain most, with detailed tariff schedules running into the thousands of product lines.

The strategic calculation

Beyond the immediate tariff savings, ministers are betting on the deeper strategic shift unfolding across the Gulf. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the UAE’s industrial diversification programme and Qatar’s push into financial and digital services all point in the same direction: away from oil dependency and towards a regional economy built on transport, tourism, technology and capital markets. By moving first among the G7, the UK is positioning itself as the preferred Western partner for that transition.

Negotiations were complicated by the need to align the often divergent economic interests of the six GCC members. That the Department for Business and Trade was able to land the agreement before Washington, Berlin, Paris or Tokyo will be seen in Whitehall as a meaningful diplomatic coup.

For Britain’s exporters, and particularly the SMEs that this magazine has long argued are the engine room of the UK economy, the practical question now is implementation. The agreement is not yet in force; the UK and all six GCC members must complete domestic ratification procedures. But with £360 million of tariff savings due on day one, the smart money is already on UK firms moving quickly to register, certify and ship.

Read more:
Britain seals landmark Gulf trade deal in G7 first, promising £3.7bn lift for UK exporters

OpenAI, the San Francisco company behind ChatGPT, is preparing to file confidentially for an initial public offering within weeks, in what would rank as one of the largest flotations the artificial intelligence sector has ever seen and a defining moment in the global technology race.

According to two people familiar with the matter, the ChatGPT maker is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the paperwork and is monitoring market conditions closely before pulling the trigger. The timing remains fluid, but a filing in the coming weeks could pave the way for a listing as early as September. The news, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Bloomberg, sent fresh ripples through a market already braced for a bumper year of technology debuts.

“As part of normal governance, we regularly evaluate a range of strategic options,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. “Our focus remains on execution.”

The most-watched listing in a generation

Few companies have generated as much speculation among bankers, fund managers and policymakers. OpenAI was valued at $730 billion in its most recent private funding round earlier this year, with secondary market trades reportedly pushing the implied valuation closer to $850 billion. A successful listing would dwarf the floats of Facebook, Alibaba and Saudi Aramco in dollar terms and crystallise the AI boom that ChatGPT triggered when it launched in late 2022.

It would also stand as a bellwether for the broader appetite for AI stocks at a moment when revenue multiples across the sector have stretched far beyond historical norms. CNBC reported separately that the company is targeting a public debut in the autumn, with the filing potentially landing within days.

For UK-based investors, founders and SME advisers, the proposed listing carries particular resonance. OpenAI has spent the past 12 months deepening its British footprint, recently signing a long lease on a King’s Cross headquarters as part of plans to more than double its UK workforce. The company has also brought former chancellor George Osborne on board to lead its international Stargate infrastructure programme.

A bumper year for tech mega-floats

OpenAI is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight queueing up for the public markets. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite group which has valued itself at more than $1 trillion in recent secondary trades, is widely expected to begin trading as soon as next month. Anthropic, OpenAI’s closest rival in the frontier-model race, has also taken preparatory steps towards a listing.

That trio alone could absorb a meaningful chunk of global IPO capacity in 2026, sucking liquidity away from smaller deals and intensifying competition between New York, London and Hong Kong for blue-chip listings. The implications for the City have not gone unnoticed: Zopa chief executive Jaidev Janardana recently argued that London’s IPO market could thrive as US political instability mounts, with British exchanges working hard to retain growth-stage technology companies.

Musk hurdle cleared, capacity questions remain

OpenAI’s push towards the public markets received a significant boost on Monday, when a federal judge and jury rejected a lawsuit brought by Mr Musk, an OpenAI co-founder turned vocal critic, that had sought to unwind the for-profit structure adopted by the company last year. Had the action succeeded, it would almost certainly have derailed any near-term flotation. With that legal cloud lifted, advisers can press ahead with due diligence and underwriting work.

The company will still need to convince public investors that it can sustain the breakneck infrastructure spending behind frontier models. OpenAI recently inked a $38 billion compute deal with Amazon, on top of multibillion-dollar commitments to AMD and Oracle, raising fresh questions about cash burn, energy availability and the long path to profitability.

What it means for SMEs

For Britain’s small and mid-sized businesses, the significance of an OpenAI IPO extends beyond the share-price headlines. A public OpenAI would be obliged to disclose far more about its commercial pipeline, pricing strategy, enterprise customer base and roadmap than is currently visible — information that procurement teams, technology buyers and competing UK AI start-ups can use to sharpen their own planning. It is also likely to embolden a wave of follow-on listings from smaller AI vendors keen to ride OpenAI’s slipstream, potentially creating new exit routes for British founders and venture capital backers

If the filing arrives on the timetable bankers are now sketching out, the autumn could mark the moment artificial intelligence formally graduated from private-market darling to mainstream public-market asset class. For SME owners weighing their own technology investments, the message is straightforward: the AI economy is about to become a great deal more transparent — and a great deal harder to ignore.

Read more:
OpenAI lines up confidential IPO filing as race for AI listings accelerates

Cheap chatbots are helping residents fire off forensic objections in minutes, piling pressure on already-stretched council planners and threatening the government’s flagship housebuilding pledge.

A new generation of artificial intelligence tools is being weaponised by opponents of housing and commercial schemes, producing torrents of detailed, policy-laced objections that are clogging town halls and slowing decisions across England.

The warning comes from Geoff Keal, chief executive of TerraQuest, the company that runs the national planning portal under a joint venture with central government. The portal handles roughly 95 per cent of all planning applications in the UK, giving Keal a near-unique vantage point on what is actually happening on the ground.

“They’re using AI to be able to provide better objection documents, much wider and much broader, which is slowing the system down, because obviously those things need to be dealt with in the right way,” Keal told Business Matters. “It’s certainly what we’re seeing local authorities suffer from.”

His comments will land awkwardly in Whitehall, where ministers have made unsticking the planning system central to their economic growth strategy and the pledge to deliver 1.5 million new homes during the current parliament, a target already under strain from a deepening construction skills shortage and rising build costs.

The £45 objection

Until recently, mounting a credible objection to a retail park, brownfield redevelopment or housing scheme typically meant hiring a planning consultant, often at a cost running into thousands of pounds. AI has collapsed that barrier almost overnight.

Objector.ai, one of a small but fast-growing crop of consumer-facing services, promises “strong, policy-backed objections in minutes” for £45 per full planning application, with a £249 crowdfunded option for residents who want to pool against bigger housing schemes. A rival, planningobjection.com, markets its “Planning AI” as a way to produce “persuasive, policy-centred objection letters … in just a few clicks, for a fraction of the cost of a planning consultant”.

Beyond the dedicated platforms, there is mounting anecdotal evidence of individual residents using general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT to submit hundreds of bespoke objections to a single application, each one tailored just enough to escape being dismissed as a duplicate.

For councils already buckling under workload, that creates a real-world problem. Officers cannot simply ignore submissions that cite the National Planning Policy Framework, local plans and case law, even when they suspect a chatbot has done much of the heavy lifting. Every objection has to be logged, weighed and, where material, addressed in committee.

The result is a system increasingly tilted against speed. According to the Home Builders Federation, the number of housebuilding sites granted planning permission in England last year fell to the lowest level since records began more than two decades ago, with average determination times stretching beyond 40 weeks against a statutory target of 13.

Defenders of digital democracy

Proponents of the technology argue this is, in fact, planning democracy working as it should. For years, well-resourced developers have been able to mount sophisticated arguments while ordinary residents have struggled to be heard in the language of policy that planning committees actually respond to.

Hannah George, co-founder of Objector, said the company was set up to help residents produce “high-quality, evidence-based objections … while reducing the number of invalid, repetitive or purely emotional submissions”. The platform, she added, advises against using generic AI tools to mass-produce letters and triages every application free of charge to decide whether there are valid grounds to object in the first place.

That argument is unlikely to satisfy housebuilders, who privately complain that even nominally well-drafted objections can be used to delay schemes long enough to wreck their economics, particularly for the small and medium-sized developers ministers say they want to back. Yet it does highlight the policy bind: the same tools that empower a parish to push back against an unloved retail shed also empower a handful of determined individuals to grind a 200-home scheme to a halt.

It is also worth remembering that pressure on the system pre-dates the chatbots. Labour has already pledged to face down what the Chancellor has called a culture of obstruction, with Rachel Reeves vowing to ease building rules and challenge ‘nimbys’ as part of the broader planning overhaul led by Angela Rayner. AI is now landing on top of a system that was already creaking.

The case for AI on the other side of the desk

If chatbots are creating the problem, they may also be part of the answer. Keal argues that AI can “speed up decision-making” in some areas, particularly the routine evaluation of submissions, although he cautions that large schemes involving parish councils, statutory consultees and wider community engagement remain stubbornly resistant to automation.

There are early signs of progress. Leeds City Council has piloted Xylo Core, an AI-enabled tool designed to help process planning applications, with officials reporting that planning officers saved an average of one day a week during the trial through “streamlining of administrative tasks” and faster access to planning data.

The wider regulatory mood is also shifting. The Planning Inspectorate, the agency that hears appeals against council refusals, has issued official guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in casework evidence, urging applicants and objectors alike to use the technology responsibly and to declare when tools such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot have played a significant role in drafting their submissions. Failure to do so, the Inspectorate warns, risks undermining the credibility of any case.

What it means for SME developers and British business

For SME housebuilders, commercial landlords and high-street operators planning to expand, the implications are uncomfortable but unavoidable. Schemes that might once have attracted a handful of handwritten letters can now generate dozens of forensic, policy-citing objections within days of a notice being posted, lengthening determination times and increasing holding costs.

Three practical conclusions are worth drawing. First, the era of low-friction local opposition is here to stay; planning strategies will need to assume sophisticated, AI-assisted objections as a baseline rather than a worst case. Second, early and genuine community engagement, the kind that takes place before an application lands, not after, is likely to become a more important commercial discipline, particularly for smaller developers without in-house PR teams. And third, applicants should expect councils and inspectors to start asking pointed questions about AI use on both sides of the planning fence.

Britain’s planning system has been creaking for years. The arrival of cheap, capable AI on the objector’s side of the desk does not change the underlying problem. It does, however, make the political and operational case for reform considerably more urgent, and the cost of getting it wrong considerably higher for the businesses that build, lease and trade from the buildings the country has yet to approve.

Read more:
AI-powered nimbyism is jamming Britain’s planning system putting 1.5 million new homes at risk

You may have heard the joke: an older fish says to a younger fish, ‘The water’s nice today, huh?’ and the younger fish replies, ‘What the hell is water?’ It works because the things that shape our experience most are often the easiest to overlook.

For many businesses, workforce technology is like that. When it works properly, nobody notices it. When it doesn’t, it can quickly become the centre of the working day. And if you don’t have a dedicated IT team to step in and fix issues quickly, the impact is magnified.

This is felt especially sharply with employee laptops, because so much of modern work runs through this single device: email, documents, spreadsheets, browser tools, calls, messaging and client communication. When a laptop is not up to the job, it reshapes how work feels, how smoothly people move through the day and how much energy gets wasted on things that should be effortless. Crucially, this often doesn’t show up as one dramatic failure. It shows up as constant, low-level friction that people gradually learn to work around. That is what makes it so easy to miss. Employees adapt, lower expectations, build bad habits to cope with the device and push through, so the drag on time and energy becomes ‘just how it is’.

In practice, that can mean slowdowns when switching between email, documents, spreadsheets, browser tabs and calls, video meetings that glitch, freeze or feel unreliable under pressure, battery anxiety when working away from a desk, repeatedly waiting for the laptop to catch up, restart or reconnect, cramped side-by-side working on smaller screens, and too much reliance on dongles, adapters and setup workarounds.

The cost in terms of behavioural impact includes employees switching cameras off just to keep calls running smoothly, which hampers communication and damages the client experience, keeping fewer windows open than they need, which slows tasks down, delaying restarts and important software updates, increasing exposure to vulnerabilities, and using their personal devices as a backup, sometimes handling sensitive business or customer information.

For business leaders, there is another layer of concern: buying the wrong thing and being stuck with it for years. That might mean devices already feeling stretched after 12 to 24 months, overspending on tech people do not fully use, or risking client trust through weak privacy and security. The biggest risk is that these ways of working start to feel normal. Once that happens, friction stops looking fixable and starts getting absorbed into everyday life.

