Partner Article

How does the Autumn Statement Affect SMEs?

Florian Richter, Director, SumUp, UK

The few small merchants able to take time off from keeping their businesses afloat to watch the Chancellor’s speech will have turned off their sets and closed their browsers with a familiar sense of disappointment this afternoon. While it is great that the Government is making inroads by cutting business tax and extending the small business rate relief to April 2014, the reality is that the growth forecast is expected to shrink and little of the relief being offered by the Government in the aftermath of the double-dip recession will benefit small, independent, businesses.

While the plan to freeze fuel prices will be welcomed by those business people who make their livelihoods from—and on—the roads, it is really a stay-of-execution—not a pardon—for most small merchants. Similarly, Vince Cable’s ‘business bank’ (which received tellingly little ‘air-time’ today) is sounding like more of a PR exercise than a genuine game-changer for small businesses at this point.

All in all, small businesses will need to look to their own strategies if they’re going to survive this economic winter and thrive in 2013 – and that means pushing every small edge. One edge that many independent merchants are giving up at present is the ability to take credit and debit card payments, often due to large upfront terminal costs. Now that processing plastic is as simple as connecting a free reader to a smartphone and downloading an app, we expect to see large numbers of small businesses using pay-as-you-go card payment solutions to help stabilise their cash flow in the months ahead.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Florian Richter .