Because people often stop flagging these issues and simply work around them, it’s easy for leaders to underestimate the scale of the problem. But this is affecting millions of SMBs in the UK and many millions more around the world. HP’s 2026 SMB workflow research found that nearly 60% of SMB IT leaders say troubleshooting consumes more of their time than innovation, nearly half of SMB workers say obsolete tools make everyday tasks unnecessarily frustrating, and more than 60% of business leaders link those inefficiencies to increased burnout and employee turnover.

If hidden friction is the problem, then simply adding more technology is not the answer. Rather, it is about how to choose the right devices that will remove the most important points of friction from the working day.

The HP EliteBook 8 G1a, advanced by the AMD Ryzen AI 7 Pro is a useful example of a lower-friction device because it is built around the problems businesses actually experience. Work feels faster and less stop-start, because the laptop has the headroom for how people actually work now, moving between documents, spreadsheets, browser tabs, messaging and HD calls without quickly feeling maxed out. That is where the AMD Ryzen AI 7 Pro platform, 64GB RAM and 1TB storage make a real difference.

Long, multitasking sessions feel more comfortable, because the 16-inch, 16:10 display gives people more room to compare documents, work across spreadsheets and take notes during meetings without constant resizing and juggling. Hybrid work becomes less awkward, because built-in HDMI, USB-A and multiple USB-C and Thunderbolt 4 ports make it easier to move between meeting rooms, home offices and shared workspaces without relying on a bag full of dongles and adapters.

Security and privacy feel more built in and less disruptive, which matters especially for SMBs without a dedicated IT team. HP Wolf Security helps isolate common threats such as phishing links, malware and ransomware in the background, while Sure View narrows the viewing angle of the screen so sensitive information is harder for people nearby to see in shared or public spaces. Meetings feel more professional without extra effort, because the 5MP camera and built-in AI-powered meeting features help people look clear, stay centred in frame and sound better on calls.

As a next generation AI PC, it is a more future-ready choice, because AI will increasingly be part of the tools businesses already use. With a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and enough memory to support more local AI-enabled workloads over time, it is designed to stay fast and efficient for longer rather than feeling like the wrong decision a year from now.

For business leaders, the key question is: What will reduce friction for our team for long enough to justify the investment? Some useful ways to think about this, and questions to ask your team directly, include identifying where current laptops are quietly slowing people down, looking for repeated low-level problems rather than dramatic failures such as lag, poor meetings, awkward setup, battery stress and too many workarounds. It also means understanding what the busiest day actually looks like and buying for the reality of multitasking, video calls, side-by-side working and hybrid movement.

Leaders should consider whether they are buying for short-term savings or long-term value, since a cheaper device that feels stretched after a year can become worse value than a better-specced one that stays comfortable for longer. They should also ask whether security feels built in or bolted on, because the safest setup is usually the one that asks the least extra effort from already busy people.

It is also worth thinking about whether a device will stay useful as AI-enabled tools become more normal. The practical issue is not whether AI matters this minute, but whether the laptop will keep pace as those features become part of everyday software. Finally, consider whether the device fits how people actually work, as the right choice is about balance: performance headroom, screen space, connectivity, collaboration and peace of mind.

Future-ready technology should not demand more attention from a business. It should support the business without demanding more effort to use it, by reducing everyday friction, protecting sensitive work and staying useful for long enough to offer real value. For more information, please visit HP’s site.

Read more:
Are You Building a Future-Ready Business? Choose Tech That Is Less Visible, Not More Complicated

Three of Britain’s best-known high-street names have been censured by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) after the watchdog found their Black Friday promotions overstated the true value of the discounts on offer, in a ruling that will sharpen the focus on pricing claims across the retail sector this Christmas.

The regulator concluded that John Lewis, Boots and Debenhams each breached the advertising code by presenting reference prices that could not be substantiated as genuine established selling prices, the long-standing benchmark by which savings claims are judged.

In John Lewis’s case, two laptop promotions came under scrutiny. A MacBook Air advertised with a £150 saving against an earlier price of £849 was found not to meet the threshold, with third-party pricing data indicating the higher figure had only been in place briefly before the promotion began. A separate Asus laptop, advertised with a £450 reduction, was likewise judged not to represent a genuine saving.

The ASA also upheld complaints against Debenhams over banners offering discounts of “up to 44%”, and against Boots over a fragrance promotion marked down from £80 to £60, ruling that there was insufficient evidence in either case that the higher prices reflected the goods’ usual selling prices.

The interventions form part of the ASA’s expanding programme of AI-assisted monitoring, which has already produced action against travel firms and the online retailer Very over similar pricing claims. The watchdog has made clear that its proactive Active Ad Monitoring system is being scaled up to identify suspect promotions at speed, particularly around high-stakes trading events such as Black Friday and the January sales.

Emily Henwood, an operations manager at the ASA, said consumers were entitled to expect that Black Friday bargains were the real thing. Retailers, she added, must remember that promotional events do not buy them an exemption from the rules and that any advertised discount must be capable of being proved.

The rulings sit within a broader pattern. Consumer research has repeatedly shown that headline Black Friday savings are not all they seem, with one widely reported study finding only one in seven so-called Black Friday bargains offered a genuine discount compared with prices charged at other points in the year. The CAP Code is unambiguous on the point: under its promotional savings claims guidance, reference prices must reflect a genuine, established usual selling price and the higher figure must have been available for a meaningfully longer period than the discounted one.

For boards, finance directors and marketing leads at SMEs that take their cue from larger retailers, the message is straightforward. The regulator is no longer reliant solely on consumer complaints to police pricing; algorithmic monitoring is doing much of the heavy lifting, and the bar of proof for “was/now” claims is being applied with increasing rigour. Recent enforcement against Nationwide over its branch closure advertising and Huel and Zoe over undisclosed commercial ties to Steven Bartlett underline that the ASA is willing to take on household names where it believes consumers have been misled.

George McLellan, a partner in the dispute resolution team at law firm Sharpe Pritchard who has defended advertisers in ASA investigations, said the latest decisions showed the regulator at its most effective. “These rulings show the ASA at its most effective: tackling straightforward cases of potentially misleading advertising that directly affect consumers,” he said. “I hope the ASA and CAP continue to prioritise this kind of core regulatory enforcement over broader attempts to influence social policy through advertising rules.”

For consumers, the practical takeaway is that scepticism remains the sharpest tool in the shopper’s arsenal. For retailers, the cost of a censure now goes well beyond a corrective ruling: reputational damage, the prospect of follow-on action from the Competition and Markets Authority under its strengthened consumer powers, and the wider chilling effect on customer trust all argue for tighter discipline around how discounts are constructed and communicated.

If Black Friday is to remain a serious commercial fixture rather than a marketing folk tale, the burden of proof, the ASA has made clear, sits squarely with the retailer.

Read more:
ASA rebukes John Lewis, Boots and Debenhams over inflated Black Friday discounts

Britain’s small businesses, community energy co-operatives and rural entrepreneurs are being urged to step into the spotlight as the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) opens nominations for its inaugural Centenary Awards, with a flagship category dedicated to rooftop solar deployment.

The awards, marking 100 years of the countryside charity’s campaigning work, will culminate in a ceremony at the Houses of Parliament on 29 October 2026. Of the six categories on offer, the Best Rooftop Solar Solution award is likely to attract the keenest interest from the SME community, coming at a moment when government policy is decisively tilting in favour of putting panels on roofs rather than fields.

That shift in mood music is no accident. Earlier this year, CPRE warned that nearly two-thirds of England’s largest solar farms have been built on productive agricultural land, with a third sited on the country’s most valuable fields — a finding that has only sharpened ministerial appetite for unlocking the estimated 250,000 hectares of suitable commercial and domestic roof space across the UK. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has since signalled a step-change in support for commercial rooftop solar, including business rates relief running through to 2035 and streamlined planning for installations above 1MW.

For the small and medium-sized firms that have long viewed solar as the preserve of the deep-pocketed, the timing could scarcely be better. Businesses generated record volumes of clean power last year, with wind and solar driving the UK’s renewable electricity record — and a growing slice of that came from SME-scale rooftop arrays rather than industrial-scale developments.

CPRE has set a deliberately ambitious bar. Successful nominations should demonstrate some, or ideally all, of four hallmarks: meaningful local community involvement in choosing and approving the site; sensitive design that minimises visual impact on the surrounding landscape; long-term economic benefit for the host community alongside maximised energy efficiency; and the use of innovative solutions or technology to overcome site-specific challenges.

The judging panel reflects that breadth of remit. Emma Fletcher, Innovation Director at Octopus Energy, brings the perspective of one of the country’s most disruptive clean-power players, a business currently investing billions in renewables on both sides of the Atlantic. She is joined by Richard Alvin, Editor at Capital Business Media’s renewable energy title Turning Electric, and a long-standing chronicler of the SME energy transition; Noël Lambert, a founding director of community-finance pioneer Big Solar Co-op; and Juliet Loiselle, Publisher at Warners Group Publications.

It is a line-up calibrated to spot the difference between solar projects that simply tick the carbon box and those genuinely embedded in the communities they serve, a distinction that increasingly separates winners from also-rans in the commercial clean energy market.

Crewenna Dymond, CPRE’s director of communities and participation, said the awards were designed to surface stories that too often go untold.

“As CPRE marks its centenary, these awards are a chance to celebrate the remarkable people and projects already making a difference to our countryside. From innovative housing solutions to community green spaces, there is so much inspiring work happening across England that deserves recognition,” she said.

“Whether you are an individual, a business or a community group, we want to hear your story. Nominations are open to all, and we encourage anyone who cares about the countryside to get involved.”

That open-door approach matters. Recent years have seen a wave of investment commitments aimed at smaller commercial sites — including Electron Green’s pledge to invest up to £1bn to kickstart a solar electricity revolution for UK businesses — yet many of the most ingenious SME-led schemes remain virtually unknown beyond their immediate locality. The Centenary Awards offer an unusually high-profile platform to change that.

Nominations close on 30 June 2026, with winners and highly commended entrants invited to the parliamentary ceremony in October. Self-nominations are accepted, and full criteria are published on CPRE’s National Centenary Awards page.

For SME owners whose rooftop schemes have quietly transformed their balance sheets, their carbon footprints and, crucially in CPRE’s eyes — their communities, this is a rare opportunity to claim a slice of national recognition.

Read more:
Rooftop solar pioneers sought as CPRE opens nominations for Centenary Award

The black cab is the most reliable piece of street furniture in London. It has outlasted hansom carriages, two world wars and the rise of Uber. But the trade now faces an opponent it cannot intimidate with a beep of the horn, an artificial intelligence that drives two million miles a week and never has to learn a single street name.

In a quiet corner of Westminster, just behind Parliament Square, a Jaguar I-Pace is nosing its way around a roundabout choked with tourists. The wheel is turning, the indicators are flicking on and off, the speed is precisely judged. The man in the driver’s seat is not driving. Alex Kendall, chief executive of the British self-driving start-up Wayve, has his hands in his lap.

A few miles east, in a hushed examination room at Transport for London, Steven Fairbrass is sitting his twentieth attempt at the Knowledge of London. He has been studying for eight years. He stumbles on a street name in Portland Place and the examiner, kindly, tells him to come back another day.

These two scenes, highlight the future of London transport and frame the most consequential business story the capital’s streets have seen in a generation. The world’s most heavily regulated taxi trade is colliding with one of the world’s most heavily capitalised pieces of artificial intelligence, and the collision is going to shape everything from urban property values to the United Kingdom’s industrial strategy.

A trade already in retreat

The numbers tell their own grim story. Licensed black cab drivers in London peaked at 25,538 in 2014. By November 2024 the figure had fallen to 16,965, a contraction of more than a third in a decade. Over the same period the number of licensed private hire drivers, Uber, Bolt, Addison Lee and the rest, has grown by 82 per cent, to 107,884. As Business Matters has previously detailed, the lost fare income runs into hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and the trade’s underlying cost base, electric-vehicle financing, congestion charging, insurance, keeps rising.

The pipeline of new cabbies is drying up faster than the existing workforce is retiring. The pass rate for the Knowledge, the test that for 161 years has separated the “knowledge boys” from the rest, has slumped from 59 per cent in 2020 to 38 per cent in 2025. Steve McNamara, head of the Licensed Taxi Driver’s Association, has warned that without intervention the trade could be functionally extinct by 2045.

Into this softening market arrive two competitors with very different business models but identical ambitions.

Silicon Valley meets the South Circular

Waymo, the autonomous-driving arm of Alphabet, has been quietly mapping a 100-square-mile patch of London since the autumn. A fleet of around 100 Jaguar I-Paces, fitted with the company’s proprietary stack of 29 cameras, six radars and five lidar units, has been recording the city’s curious right-hand-drive choreography. The company, as Business Matters reported earlier this year, is targeting a fully driverless commercial launch in the fourth quarter of 2026, in partnership with the fleet operator Moove.

Waymo’s co-chief executive, Tekedra Mawakana, points to a fleet that has now driven more than 170 million paying-passenger miles in the United States and a safety record that, the company says, shows 92 per cent fewer serious-injury crashes than the human benchmark. “We travel over two million miles a week,” she recently told Anderson Cooper for a CBS Minutes piece. “Humans drive about 700,000 miles in a lifetime, so this is almost three lifetimes per week that our fleet is driving.”

Wayve, the Cambridge-founded scale-up backed by Microsoft, Nvidia and now Uber, takes a deliberately different approach. Its AI Driver is a foundation model trained end-to-end on millions of hours of footage, designed to generalise to any city rather than relying on the pre-built high-definition maps that Waymo favours. The bet is leaner, faster and, in theory, exportable. It has been enough to attract a $1bn funding round last year and a valuation of $8.6bn, the richest yet awarded to a British AI company. In May, Wayve signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department for Business and Trade to fast-track the path from test fleet to commercial deployment.

The prize is not just London fares. Ministers estimate that the autonomous vehicle sector could add £42bn to the UK economy and create close to 40,000 jobs by 2035. Whoever wins London, the most complex, most regulated and most observed urban driving environment in the western world, wins a benchmark that can be sold to every other capital.

The regulatory starting gun

For years, the British self-driving question was theoretical. The Automated Vehicles Act 2024 settled the legal architecture, creating a new category of “authorised self-driving entity” that takes on legal liability when the car is in charge. In a significant acceleration, the Department for Transport has brought forward the Automated Passenger Services permitting regime to spring 2026, allowing pilots of driverless taxi and bus services with no safety driver onboard. The Vehicle Certification Agency has been confirmed as the single national gatekeeper deciding which vehicles can carry paying passengers.

This matters commercially because permits, not technology, were the real bottleneck. Now the path is clear. Uber, which is partnering with Wayve, plans to fold autonomous vehicles into its existing London app. Bolt has indicated it will follow. Waymo’s pilot may carry no driver at all from day one. Within twelve months, a Londoner could be hailing a robotaxi on the same screen they currently use to summon a human one.

The human moat

The cabbies’ counter-argument is not that the technology will fail. It is that a London journey is not a navigation problem.

The Knowledge requires aspiring drivers to memorise some 25,000 streets and 20,000 points of interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. Tom Scullion, who has been driving for 34 years, says he is regularly asked to ferry unaccompanied children to school and a regular client’s Irish wolfhound to the vet. The trust is a function of the licence, and the licence is a function of the years of study.

It is also a function of biology. Research by the late Professor Eleanor Maguire at University College London famously demonstrated that the posterior hippocampus, the brain’s spatial filing cabinet, grows measurably larger in qualified cabbies. New work from UCL’s Spatial Cognition Group suggests, intriguingly, that taxi drivers’ route-planning strategies could in turn inform the next generation of AI navigation systems, an irony not lost on the trade.

Whether that biological moat translates into commercial defensibility is the question that matters in the boardroom. Wayve and Waymo are not pitching themselves as better navigators. They are pitching themselves as cheaper, always available and, they argue, safer. In a city where average black cab fares have risen sharply with electric-vehicle financing costs, price competition is the threat the trade has the least answer to.

What it means for UK plc

The substantive question is not whether the cabbie survives, it is what the disruption tells us about Britain’s appetite for tolerating one. The Treasury has banked on AV adoption to lift productivity and rejuvenate UK automotive manufacturing. The National Wealth Fund is reportedly close to backing the Oxford-founded driverless start-up Oxa. Sherbet London has just raised £40m to electrify its black cab fleet, an explicit defensive play. Insurance underwriters, fleet operators, mapping companies and local councils are all being asked to model a scenario that did not exist eighteen months ago.

Three commercial implications stand out. The first is that London is being treated by the world’s largest AV companies as a global proving ground; success here unlocks a regulatory passport to Paris, Berlin and Tokyo. The second is that the United Kingdom, almost uniquely among large economies, has both a credible domestic champion in Wayve and a willing regulator, which is rare leverage in a sector dominated by American capital. The third is that the long-feared “Uberisation” of the taxi industry was, in retrospect, a soft landing. The next disruption removes the driver altogether, and with it the principal cost line, the principal customer-service complaint and, less comfortably, the principal employer of working-class Londoners who never went to university.

The black cab will not vanish overnight. The same regulatory frame that admits Waymo also affirms the taxi trade’s protected status to ply for hire on the street, and the iconography remains commercially valuable: every tourism board on earth would pay to keep a TX5 in the establishing shot. Sherbet’s investors, evidently, agree.

But the economics are unforgiving. The number of “appearances” booked at TfL each year is falling. The capital cost of a new electric London-style cab now exceeds £70,000. And the next generation of would-be cabbies, including 41-attempt Knowledge graduate Anshu Moorjani, are entering a market in which their newly enlarged hippocampi will be competing with neural networks that learn faster every week.

A century after the last horse-drawn hansom left the streets of London, the same city is preparing to host the first commercial robotaxi service in Europe. The Knowledge made the London cab the gold standard of urban transport. Whether it survives the algorithm is now, finally, a question with a deadline.

Read more:
The Knowledge versus the algorithm: inside London’s £42bn robotaxi reckoning

For all the column inches lavished on hoodie-wearing teenage coders and so-called “Silver Starter” retirees launching second-act ventures from the kitchen table, the typical British entrepreneur looks remarkably like the one who turned up at Companies House a quarter of a century ago. They are 43 years old, mid-career, and, by the looks of it, completely unmoved by fashion.

That is the central finding of a sweeping new study by company formation agent 1st Formations, which has crunched more than 9.2 million UK director appointments stretching back to the year 2000. Across 26 years of dot-com booms, banking collapses, a Brexit referendum and a global pandemic, the average age at which Britons take the plunge into running their own company has scarcely shifted, hovering between 41 and 44 throughout.

A stubbornly steady number

The data tracks a gentle drift upwards in the early years of the millennium, with the mean founder age sitting at 42 across 2000 to 2009 before nudging to 44 between 2010 and 2019. From 2011 right through to 2023, it parked itself stubbornly at 44, before easing back to 43 in both 2024 and 2025 – the first material decline in more than a decade.

The pattern holds with eerie consistency against the backdrop of the past quarter-century’s defining moments. The dot-com boom of 2000 produced an average founder age of 41. By 2008, with Lehman Brothers collapsing and the financial system in freefall, that figure had crept to 43. The post-recession recovery and the Brexit referendum vote of 2016 both registered 44. The pandemic year of 2020 did the same. And the current AI and green-energy gold rush, far from minting a wave of twentysomething founders, has so far produced an average age of 43, almost identical to the figure recorded at the dawn of the millennium.

The numbers cover an extraordinary span of would-be company directors, from 16-year-olds, the legal floor set by the Companies Act 2006, to a 110-year-old who took on a directorship in 2012. The average age of the oldest founder in any given year is 91, suggesting the entrepreneurial itch is one that lasts the best part of seven decades.

Why mid-career still wins

The picture is at odds with much of the cultural mythology around start-ups, which tends to oscillate between dorm-room prodigies and silver-haired second-acters. Yet the figures align with a broader truth about the country’s business base: small and medium-sized enterprises make up 99.9% of the UK’s private sector and employ roughly 16.9 million people, according to the latest Department for Business and Trade business population estimates. The economy’s beating heart, in other words, is run by people who have already spent a couple of decades in someone else’s payroll.

Graeme Donnelly, founder and chief executive of 1st Formations, argues that the sheer volume of data strips the romance out of the debate. “When you are analysing over 9 million data points, the noise of ‘trends’ disappears and the reality emerges,” he says. “British business thrives on experience. Today, the average age to start a business matches that of the millennium’s start.

“While younger generations enter the business world and veterans continue to grow, the heavy lifting of the economy is done by the 43 Club. These are professionals who have spent decades honing their craft before taking the leap.”

It is a useful corrective. The classic mid-life founder profile, a manager with a hard-won contact book, a mortgage to defend and a working understanding of cash flow, has long been the unglamorous engine room of British enterprise, even as media attention drifts elsewhere.

The Gen Z asterisk

That said, the picture at the edges of the dataset is changing fast. A Glassdoor-Harris poll cited in the study suggests 57% of Gen Z workers now run some form of side hustle, fuelled by social platforms that allow a teenager in a bedroom to test a product on a global audience for the price of a ring light. Business Matters has previously reported on the growing army of UK side-hustlers turning hobbies into income streams, as well as the broader entrepreneurship boom among young Britons, two-thirds of whom now say they intend to work for themselves.

At the other end of the spectrum, the rise of the so-called Silver Starter, older founders launching their first venture after 50, continues apace, supported in part by a significant uptick in over-50s drawing on the British Business Bank’s Start Up Loans scheme.

The slight dip in average founder age to 43 in 2024 and 2025 may yet prove the start of something more meaningful. The current cohort is starting businesses against a backdrop of accessible AI tooling, lower fixed costs and a sharp pivot towards the green economy, all of which lower the barriers that traditionally kept first-time founders in mid-career rather than their twenties.

What it means for SME Britain

For lenders, advisers and policy-makers wondering where to point their attention, the message from the 1st Formations data is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. The growth at the margins – teen side-hustlers and seasoned career-changers, is real and worth nurturing. But the Federation of Small Businesses’ latest data on the UK’s 5.5 million-strong small business population underlines that the country’s economic resilience still rests on the experienced middle: people who have done their time, know their market, and decide, somewhere around their forty-third birthday, that they would rather build something of their own.

Through dot-com, downturn, Brexit and Covid, that has been the one constant. Britain, it turns out, prefers its founders battle-tested.

Read more:
The ’43 club’: why Britain’s typical entrepreneur has barely aged a day in 25 years

After more than a quarter of a century pouring Old Speckled Hen down the throats of British shoppers, Greene King has decided enough is enough.

The Suffolk pub group has agreed to sell its best-known supermarket ale to Damm UK, the British arm of the family-owned Spanish brewer behind Estrella Damm, in a deal that effectively ends its ambitions in the off-trade.

The price has not been disclosed, but the strategic message is loud. Old Speckled Hen, which Greene King has owned since acquiring Morland Brewery in 1999, accounts for more than half of the company’s off-trade sales, the volumes that flow through Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and the independents rather than across the bar. By handing the brand to Damm, chief executive Nick Mackenzie is conceding that the supermarket beer aisle is no longer a battleground worth fighting in.

“This has been a long-term decision,” Mackenzie told The Times, pointing to the structural challenges facing cask ale and the wider beer category. Selling through pubs, restaurants and bars, he added, “is where our long-term strategy and focus is”.

Why a spanish brewer was the natural buyer

For Damm, the deal is the logical next step in a UK push that began in 2023, when it picked up the former Charles Wells brewery in Bedford. The site, rechristened Damm Eagle Brewery, has since been the focus of a £70m investment programme designed to make it the company’s flagship outside Spain, as The Grocer reported when the upgraded facility opened last autumn. Folding Old Speckled Hen, together with Old Golden Hen, Old Crafty Hen and Old Hen sister brands, into that operation gives Damm a heritage British cask name to sit alongside its lager imports, and the volume to keep its new lines humming.

Brewing of the Hen family is expected to migrate from Greene King’s Westgate Brewery in Bury St Edmunds to Bedford by June next year. Crucially for drinkers, the beers will still pull through in Greene King’s 1,600 managed pubs and on supermarket shelves once the transition is complete, according to the Morning Advertiser, which first detailed the wider brewing reset.

A tighter, on-trade-led brewing model

The transaction sits inside a much bigger reshaping of Greene King’s production footprint. The group is pouring £40m into a new, smaller brewery on the edge of Bury St Edmunds, alongside a fresh distribution depot. From next year it will brew only its core on-trade portfolio, Greene King IPA, Abbot Ale and the newer Hazy Day, at the site, replacing the historic Westgate Brewery in the town centre. Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar, East Lothian, is untouched by the changes.

“We are reflecting the size of the new brewery to reflect the market we are now operating in, and the market has changed pretty significantly,” Mackenzie said. “We believe we can control what we can control by focusing on our beers in our pubs.”

That candour will land uncomfortably with brewery staff. Greene King has declined to put a number on the jobs at risk, but a consultation began on Tuesday. The new plant is designed to be more efficient and to need fewer hands. For an industry already navigating brutal economics, the UK lost 100 breweries in 2024 alone, as Business Matters reported in its review of rising brewery insolvencies, it is another sign that scale-back, not expansion, is the order of the day.

The off-trade retreat in context

The decision to walk away from supermarkets is striking, given how much energy big brewers have historically spent on shelf space. But the maths has changed. Off-trade beer is a heavily promotional, low-margin game dominated by global lager brands, while cask ale, once a supermarket fixture, has been in slow retreat as drinkers gravitate to lager, world beers and low-and-no alternatives.

For Greene King, which still pulls a competitive pint through its own estate, the calculus is simpler than ever: a barrel sold in a managed pub earns far more than the same barrel battling for promotional slots in a multiple grocer. The Old Speckled Hen sale crystallises that logic.

The wider strategic reset under hong kong ownership

The brewing shake-up is the latest move in a sweeping rethink of the business under Hong Kong owner CK Asset Holdings, which bought Greene King for £4.6bn in 2019 in a deal led by billionaire Li Ka-shing. Last year the group posted revenues of £2.53bn but slipped to a £23.4m pre-tax loss, with net debt, excluding lease liabilities, running at around £2bn and annual servicing costs of close to £95m.

In March, Greene King confirmed it would sell 150 of its managed pubs and convert another 150 into tenanted houses as part of a refreshed estate strategy. Combined with the brewing slimdown and the Old Speckled Hen disposal, the picture is of a group methodically shedding the things it does not need to own and concentrating capital on what it considers core, wet-led, managed pubs where it controls the customer, the menu and the margin.

“For us, this is about how we future-proof the wider business and how we leverage our model,” Mackenzie said.

What it means For SME drinks and hospitality operators

For independent brewers and smaller pub operators, the implications cut both ways. The exit of a heritage cask brand from Greene King’s in-house portfolio frees up roughly half a pump line’s worth of off-trade attention and could give regional cask ale producers a slightly better shot at supermarket buyers. Equally, Damm’s decision to back a British ale at scale signals continued international appetite for UK-brewed brands, and reinforces Bedford’s emergence as a serious brewing cluster.

The blunter truth, though, is that one of the country’s most recognisable cask ales is now under foreign ownership because its British parent has concluded that supermarkets are not where its future lies. In an industry still struggling with input costs, business rates and shrinking discretionary spend, that is as honest a piece of strategic communication as the sector has heard for some time.

Read more:
Greene King pulls the plug on supermarket strategy with sale of Old Speckled Hen to Spain’s Damm

Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses have been put on notice. From 19 June 2026, exactly one month from today, every organisation that handles personal data will, by law, be required to operate a formal complaints process. Those that fail to prepare risk regulatory action, reputational damage and the slow drip of customer trust eroding away.

The new obligations flow from section 103 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, the most significant reshaping of the UK’s data protection landscape since the post-Brexit settlement. And in a clear signal that the Information Commissioner’s Office is anxious to avoid a repeat of the GDPR scramble of 2018, deputy commissioner Emily Keaney has used the four-week countdown to issue a direct appeal to the smaller end of the market.

“There is still plenty of time to act, and the ICO is here to support you,” Ms Keaney said. “We know that smaller organisations are less likely to have formal complaints processes in place, and that is exactly why we have designed this guidance with you in mind.”

What the new law actually requires

For SME owners and finance directors who have not yet digested the detail, the statutory obligations are mercifully short. Under the new regime, every organisation must give individuals a clear and accessible route to raise a data protection complaint, whether by email, online form, telephone or post. Receipt of a complaint must be acknowledged within 30 days. Businesses must then, “without undue delay”, take appropriate steps to investigate, keep the complainant informed of progress, and communicate the outcome.

Crucially, there are no carve-outs. The rules apply to the corner shop with a customer mailing list just as much as to the FTSE 250 financial services firm. Privacy notices will also need updating to make clear that customers have a right to complain directly to the organisation before escalating to the regulator.

Why this matters more than it might look

On paper, the changes appear modest, a tweak to administrative housekeeping rather than the seismic shock that GDPR delivered seven years ago. But seasoned compliance professionals warn that complacency would be a mistake.

For the first time, individuals will have a statutory right to complain directly to the organisation handling their data, and to expect a structured response within a defined timeframe. That changes the calculus on everything from subject access requests to the handling of data breaches. The ICO has indicated that sectors generating the highest volume of complaints, healthcare, financial services, technology and retail, should expect particular scrutiny.

There is also a commercial logic at work. Resolving a grievance quickly and fairly tends to prevent it from metastasising into something more serious, whether a formal regulatory referral or a customer departure. As any SME operator who has watched a one-star Trustpilot review go viral can attest, the cost of getting the response wrong can dwarf the cost of getting the process right. The wider context is one of rising data risk, with the ICO already pressing the technology sector to embed privacy by design into AI products, a sign of how high the regulatory bar is climbing.

The ICO’s olive branch

The regulator’s tone this time is markedly different from the rather schoolmasterly approach that characterised the early GDPR rollout. The guidance, published in February following a public consultation that drew more than 85 responses, is studded with practical examples and worked-through scenarios pitched squarely at smaller firms without dedicated compliance teams.

“A data protection complaint can come from any customer at any time,” Ms Keaney noted. “Having a clear process means you can respond quickly, resolve issues fairly and protect the trust your customers place in you. We are not here to catch businesses out, we are here to help you get ready.”

That conciliatory framing should not, however, be mistaken for indefinite patience. Once the 19 June commencement date passes, the ICO will have the power to take enforcement action against organisations that fail to operate a compliant process, and the line between supportive regulator and active enforcer can move quickly.

A four-week action list

For business owners still unsure where to begin, the practical steps are reasonably straightforward. Decide who inside the business will own the complaints process and ensure they have the authority to investigate and respond. Build a simple, visible route for customers to raise complaints — usually a dedicated email address or web form, signposted in the privacy notice. Document the workflow, including how the 30-day acknowledgement deadline will be met. Train any customer-facing staff on what to do if a complaint lands in their inbox.

Owners who already operate under data protection frameworks will recognise much of this from existing good practice. For a refresher on the broader compliance landscape, our complete guide to GDPR compliance in the UK sets out the foundations, while our explainer on the difference between data controllers and processors is worth bookmarking for any business that shares customer data with third parties.

The bottom line

For Britain’s 5.5 million SMEs, the message from regulators is clear: 19 June is not a target, it is a deadline. The four weeks ahead are not an invitation to delay, but a window to prepare. Done well, the new complaints process is a modest piece of administrative plumbing that can quietly strengthen customer relationships. Done badly, or not at all, it is a regulatory exposure that few small businesses can afford to carry.

The ICO has, unusually, all but rolled out a welcome mat. The smart move for SME owners is to walk through the door before someone else knocks.

Read more:
ICO Warns SMEs: one month to comply with new Data Complaints Law

Standard Chartered has fired the latest, and loudest, warning shot in the City’s march towards an artificial intelligence-led workforce, confirming plans to shed almost 7,800 back-office roles by 2030 just as fresh figures show Britain’s jobs market sliding into its weakest patch since the pandemic.

The emerging markets lender, headquartered in the City of London, told investors at a strategy day in Hong Kong that it would strip out more than 15 per cent of its corporate functions over the next four years, with chief executive Bill Winters arguing the move was less about cost and more about reweighting the bank towards technology. Details of the overhaul were set out at the bank’s investor event, which also unveiled a target to lift income per employee by around a fifth by 2028.

“It’s not cost cutting: it’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and investment capital we’re putting in,” Winters told analysts. The FTSE 100 group said it was “scaling practical uses of automation, advanced analytics and AI to streamline processes, improve decision-making and enhance both client service and internal efficiency”.

The cuts will land hardest in human resources, risk and compliance, with the bank declining to give a UK breakdown. Operations understood to be in the firing line include sizeable back-office hubs in India, China, Malaysia and Poland, although a chunk of the reduction is expected to come through natural attrition and internal redeployment rather than outright redundancy.

A sharper edge from the ONS

The timing has done Standard Chartered few favours. The Office for National Statistics said this morning that UK vacancies fell by 28,000 to 705,000 in the three months to April, the lowest tally in five years, while the unemployment rate edged up to 5 per cent in the three months to March. More striking still, payrolled employment dropped by 100,000 in April alone, suggesting firms are no longer simply easing off the hiring pedal but actively trimming headcount.

Liz McKeown, the ONS director of economic statistics, said lower-paying sectors such as hospitality and retail had seen “some of the largest falls in vacancies and payroll numbers”. Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, was blunter: the figures, he said, would “stop the MPC in its tracks”, with unemployment running hotter than forecast and payrolls suffering what he described as a “mammoth fall”.

For SME owners, that combination, slowing demand for labour, a softer high street and a Bank of England that may now hesitate on rate cuts, is the most uncomfortable since the post-Covid wage squeeze of 2022.

Not alone in the City

Standard Chartered’s announcement adds to a thickening pile of bank restructurings driven, at least rhetorically, by AI. HSBC has flagged that up to 20,000 roles are at risk as it accelerates its own automation programme, while Morgan Stanley is cutting around 2,500 jobs even as revenues hit record highs. DBS, the Singaporean lender, has already warned of around 4,000 contract and temporary positions going, and Meta, Amazon and Oracle have unveiled their own sizeable reductions as capital is funnelled towards data centres rather than desks.

The pattern is no longer fringe. Recent research suggests one in six UK employers expects to make AI-driven job cuts within the next year, with clerical, junior managerial and administrative roles consistently identified as the most exposed. For smaller businesses sitting downstream of the FTSE giants, from compliance bureaux servicing the big banks to back-office software vendors, the message from Winters this week is awkward: the customer base for routine human processing is shrinking, and quickly.

Charles Radclyffe, the AI entrepreneur, framed the structural shift bluntly. “Every time we bill [for a month’s AI work],” he said, “that is a job from the economy gone and moved into a data centre.”

What it means for SMEs

For UK SMEs, the read-across is twofold. First, the model adopted by Winters, running headcount through the lens of income per employee rather than absolute cost, is already filtering down to mid-market boardrooms, and finance directors should expect to be asked the same productivity questions in their next budget cycle. Second, the rising unemployment figure quietly rewrites the talent equation: the war for back-office staff that defined the past three years is easing, but so is the spending power of the consumers those staff support.

If Standard Chartered is right that the bank of 2030 will run on materially less human capital, the question for British smaller firms is not whether to follow, but how fast they can sensibly do so without hollowing out the institutional knowledge that makes them defensible in the first place.

Read more:
Standard Chartered to swap 7,800 back-office jobs for AI as UK labour market wobbles

For an SME, the cruellest moment in any growth story is the one when a once-in-a-generation order lands on the desk, and the cash flow simply cannot stretch to fulfil it.

That, until very recently, was the predicament facing Packaging One, the family-run Cheshire manufacturer behind the patented MediaWrap protective packaging used to ship smartphones, laptops and other high-value electronics around the world.

The Middlewich-based firm has now closed a £4 million contract with one of the world’s largest technology companies, after a £700,000 loan from NatWest, guaranteed by UK Export Finance (UKEF) under its General Export Facility, provided the working capital needed to pay suppliers before overseas customer payments landed. Without that bridge, the multi-million-pound order would almost certainly have been turned away.

It is the kind of deal that neatly illustrates why Whitehall has spent the past three years recalibrating its export credit agency around smaller exporters rather than the headline-grabbing defence and infrastructure contracts of old. Referred to UKEF by the Department for Business and Trade, Packaging One was able to access the GEF’s partial government guarantee, typically covering up to 80% of a bank’s exposure, and convert it into the cash buffer the business needed to scale.

A patented product, a global pull

MediaWrap is no ordinary box. The patented and trademarked solution is designed to cradle delicate consumer electronics in transit, and it has won admirers from Silicon Valley to the manufacturing hubs of East Asia. Packaging One has now fulfilled orders across North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, with North American demand in particular driving the latest expansion.

The numbers tell their own story. Turnover stood at £9.4 million in 2025 and the company is targeting £16 million by 2028, a roughly 70 per cent uplift over three years. At least 50 new full-time roles have been added at the Middlewich headquarters, and management is now scoping a manufacturing facility in the United States to shorten supply chains for its largest customer base.

It is a familiar pattern for UKEF-backed exporters. Earlier this year, Northamptonshire’s Pallite secured a £1.6 million UKEF-backed facility to meet global demand for its recyclable warehouse and packaging products, while athleisure brand Vanquish Fitness used a £1 million NatWest trade loan backed by UKEF to push deeper into the United States. The thread that runs through all three deals is the same: ambitious SMEs unable to fund the gap between order and payment, and a government guarantee that turns a “no” from the credit committee into a “yes”.

Why working capital matters more than ever

Cash flow has long been the silent killer of British export ambition. According to UKEF, more than £771 million has now been issued through the GEF scheme, the vast majority of it to SMEs. Yet awareness of the product remains stubbornly patchy, with many founders only stumbling across it through a referral from their bank or a chamber of commerce.

That is something UKEF is working hard to change. The agency has been rolling out faster digital onboarding, expanded eligibility and new SME-focused tools, a strategic shift covered in detail in our recent report on how UKEF is unveiling fresh tools to boost SME global trade. The agency delivered a record £14.5 billion of financing in its last reporting year, supporting more than 667 UK exporters and helping to sustain an estimated 70,000 jobs.

What the principals say

Kevin Ledwith, UKEF’s Export Finance Manager for Cheshire, said the case “shows perfectly why UKEF wants to support more SMEs to grow their exports. By backing them with our General Export Facility, we enable them to win and fulfil orders on the world stage, which means they can continue to sustain local jobs and growth.”

For Emma Chesworth, director at Packaging One, the practical impact has been immediate. “The support from UKEF and NatWest has enabled us to take on bigger orders than we could have managed before,” she said. “This has kickstarted a process: more projects, more people employed, and more local benefits.”

Rhys Lloyd-Jones, trade finance manager at NatWest Group, framed the deal as part of a wider pledge to British SMEs. “Supporting ambitious family businesses to grow internationally is central to NatWest’s commitment to helping the economy thrive,” he said. “By working with UK Export Finance, this funding solution has given Packaging One the confidence and working capital needed to fulfil an ongoing export contract with a major US brand and to expand into new global markets whilst boosting the local economy by creating jobs.”

The transaction forms part of NatWest’s £2 billion export lending package, which sits within the £11 billion UKEF-backed SME lending commitment made by the UK’s five leading banks, a pool of capital that, if properly drawn down, could measurably shift the dial on Britain’s stubborn export performance.

The bigger picture

Packaging One’s story is, in many ways, a microcosm of where Britain’s growth case now sits. The firm has a patented product, demonstrable international demand and a credible plan to double turnover. What it lacked, until UKEF stepped in, was the working capital to back its own success. That is precisely the gap the General Export Facility was designed to plug, and on the evidence of Middlewich, it is starting to do its job.

Read more:
Packaging power: how Cheshire’s Packaging One sealed a £4m export deal with UKEF backing

Peter Kyle has issued a defiant message to the boardrooms of corporate Britain: the government’s long-awaited crackdown on late payments will not be diluted, no matter how loudly big business lobbies against it.

In an interview with Business Matters, the Business Secretary said he would not “resile from delivering” what he described as a “step change in the relationship between all larger businesses and their supply chains” as the Small Business Protections (Late Payments) Bill is laid before parliament on Tuesday.

The legislation, billed by Whitehall as the most far-reaching shake-up of commercial payment rules in more than 25 years, caps payment terms at 60 days for large firms paying smaller suppliers, imposes mandatory interest of 8 per cent above the Bank of England base rate on overdue invoices, and hands the Small Business Commissioner sweeping new powers to investigate, name and fine serial offenders. It also outlaws the controversial use of “retentions” in the construction sector, a practice in which main contractors withhold a portion of a supplier’s bill, ostensibly as a defects guarantee, but which the government argues has long been abused to prop up cashflow further up the chain.

According to government figures, poor payment practices drain roughly £11 billion a year from the UK economy and contribute to the closure of an estimated 38 small businesses every day.

A line in the sand

Kyle was unequivocal when asked whether ministers would soften the bill in the face of pressure from corporate Britain. “I am fighting to bring more fairness to our economy,” he told Business Matters. “Sixty days is a solid, reasonable outer limit for paying a small business.”

He claimed the reforms would give the UK “the strongest legal framework in the G7” on commercial payments — a point ministers have made repeatedly since the package was first trailed earlier this year.

“An unhealthy economy is one in which businesses are exploited or strangled to death,” he said. “I don’t think there are many people in their personal lives, let alone in their professional lives, that think it’s reasonable to wait more than two full months to be paid.”

His comments come amid mounting unease in Westminster that the legislation could be watered down at committee stage. Both the British Retail Consortium and the Confederation of British Industry have flagged concerns. The CBI warned last week that the new rules must be “balanced carefully against the need to protect the competitiveness of larger businesses — particularly those operating across complex supply chains”.

Supporters of the bill, however, see those interventions as precisely the reason ministers cannot afford to flinch. Craig Beaumont, executive director at the Federation of Small Businesses, pulled no punches. “Many big businesses are using small businesses for free credit, and some are busy lobbying to keep it,” he said. “As this bill goes through parliament, it absolutely must not be watered down. Victims don’t want a balanced approach with perpetrators.”

A commissioner with teeth

For the reforms to bite, much will hinge on enforcement — and on Emma Jones, the small business commissioner appointed last year to take on Britain’s payment culture. Until now her office has been seen by critics as toothless, having not used its existing “name and shame” powers since Labour came to power. The government has said that is because no complaint from suppliers had merited that step.

Kyle insisted that would change once the new bill became law, and made clear he expected Jones to use her new powers assertively, including fines that could run into the tens of millions of pounds for “persistently” late payers.

“I’m empowering her to do these things, and she also has my full backing to act as swiftly as possible,” he said. “We need to have swift inquiries, swift judgments, and we need to have swift enforcement. And that will lead to the behaviour change we need.”

A drag on growth

The political logic for Kyle is clear enough. Cashflow remains the single biggest pressure point for Britain’s 5.5 million small and medium-sized enterprises, and recent figures suggest the problem is getting worse, not better, with UK firms hitting record levels of late invoice payments and SMEs collectively left more than £100 billion out of pocket last year.

For a government that has staked its growth agenda on unblocking the supply side of the economy, the message that businesses can no longer treat their smaller suppliers as a free line of credit is, by ministerial standards, an unusually sharp one. Whether the bill survives its passage through parliament without significant amendment will be the first real test of how serious Kyle is about that promise.

Read more:
Kyle vows no climbdown on late payment crackdown as landmark bill enters parliament

Britain’s labour market has buckled under the twin weight of geopolitical turmoil and stubbornly high interest rates, with the unemployment rate climbing unexpectedly to 5 per cent and payrolls plunging by 100,000 in April, the steepest monthly fall in years.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Tuesday showed the jobless rate edging up from 4.9 per cent in the first quarter, confounding City forecasters who had pencilled in no change. The fall in payrolls was sharply worse than the 28,000 decline economists had anticipated, and follows a 28,000 contraction in March, signalling that the cooling that has gripped the British jobs market for the best part of two years is now hardening into something closer to a freeze.

Job vacancies tumbled to their lowest level in five years, an ominous bellwether for small and medium-sized employers already squeezed by elevated borrowing costs and faltering consumer demand. The Bank of England, which only weeks ago warned that hiring intentions were weakening, now expects the unemployment rate to peak at 5.1 per cent in the second quarter, in line with its April 2026 Monetary Policy Report.

Iran war casts long shadow over hiring

Behind the figures lies a stark geopolitical backdrop. The United States–Iran war has now entered its eleventh week, with no immediate prospect of a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply has historically transited. The closure has driven a fresh spike in global energy prices and forced UK businesses, from manufacturers to hospitality operators, to put hiring and capital expenditure on ice. The supply shock, as Business Matters has previously reported, has pushed oil close to $120 a barrel and rattled global markets.

For SMEs, the message from the boardroom is plainly defensive. Recruitment freezes, deferred investment and rationed inventory have become the order of the day across sectors most exposed to discretionary consumer spending. The ONS noted that the sharpest declines in vacancies and payrolls have come from hospitality and retail, two pillars of the British high street that were already grappling with rising employment costs before the energy shock landed. The squeeze echoes earlier warnings that hospitality has been hit hardest in the wake of recent tax rises.

Pay growth slips below price rises

Wage growth, once the great hope of households battered by the cost-of-living crisis, is also losing steam. Average weekly earnings excluding bonuses slowed to 3.4 per cent between January and March, down from 3.6 per cent, leaving pay rising only fractionally above the March inflation reading of 3.3 per cent. Including bonuses, the picture was slightly stronger, with average wages up 4.1 per cent compared with 3.9 per cent in the previous rolling quarter.

That fragile real-terms gain is unlikely to last. Headline inflation, which had been on a steady downward path, is expected to dip to 3 per cent in April when temporary government measures to cap household energy bills came into force, but economists warn the relief will be short-lived as the Bank of England weighs interest rate decisions against the Middle East oil shock. With Brent crude trading well above pre-war levels, food and fuel inflation are likely to reassert themselves over the summer.

Liz McKeown, director of economic statistics at the ONS, said the labour market remained “soft”, noting that vacancies were at their lowest level in five years and unemployment higher than a year ago. “The number of payroll employees continued to fall in the three months to March, while regular wage growth slowed further,” she said. “Lower-paying sectors such as hospitality and retail have seen some of the largest falls in vacancies and payroll numbers, both in recent months and over the last year.”

Real pay set to slide

For workers, the implications are sobering. Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG, warned that with both private and public sector pay growth easing, “workers are likely to face a period of declining real pay, as headline inflation is set to outpace earnings, driven by higher energy and food prices.” Martin Beck, chief economist at WPI Strategy, added that “the latest labour market data suggest the UK jobs market is starting to feel the repercussions of higher energy prices, geopolitical uncertainty and weaker business confidence.”

For Britain’s 5.5 million small businesses, the data is more than a statistical curiosity, it is a warning shot. With borrowing costs unlikely to fall meaningfully before clarity returns to the Gulf, and consumer-facing sectors bearing the brunt of weaker demand, the second half of 2026 looks set to test the resilience of the SME economy in ways not seen since the pandemic.

The Bank of England’s next move will be closely watched. Threadneedle Street faces an unenviable choice between cutting rates to support a softening labour market and holding firm against the inflationary echoes of the Hormuz crisis. Either way, the era of cheap hiring and easy growth that defined much of the post-pandemic recovery now feels firmly behind us.

Read more:
UK jobless rate climbs to 5% as Iran war and Hormuz shock chill hiring

Finding a reliable office suite that does not drain your budget can be a challenge. Many professionals and students look for online tools only to end up on sketchy download pages that bundle unwanted software.

If you need a fast and lightweight toolkit that handles text documents, large data grids, and slide presentations, this guide will show you how to get a clean setup safely.

You can build a great digital workspace without paying a massive yearly subscription. Let us explore how to install the suite from a secure origin so you can work with complete peace of mind.

Why a Secure Office Suite Matters for Modern Professionals

Security is the most critical factor when you add any new application to your computer. When you work with sensitive professional files, customer data, or financial spreadsheets, a single bad download can expose your entire network to significant risks. Using a verified and safe office suite download protects your operating system from background vulnerabilities.

The Hidden Risks of Unofficial Software Downloads

Many third-party software hubs bundle extra programs inside their installation files. When you click a random download button, you might accidentally install browser extensions, tracking scripts, or adware that slows down your system. Even worse, modified installation files can contain hidden malicious payloads that give unauthorized users access to your personal files. Checking for a verified digital signature on the setup file before running it is the easiest way to avoid these risks.

Shifting to a Secure, Free Productivity Solution

You do not have to accept security risks just to get a free office alternative. Choosing a trusted, well-established brand gives you access to a modern workplace setup without any hidden financial traps. By installing a legitimate freeware productivity app directly from the official source, you get the latest security updates, clean code, and full support for your daily workflow.

Why Choose This Modern Office Suite? Core Benefits and Value

This platform has grown into a premier Microsoft Office alternative because it focuses on user comfort and raw speed. It offers a complete set of office applications that look and feel familiar, so you will not have to spend days learning where the buttons are.

Complete Productivity Tools with Full Format Compatibility

The suite offers complete file format compatibility with standard industry extensions. You can open, edit, and save files directly as .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx without losing your original layouts. This means you can collaborate easily with colleagues who use different programs, and your fonts, margins, and tables will stay exactly as you intended.

Built-In AI Capabilities for Streamlined Workflows

The latest software version includes helpful WPS AI features that simplify everyday writing and editing. The built-in writing assistant can help you brainstorm outlines, rephrase sentences, or summarize incredibly long text files in seconds. These tools help you work smarter, save time, and speed up your daily output.

Lightweight Architecture for Fast Performance

Unlike heavier software bundles that consume massive amounts of system memory, this program features very low system resource usage. It loads quickly on older laptops and budget desktops alike. The compressed installer files download in minutes, allowing you to stay highly productive even on machines with minimal RAM.

How to Secure a 100% Safe wps office free download

Getting your software setup should be simple and risk-free. Following the proper steps ensures you get the clean, original package direct from the creators. To explore the platform or check out regional features, you can always visit the official wps官网 portal.

Step 1: Navigating to the Verified Official Platforms

Always skip unofficial forum links and file-sharing sites. Going straight to the official domain is the only guaranteed way to get a true malware-free download. Legitimate platforms utilize secure connection protocols to protect your data while you download the software installer.

Step 2: Selecting the Correct Desktop Installer

Once you are on the main site, the system will look at your computer and recommend the perfect edition for you. For standard computers, pick the stable 64-bit desktop architecture option to ensure the best performance. This ensures you get a solid package built specifically for your version of Windows.

Step 3: Verifying File Integrity Before Running Setup

Before you double-click your newly downloaded package, take a second to look at the file size. A legitimate secure client installation file usually sits right between 200MB and 300MB. If the file you downloaded is only a few megabytes, it might just be a dangerous downloader stub from an untrusted site, so delete it and grab the official one.

Step-by-Step Desktop Installation and Setup Walkthrough

Setting up the desktop application is an easy process that takes less than five minutes. If you want to grab the desktop installer directly, click over to the official wps下载 page to get the official package.

Running the Installer and Managing System Permissions

Find the downloaded file in your folder and double-click to start. Your computer will open a User Account Control (UAC) prompt to ask for your permission. This is a standard security step for any modern software installation, so click “Yes” to let the official setup wizard start unpacking the files.

Configuring Custom Settings for an Optimized Workspace

Before clicking the main install button, check the box to accept the end-user license agreement (EULA). You can also click the advanced settings link if you want to choose a specific folder path or create a quick icon on your screen. When you are ready, click “Install Now” to enjoy a completely bloatware-free installation.

Deep Dive into the Essential Productivity Tools

This all-in-one document suite gives you all the essential office tools inside a single, clean window interface. It uses convenient ribbon-style navigation tabs so you can jump between different open documents without cluttering your desktop taskbar.

Advanced Document Processing and Layout Styling

The word processor gives you everything you need to build clean, professional documents. It features a deep document template library with pre-made layouts for resumes, invoices, and business reports. The smart formatting tools make it easy to apply consistent fonts, alignments, and spacings across long articles.

Data Analysis and Spreadsheet Intelligence Tools

The data tool handles big accounting sheets and complex charts with ease. It features an advanced calculations engine that fully supports complicated mathematical formulas and pivot table structures. You can easily sort through thousands of rows of data, highlight key patterns with custom formatting, and build visual graphs to show off your results.

Dynamic Presentations Supported by Automated Design

The slideshow tool lets you build stunning decks for school or corporate presentations. You can use beautiful visual transitions, insert high-quality vector shapes, and organize your ideas across clean slide layouts. The automated tool handles the alignment for you, so your slides always look professional.

Comprehensive PDF Management, Editing, and Conversions

One of the biggest advantages here is the built-in WPS PDF editor. You do not need to download extra third-party software to change text inside a PDF document. You can easily add notes, split long documents into smaller files, protect them with passwords, and use optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from scanned images.

Frequently Asked Questions About Secure Productivity Software

Is the core desktop version completely free to use permanently?

Yes, the core office tools are free to use for as long as you want. You can write documents, build spreadsheets, and design presentations without any mandatory fees or hidden subscription renewals.

Does the software function normally without an internet connection?

Yes, this is an offline office suite that runs directly on your computer hardware. You do not need an active internet connection to open, edit, or save your local documents.

Can the desktop suite be safely installed on multiple devices?

Yes, you can install the program on your laptop, home desktop, and mobile devices. You can also sign up for the optional WPS Cloud service if you want to keep your documents safely backed up and synced across all your screens automatically.

Conclusion

Upgrading your digital workflow does not require buying expensive software licenses. By choosing a reliable and safe ecosystem, you get a powerful, secure workspace that handles all your daily tasks seamlessly. When you are ready to begin, make sure to use the official wps官网下载 portal to ensure a completely clean and secure setup for your computer.

Read more:
The Ultimate Guide to WPS Office Free Download: 100% Safe & Official

Nobody in Hollywood will say it on the record, but everyone knows: the system is broken. Studios have retreated into franchise bunkers, greenlighting only sequels, prequels, and IP extensions with built-in audiences.

The streamers, who were supposed to be the cavalry, have pivoted hard from growth to profitability — which in practice means fewer shows, smaller orders, and a near-total unwillingness to bet on anything that doesn’t come pre-loaded with data-validated demand. Original storytelling, the kind that built this industry, has been priced out of the conversation.

The numbers are ugly. Hollywood’s share of qualified film and television projects fell from 23 percent in 2021 to 18 percent just two years later. Entertainment industry layoffs topped 17,000 in 2025 alone. Filming activity in Los Angeles cratered — down 40 percent from 2022 levels before dropping another 13 percent last summer. David Simon, one of the most respected showrunners alive, told an interviewer that he hasn’t had a greenlight in two years. David Chase said the same thing, warning that the business is devolving back to the pre-golden-age network model where executives prioritize financial safety over ambition.

And the foreign sales market, once the financial oxygen that kept mid-budget films alive, has tightened considerably. International buyers want proven IP. They want franchise value. They don’t want to write seven-figure checks for an original thriller from a first-time director, no matter how good the script is. The economic architecture that used to make a $40 million original film pencil out — presales covering a chunk of the budget, domestic theatrical providing upside, home video and international filling in the gaps — barely exists anymore.

So what happens next? Does Hollywood just keep cranking out franchise entries until audiences stop showing up entirely? Or does a computer take away everyones jobs and turn content like a tuna can factory? Perhaps AI has not been given a fair chance to be the savior, not the terminator for media companies and personel.

Enter Acme AI & FX. Never heard of them? That’s by design. For almost two years now they have quietly been building. No web site, no PR just building. Building what they call the ethical, talent friendly AI Studio.

Acme is not another AI startup promising to replace human creativity with algorithms. It’s closer to the opposite — a production infrastructure company that uses proprietary AI technology to make the physical act of filmmaking radically cheaper and faster while keeping every human job intact. Their approach centers on performance capture shot entirely on Acme’s proprietary grey stage. Actors perform. Directors direct. Writers write. Department heads run their departments. What Acme eliminates is the staggering cost of everything else: location shoots, set construction, travel, permits, the logistical sprawl that eats 20 to 30 percent of a typical feature budget before a single frame of story gets captured.

The technology generates 100 percent photorealistic environments. Not “pretty good for AI” — photorealistic. Every exterior, interior, cityscape, and landscape that would normally require a location scout, a construction crew, and a travel budget is instead built digitally at a quality level that holds up on a 60-foot screen. The performances remain entirely actor-driven. This is not deepfake territory. Nobody is being digitally puppeteered. The actors act. The AI handles the world around them.

One source who spent time at Acme’s London facility — but declined to go on the record due to NDA obligations — described what they witnessed there. “You’ve got to see it. It’s unbelievable,” the source said. “Over a one-week period, I watched at least numerous studio heads and the like come through. Most of them clearly showed up ready to shut down the concept of shooting in AI on the spot, and every single one of them left saying some version of ‘how quickly can we start.’ They have a pre-production AI tech that is something this industry has been dreaming of. I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s unbelievable.”

The economics are striking. Acme can deliver a film at roughly 20 percent of traditional below-the-line cost while cutting shoot schedules by 60 to 70 percent. Think about what that means for the greenlight problem. A $50 million film that studios won’t touch because the downside risk is too steep? At Acme’s cost structure, you’re making substantially the same movie for a fraction of the price. Suddenly the risk-reward math works again — not just for franchise plays, but for original stories, character-driven dramas, ambitious genre films, the entire category of movies that Hollywood has abandoned because the production economics stopped making sense. It sounds too good to be true. And in Hollywood usually when it is too good to be true it isnt true. In this case, however, we were able to visit them during their last production, Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi and saw it all come to life.

Garret Grant, who joined ACME as a partner, said  “When I was first approached about joining ACME was expecting to lose my job to an ai producer.  That’s not what’s happening here. My entire department is intact. My crew is working. The difference is I’m not spending three weeks in prep dealing with location permits and weather covers and travel logistics. We’re just making the movie. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve never had a shoot move this fast without something falling apart.”

Acme has already built studios in London and has broken ground in Spain , with plans to open facilities in New York and has a mini studio in Los Angeles. Their flagship production, Killing Satoshi, is nearing the finish line — a $70 million conspiracy thriller directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) and starring Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson, Gal Gadot and Isla Fischer,  almost done with production. The film was shot entirely on Acme’s grey stage with all AI-generated environments, in partnership with 30 Ninja’s. It tracks the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin who allegedly still controls a wallet worth tens of billions, and the powerful forces working to ensure that identity stays hidden. Nick Schenk, who wrote Gran Torino for Clint Eastwood, penned the original screenplay. It’s exactly the kind of high-concept, original, non-franchise film that the traditional studio system won’t make anymore. Acme made it.

And the pipeline is already filling up behind it. The trailer for Stop That Train, a new  Adam Shankman movie, just dropped — with Acme serving as the VFX/AI partner on the project. The company is very firm about not announcing their projects, but letting the directors or studios lead that. All told, the company has over 15 projects ( films and television) in various stages of pre-production and production, plus advertising work. This isn’t a proof-of-concept experiment. It’s a production operation scaling in real time, with finished product to show for it.

A senior executive at one of the major talent agencies, speaking on background, framed Acme’s emergence in market terms. “The foreign sales conversation has gotten brutal. Buyers want IP, they want franchise, they want safety. But when you can show them a film with a real director and real cast at this budget level, the risk profile changes completely. I’ve already had two distributors ask me what else Acme has coming. That never happens with a company this new.”

The leadership group behind Acme — Ryan Kavanaugh, Garrett Grant, Lawrence Grey, and Matthew Kavanaugh — brings a combination of Hollywood production pedigree and financial engineering experience that is genuinely rare. Kavanaugh in particular has spent his career arriving at the intersection of crisis and innovation, usually with a structural solution that the rest of the industry eventually adopts wholesale.

The elephant in the room. Ryan Kavanaugh’s Realtivity Media, a company, he founded and built into the largest mini-major studio, underwent a hostile takeover in 2015 which led to Kavanaugh putting it into a chapter 11, and, after a two year battle, buying it back out of chapter 11.  In that process he became Hollywood’s favorite whipping boy. Article after article with salacious headlines that seemed to point to Kavanaugh having done something wrong, some kind of giant scandal. The biggest “scamndal”was a fraud lawsuit brought by one of the hedge funds called RKA. It was front page everywhere. What wasn’t front page and still is left as a footnote, that RKA lost the case in a Motion to Dismiss. That means a judge found that they did not even have the basic elements to have brought the case in the first place, let alone have it adjudicated. Thats the story, nothing less nothing more. But the only thing hollywod likes more than a star is a falling star. Now onto why him?

Consider the track record. In the mid-2000s, when studios were cash-starved and struggling to finance their own slates, Kavanaugh introduced slate financing — a model that bundled groups of films to spread investment risk across portfolios rather than individual bets. That model channeled more than $25 billion into Hollywood through deals with Warner Brothers, Universal, Sony, and Lionsgate. He pioneered the finance structure for post-bankruptcy Marvel that allowed it to become an independent studio, creating the architecture that led directly to the Marvel Cinematic Universe — the single most valuable entertainment franchise in history. In 2010, he brokered the first-of-its-kind deal with Netflix that effectively created the Subscription Video on Demand window, a move that boosted Netflix’s market cap from $2 billion to $10 billion and laid the groundwork for the streaming revolution. He was also among the first to recognize that film IP could be systematically repurposed for television, a strategy that is now standard industry practice. In 2014 he gave the Keynote at MIPCOM, where he spent an hour explaining how movies, his movies made the best pilots for TV shows-their underlying IP. It was met with much skepticism, however Kavanaugh had one thing the most successful and longest running show in MTV’s history Catfish, based off of a movie he was involved with Catfish.

Every one of those moves happened at a moment when the conventional wisdom said the industry was stuck. Every one of them restructured the underlying economics in a way that unlocked a new wave of production. The pattern is hard to ignore.

What Kavanaugh and his partners are doing with Acme follows the same logic: identify the structural bottleneck choking the industry, then build the infrastructure to eliminate it. Right now, the bottleneck isn’t capital — Netflix alone is spending $18 billion a year on content. The bottleneck is production cost. It’s the fact that making a film still requires an industrial-era apparatus of physical construction, global logistics, and time-intensive shoots that push budgets past the point where anything but a guaranteed franchise hit makes financial sense. Acme’s technology collapses that cost structure without collapsing the workforce. Actors keep their jobs. Department heads keep their jobs. Directors keep their creative authority. What goes away is the waste.

Hollywood has been waiting for someone to solve this equation — to figure out how AI can lower costs without gutting the creative workforce that makes the product worth watching. The industry’s greatest fear about artificial intelligence has never really been about the technology itself. It’s been about who would wield it and what they’d prioritize. A technology company with no production experience optimizing for efficiency above all else is a terrifying prospect. A production company with decades of filmmaking experience using AI to restore economic viability to original storytelling is something else entirely.

A Director on one of their current projects who spoke to us on background gave the following quite: “I’ve spent the last two years getting told no. Not because the scripts aren’t good — because the budgets don’t work. If these guys can actually deliver what they showed me, and everything I’ve seen says they can, this is the first real reason to be optimistic about this business that I’ve had since before the strikes.”

Acme AI & FX, with Killing Satoshi nearly complete, Stop That Train freshly unveiled, and a full slate ramping up behind them, is making the case that the answer to Hollywood’s crisis was never about choosing between human creativity and technological capability. It was about building a company that refuses to sacrifice one for the other. Ryan Kavanaugh, Garrett Grant, Lawrence Grey, and Matthew Kavanaugh appear to be betting their reputations on exactly that proposition.

Given Kavanaugh’s history of being right about these things before anyone else catches on, the rest of Hollywood might want to pay attention.

Read more:
The Unlikely Partnership That Could Save Hollywood: Can Ryan Kavanaugh and Partners Save Hollywood Again?

Some careers are built through one major breakthrough. Others are built through years of steady decisions, small improvements, and a willingness to adapt. For Ian Reight, success in medicine came from learning how to stay calm, think ahead, and embrace change long before many others did.

Today, Reight is known as a general surgeon, healthcare leader, and former chief of surgery who helped guide teams through changing technology and growing demands inside modern hospitals. But his story started far away from operating rooms and robotic surgery systems.

Growing up in Maryland, Reight spent part of his early life as a volunteer firefighter and paramedic. The work exposed him to pressure, urgency, and responsibility at a young age.

“I learned early that people look for leadership when situations become chaotic,” Reight says. “You do not always have time for perfect decisions. You have to stay focused and move forward.”

That lesson would shape nearly every stage of his career.

How Ian Reight Built His Career in Medicine

Before entering medicine, Reight studied psychology at the University of Maryland College Park. Later, he earned his medical degree from the Medical University of the Americas.

He says studying psychology gave him an advantage many physicians overlook.

“Medicine is about people as much as science,” he explains. “You can be technically skilled, but if you cannot communicate well, patients and teams lose confidence.”

As Reight moved into surgery, he quickly realized the profession required far more than medical knowledge alone. Surgeons often lead teams during high-pressure situations where timing, communication, and trust all matter.

Over time, he took on larger leadership roles. He served as medical staff president, chief of surgery, medical director of a breast center, and medical director of wound care and hyperbaric medicine.

Each position brought different challenges. Some involved patient care. Others focused on managing teams, solving operational problems, and improving hospital systems.

“You cannot only think like a surgeon,” Reight says. “You also have to think about how every part of the hospital works together.”

Why Ian Reight Embraced Robotic Surgery Early

One of the biggest ideas that influenced Reight’s career was his willingness to adapt to new technology instead of resisting it.

As robotic surgery became more common in hospitals, many physicians were cautious about changing long-established methods. Reight chose a different approach. He became deeply involved in robotic surgery and eventually served as a lead robotic surgeon.

“At first, people naturally questioned whether it would become the future,” he says. “But medicine always evolves. You either learn with it or fall behind.”

Robotic surgery introduced greater precision and helped reduce recovery times for many patients. Reight believed the technology could improve patient outcomes if surgeons approached it with the right mindset and training.

“The technology itself is not enough,” he explains. “You still need discipline, preparation, and strong decision-making.”

His openness to innovation became one of the defining themes of his career. Rather than staying comfortable, he focused on learning continuously and helping teams adjust during periods of change.

“The moment you stop learning is the moment you become ineffective,” Reight says.

Leadership Lessons From the Operating Room

As Reight’s responsibilities grew, so did his focus on leadership. He believes many of the same principles that guide surgery also apply to business, management, and life.

In surgery, preparation matters. Communication matters. Consistency matters.

According to Reight, those same habits help organizations succeed during uncertain periods.

“People want leaders who stay calm when things become difficult,” he says. “Panic spreads quickly in any environment.”

During his years in leadership positions, Reight often worked between physicians, nurses, administrators, and staff members with different priorities and pressures. Keeping everyone aligned was not always easy.

He says one of the biggest mistakes leaders make is focusing only on their own responsibilities instead of understanding the bigger picture.

“You have to understand the pressures other people are dealing with,” he explains. “That is how strong teams are built.”

His leadership style focused less on authority and more on trust, communication, and consistency over time.

What Ian Reight Says About Long-Term Success

Reight believes long careers are rarely built through dramatic moments alone. Instead, they come from repeated habits and steady improvement.

That mindset helped him move through multiple areas of healthcare leadership while continuing to practice medicine directly with patients.

“Success usually comes from small decisions repeated over many years,” he says. “People often underestimate consistency.”

Outside the hospital, Reight enjoys spending time with his dogs and cooking, which he says helps him stay balanced after years in demanding medical environments.

Interestingly, he sees similarities between cooking and surgery.

“There is timing, preparation, and attention to detail involved in both,” he says with a laugh. “You learn patience very quickly.”

Looking back, Reight says the biggest ideas that shaped his career were not complicated. Stay adaptable. Keep learning. Communicate clearly. Stay calm under pressure.

Those ideas helped him navigate medicine during a period of enormous technological and organizational change.

And in an industry where change never stops, Reight believes those lessons matter now more than ever.

“Leadership is not about having all the answers,” he says. “It is about staying steady enough for other people to trust you when challenges come.”

Read more:
Ian Reight and the Ideas That Shaped a Surgical Career

Leaving crypto in an earn account feels risky, at least at first glance. That instinct is understandable, given the industry’s history.

But it is also worth examining whether that instinct holds up under scrutiny, because the landscape has changed considerably over the past few years, and modern earn products on reputable platforms are built very differently from the structures that failed.

Products like CoinEx Flexible Savings are designed with transparency and liquidity at the forefront. Interest is generated by real borrowing demand, assets are fully backed by verified reserves, and users can redeem at any time without penalty. That combination addresses most of the concerns that made earlier earn products feel precarious.

Why Earn Accounts Have a Better Safety Record Than the Headlines Suggest?

The high-profile collapses that shook the industry between 2022 and 2023 were not failures of the earn account model itself. They were failures of governance, transparency, and asset management. Platforms that commingled user funds, operated without reserves, and obscured their financial position created the conditions for collapse. Those failures were real, and the damage to retail investors was serious.

What followed, however, was a significant industry-wide reckoning. Exchanges that had operated with limited accountability began facing pressure to publish verifiable reserve data. Those that already maintained full reserves and robust security infrastructure were able to demonstrate exactly why their earn products operated differently. The distinction between well-governed platforms and poorly governed ones became much clearer.

Proof of Reserves Changed the Conversation

Proof-of-reserves verification allows any user to confirm that the funds they see in their account are genuinely held by the platform. Exchanges that publish this data regularly and submit to third-party audits are making a quantifiable commitment rather than a marketing claim. That level of transparency is increasingly becoming the baseline expectation.

For users considering earn accounts, the presence of verified reserve data is one of the most meaningful signals available. It indicates the platform is not lending out user deposits beyond its capacity to cover withdrawals, which was the core mechanism behind the industry failures that generated the most public concern.

What Makes Earn Products Low Risk in Practice

• Flexible vs. Fixed Products

Flexible earn products allow instant subscription and redemption. Users can exit at any time, without notice periods or penalties, which limits their exposure to the duration they actively choose.

Fixed-term products typically offer higher yields in exchange for a commitment period. Users accept a longer window of platform exposure for a better rate. Both can be reasonable choices, but flexible products give conservative users the most direct control over their risk.

• The Source of the Yield

Sustainable earn yields come from lending to margin traders and borrowers on the same platform. Those borrowers pay interest, and the platform distributes a portion of that interest to savings depositors.

Because the yield is tied to genuine borrowing demand, rates fluctuate with market activity rather than staying artificially elevated. This is a meaningful indicator of a well-structured product. Rates that are consistently far above market norms, with no clear explanation for where the return comes from, warrant closer scrutiny.

Security Infrastructure on Modern Platforms

A well-operated exchange does not store all user assets in a single accessible location. Standard security architecture involves cold storage for the majority of holdings, with a smaller portion in hot wallets to handle withdrawals efficiently. Multi-signature protocols, physical system isolation, and real-time monitoring systems add further layers of protection against internal and external threats.

Platforms that have operated for many years without a major security incident have demonstrated something that newer entrants simply cannot offer: a track record. Longevity in the crypto exchange space, combined with growing user numbers and transaction volume, is evidence that the underlying infrastructure is functioning reliably under real-world conditions.

How to Use Earn Accounts Responsibly

The most sensible approach treats an earn account as one component of a broader allocation strategy rather than a passive storage solution. Keeping a portion of idle assets in a flexible earn product while maintaining personal custody of long-term holdings offers a balance between earning yield and limiting platform exposure.

Checking reserve publications periodically, paying attention to platform communications during periods of market volatility, and diversifying across multiple platforms for larger holdings are straightforward habits that reduce concentrated risk without requiring any technical expertise.

The Bigger Picture

Exchange earn accounts, when offered by transparent, well-capitalised platforms with verified reserves and strong security infrastructure, represent a genuinely useful tool for crypto holders. The risks that once made these products feel precarious have been substantially addressed by the generation of platforms that prioritise accountability. For investors who understand what they are using and choose their platform carefully, earning yield on idle crypto assets is a reasonable strategy.

Read more:
Is It Safe to Leave Crypto in an Exchange-Earn Account?

Bridging digital visibility and in-store performance across multi-site retail estates is one of the central challenges facing UK retailers seeking sustainable growth.

With footfall and shopper traffic declining (down 2.9% year-on-year in December), a critical challenge for multi-site operators is how to accurately measure and optimise digital performance at the level of an individual store, rather than just the brand as a whole.

With a retail portfolio of 77 stores nationwide, itsu, like other UK market leaders, has turned to external experts to address that question. Founded by Julian Metcalfe, itsu has built a reputation and a market-leading business on a simple belief: that people deserve convenient food that’s also high-quality and nutritious. Backing its ambition to help the UK “eat beautiful”, itsu shared plans to expand its restaurant and retail estate, targeting approximately 100 new outlets following investment by Bridgepoint Capital in 2021.

To support its commercial ambitions, itsu has appointed London-based retail growth specialist and digital marketing agency Serendipity. The partnership is designed to reach more customers through search-based discovery, while holding itsu’s long-standing position against fried-by-default convenience food; a stance the brand has built on since the late 1990s.

Across a complex physical retail estate where commercial outcomes vary by location, footfall, and live trading conditions, no amount of category-level visibility will move the needle on its own. Instead, this data-led, performance-driven digital strategy will focus on strengthening brand presence, driving retail and online sales, and creating clearer connections between digital engagement and real-world commercial performance.

The work spans SEO, content, paid media and advanced measurement, beginning with foundational technical SEO audits and the development of a content and search strategy to surface where visibility can be improved. From there, Serendipity will use itsu’s search infrastructure – keyword authority, audience data and content positioning – as the upstream signal, applying store-level measurement to convert that signal into till receipts.

Launching the work as a test-and-learn programme across local search, paid and organic channels, Serendipity will establish performance benchmarks across the full estate and build a data driven approach to identify growth opportunities and align with location specific user demand. Supporting this analysis is a measurement framework designed to clearly link online activity to real in-store behaviour at each site, rather than at brand level. The result will be a clearer view of how customers move between digital, physical retail and grocery channels. For itsu, that means a measurable line from digital spend back to commercial outcomes.

Rukshan Warnacula, founder of Serendipity, said: “At a time when eating well and sustainably matters more than ever for our communities and our planet, itsu continues to lead the way with Asian-inspired, healthier menus that support health and wellbeing. We’re proud to play a part in connecting people with food that is fresh, convenient and healthy.”

The methodology is built on a longer track record. Serendipity has worked with itsu’s grocery business for five years, a partnership that has delivered 60% UK gyoza category visibility, more than 900 top-three keyword positions across core category terms, and 23% of gyoza-related AI responses now referencing the itsu brand. The agency’s case study on the itsu grocery partnership lays out the category-level mechanics.

Rukshan Warnacula added: “Using our data-driven approach at a store level, this framework will equip itsu with insights into both store performance and growth opportunities across all locations.”

The appointment builds on Serendipity’s existing five-year partnership with itsu’s grocery business. The retail growth specialist has delivered 60% UK gyoza category visibility and more than 900 top-three keyword positions across core category terms for the brand.

Read more:
Inside Serendipity’s store-level approach to itsu’s UK retail growth

Charitable organisations operate under specific constraints when it comes to payment infrastructure. Every percentage point of donation processing fee reduces the amount reaching the cause.

Every checkout friction point loses donors at the moment of generosity. Every failed recurring donation represents a supporter relationship that needs rebuilding. PayAdmit has supported several charitable organisations through payment infrastructure modernisation, and the operational patterns are specific to this sector.

The charitable sector has historically used generic payment processors built for commercial transactions. PayAdmit treats donation payment flows as a dedicated PayAdmit business segment. The mismatch shows up in several places. Donation payment flows need different optimisations than ecommerce. Recurring donation payments differ from subscription billing. Gift Aid handling adds online payment layers that processors miss. PayAdmit shows charities how to convert this fragmented stack into one white label gateway under their own brand.

Why charitable organisations need specialised donation payment infrastructure

Three operational realities make charity payments fundamentally different from ecommerce. The first is donor psychology. Donors often abandon at the smallest checkout friction. Generic processor flows optimised for online ecommerce introduce steps that lose donors. Specialised payment infrastructure removes friction wherever possible.

The second is recurring donation dynamics. Monthly supporters are the most valuable category for charities. Sustaining these through card expirations and failed transactions is key. Account updater integration, dunning workflows, and clear donor communication during payment issues affect retention.

The third is administrative simplicity. Charity finance teams have fewer payment resources than commercial operations. The payment infrastructure has to handle Gift Aid declarations and tax receipts with minimal manual work. PayAdmit’s white label payment software handles Gift Aid, recurring donations, and tax receipts without manual overhead.

Donation-specific payment capabilities every charity needs in 2026:

• Frictionless checkout flows optimised for donation psychology
• QR-based giving for campaigns and physical donation requests
• Recurring donation infrastructure with account updater integration
• Gift Aid declarations integrated into the donation flow
• Tax receipt generation and donor record-keeping automated

How a white label payment gateway supports charitable operations

A white label payment gateway designed for charities handles donation patterns as default capabilities rather than custom development projects. QR-based giving works through the platform. Recurring donations integrate with account updater services. Gift Aid sits alongside the donation amount in checkout. Donor records sync into the charity CRM through webhooks.

PayAdmit operates this online gateway model for charitable organisations across the UK, EU, and forty plus markets. PayAdmit acts as a payment software provider rather than a generic processor. The PayAdmit gateway routes every donation transaction through the optimal acquirer. Each PayAdmit capability is configured per organisation rather than imposed as a default.

The commercial impact for charitable organisations shows up in several places. Donation conversion rates typically rise by three to seven percentage points after switching from generic processors to specialised charitable infrastructure. Recurring donor retention improves transaction by transaction. PayAdmit fits this charity profile cleanly because the same PayAdmit payment service supports SaaS billing, ecommerce checkout, and bank-grade compliance from one PayAdmit gateway. The PayAdmit team helps each charity merchant set up the PayAdmit payment gateway as a white label solution, and the PayAdmit business case stays consistent across every PayAdmit deployment. How to start is a short scoping call about annual donation volume.

Charitable organisations evaluating their payment infrastructure typically review specific deployment configurations for donations workflows, which cover frictionless checkout, recurring giving, and Gift Aid integration.

PayAdmit acts as a payment software provider rather than a generic processor. The PayAdmit gateway covers cards, wallets, and rails through one online integration. The PSP-grade routing inside PayAdmit recovers donations that single-acquirer processors quietly decline. PayAdmit shows merchants how to scope a deployment in one short call about annual donation volume, target geographies, and Gift Aid requirements.

About PayAdmit

PayAdmit is a payment gateway software provider delivering white label payment solutions for charitable organisations alongside online ecommerce merchants, SaaS subscription businesses, banks, and licensed PSPs. The PayAdmit payment gateway combines multi-acquirer routing, tokenisation, fraud screening, and analytics into one business-grade payment service.

Read more:
PayAdmit Helps Charities Build Modern Donation Payment Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, digital infrastructure and startup innovation are transforming the European business landscape at unprecedented speed.

In this rapidly evolving ecosystem, companies are increasingly looking for opportunities to connect with innovators, investors, technology providers and decision-makers capable of shaping the future of digital business.

This is precisely why events such as VivaTech Paris have become strategic reference points for the international technology sector. Scheduled in Paris in 2026, the event continues to strengthen its role as a leading European tech conference, attracting startups, enterprises, governments, investors and technology leaders from across Europe and beyond.

For British businesses in particular, VivaTech represents much more than a traditional technology exhibition. It has become a key opportunity to understand emerging trends, build international partnerships and remain competitive in a market increasingly driven by innovation and AI.

Europe’s technology ecosystem is evolving rapidly

Over the last few years, Europe has accelerated investments in digital transformation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and strategic technologies.

Governments and enterprises are prioritising:

• AI adoption
• cloud infrastructure
• digital resilience
• cybersecurity governance
• startup ecosystems
• sustainable innovation

At the same time, European regulation is becoming increasingly influential in shaping global technology standards through frameworks such as:

• the EU AI Act
• NIS2
• DORA
• GDPR

For UK companies operating internationally, maintaining visibility into these developments is becoming essential.

Technology events are no longer just networking opportunities — they are strategic observatories for understanding where the market is heading.

Why VivaTech has become strategically important

Unlike traditional trade fairs focused on individual sectors, VivaTech brings together multiple dimensions of the digital economy under one ecosystem.

The event typically attracts:

• global tech companies
• fast-growing startups
• venture capital firms
• cybersecurity specialists
• AI innovators
• public institutions
• enterprise decision-makers

This creates a highly dynamic environment where emerging technologies, business strategy and investment trends intersect.

For companies looking to expand internationally or identify new partnerships, access to this ecosystem offers significant strategic value.

AI is dominating the technology conversation

Artificial intelligence is expected to remain one of the dominant themes at VivaTech Paris 2026.

Across every industry, organizations are trying to understand how AI will impact:

• operational efficiency
• customer experience
• cybersecurity
• data governance
• automation
• workforce management

At the same time, businesses are also becoming more aware of the risks associated with uncontrolled AI adoption.

Issues such as:

• data exposure
• AI governance
• regulatory compliance
• third-party risk
• ethical AI usage

are becoming increasingly central in enterprise discussions.

This balance between innovation and risk management is likely to play a major role during the event.

Cybersecurity is now part of every technology discussion

One of the clearest trends in modern digital transformation is that cybersecurity can no longer be separated from innovation.

As companies accelerate cloud adoption and AI integration, their exposure to cyber threats also increases.

Today, organizations must manage:

• supply chain vulnerabilities
• ransomware risks
• third-party exposure
• identity compromise
• AI-related attack surfaces
• data leakage risks

Technology conferences like VivaTech increasingly reflect this reality by integrating cybersecurity into broader conversations around digital business transformation.

Paris is strengthening its role as a European innovation hub

Paris has become one of Europe’s most important technology and startup ecosystems. Significant investment in innovation, AI research and digital infrastructure has transformed the city into a major international hub for technology companies and investors.

For British businesses, this proximity offers important advantages:

• easier access to European markets
• networking with continental partners
• visibility into EU innovation policies
• opportunities for international expansion

Despite Brexit, collaboration between UK companies and European ecosystems remains extremely active, especially in sectors such as AI, fintech, cybersecurity and digital services.

Startups and enterprise innovation are converging

One of the defining characteristics of VivaTech is the interaction between startups and large enterprises.

Corporations increasingly rely on startup ecosystems to accelerate:

• innovation processes
• AI experimentation
• cybersecurity capabilities
• sustainability initiatives
• digital transformation strategies

At the same time, startups benefit from direct access to enterprise buyers, investors and strategic partners.

This convergence is reshaping how innovation is developed and commercialised across Europe.

Technology events are becoming intelligence platforms

Modern technology conferences are no longer just about product showcases or keynote speeches.

For many organizations, events like VivaTech function as real-time intelligence environments where companies can:

• identify emerging trends
• monitor competitor activity
• evaluate market shifts
• discover strategic partnerships
• understand evolving customer expectations

In highly competitive sectors, this visibility becomes strategically important.

Being physically present where innovation conversations happen often provides insights impossible to obtain remotely.

The growing importance of ecosystem visibility

As digital ecosystems become more interconnected, businesses increasingly need visibility not only into technologies, but also into the broader networks shaping the market.

This includes understanding:

• investment movements
• startup acceleration trends
• AI adoption patterns
• cybersecurity priorities
• regulatory evolution
• international partnerships

Events such as VivaTech offer a unique concentration of these signals within a single environment.

Why UK businesses should pay attention now

British companies continue to play a major role within the European technology landscape. However, the speed of technological change means that maintaining strong international visibility is becoming more important than ever.

Whether operating in:

• cybersecurity
• AI
• fintech
• SaaS
• cloud infrastructure
• digital consulting

UK businesses need direct exposure to the conversations shaping the future of European innovation.

VivaTech Paris 2026 represents one of the most important opportunities to engage with that ecosystem in real time.

Because in today’s technology market, competitiveness is no longer determined only by internal innovation, but also by the ability to understand, anticipate and participate in the broader evolution of the global digital economy.

Read more:
VivaTech Paris 2026: why British businesses can’t afford to miss Europe’s leading tech conference