Finances & CSS - Online Resources

Looking for the path to right debt management

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:56:53 +0000

There are two possibilities here, either management will attempt to acquire all the equity with their own money or, more likely, with traditional bank finance; or if the buy-out is an EPO, a specialist EPO financier will provide both equity and debt support. To prepare your company for this type of buy-out you need to be aware of the following:

Where the management is buying your business without any borrowings, the central issue is whether the business is attractive enough for them to offer you your asking price. In these circumstances, the transaction is more like a trade sale than a management buy-out.

Where the management is putting up some of the purchase price only and is borrowing the rest, the business will still need to comply with the traditional MBO, because the business assets will be security for the borrowings. This is very important because, from my experience, most management/employee buy-outs that fail do so because they are unable to acquire the finance they need.

Keep your payday loan future oriented

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:54:08 +0000

Building on that attribute, in the Storm stage you’ll need your Ability to Trust and Win-Win Orientation to get you through the stormy times this stage presents. Many alliances get stranded in this stage, as win-lose conflict resolution destroys trust and sets up the partnership for failure. As your alliance moves into initiating a task, your team begins to establish norms of behavior. This is the Norm stage. As you think about a new future, your Comfort with Change will be challenged as you begin to plan and do things differently. Keeping future oriented and not making assumptions about what your partners will do is difficult, especially if you have preconceived notions of how they are. This will challenge your Future Orientation and Comfort with Change as you move from the status quo to changing and letting go of control. While change is difficult, failure to do so can diminish trust and the quality of your output.

Characteristics of a good credit lender

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:49:50 +0000

All of the characteristics of a traditional MBO apply to a company that is seeking to exit through an MBI with one very important exception: where there is no one suitable for the role of CEO, or other key management function within the business, the investors will insist that outside expertise be brought in to cover this deficiency before they will give the buy-out their financial support.

When planning for a management buy-out you should always be alert to possible management shortcomings. Where you recognise that your management is weak in some area, you will need to put someone else in place. If this is not possible, you need to accept that the VC investors will insist on bringing in a recognised industry expert as a part of the team.

This could completely change the dynamics of the buy-out team and your ability to negotiate the most favourable deal.

Signing for the right credit approach

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:04:13 +0000

Besides senior management considerations, it is helpful for you to understand what VCs and Business Angels expect by way of return on their investment. VCs will be looking for a high return and a likely exit in five to seven years. They are attracted to businesses that have a chance of going public, or being on-sold at a significant profit. (You need to bear in mind, however, that very few private businesses have a realistic chance of taking the flotation route.)

Business Angels are a mixed bag of individuals. Some of them take a professional investment approach by seeking high returns through a three to five year exit (and will keep at arm’s length from your business in the meantime). Others will be quite happy to be involved in the business in a non-executive capacity with no particular rate of return, or exit time frame in mind: these people might be, simply, looking for something exciting to do!

Minimizing credit risk is necessary

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:04:29 +0000

The developments in credit markets since 2000 have shown that a disciplined approach to minimize risk is necessary. This includes the determination of stop-loss marks which have to be defined on a caseby- case basis. Important is the volatility of the particular bond and the risk profile of the portfolio. Aportfolio with a high-yield benchmark will be able
to take the highest volatility but a buy-and-hold strategy is also not compatiblefor such a portfolio if a specific bond has to suffer a huge price loss.

The price mechanism of Fallen Angels and high-yield bonds requires disciplined stop loss marks. Fallen Angels tend to trade on very wide levels prior to a downgrade in high yield but a downgrade will usually induce another sell-off in the bonds so that a significant price fall will occur.

Besides fundamental facts, technical factors play an important role and current risk appetite of investors determines basically a floor for the Fallen Angel. If new buyers arise upswings in price can be significant, supported through positive credit news.

Expand your business with web standards conformance.

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:29:58 +0000

Web standards allow you to increase the searchability of your financial sites. Google has been dubbed the greatest blind user out there on the web, because it (as well as other search engines) are particularly partial to indexing standards-compliant sites.

Break the “build, break, re-build” cycle. It is important to ensure forward compatibility of every website regardless if it concerns loans, real estate or money in general, with any new browser releases: your CSS-based financial site will be displayed accurately in future versions of today browsers. With table-based sites you never know what may happen. Along with the constant evolution of (standards compliant) browsers the performance of non-standards sites decreases. This phenomen is often described as “perpetual obsolescence”.

You can also save money by simplifying your design requirements. Compliant financial websites have an improved chance of rendering properly on all resolution and monitor sizes, while still maintaining design integrity that was originally intended for them.

Not only can you improve your income but also accquire some good publicity along the way. Creating an attractive, well-functioning and standards-compliant financial website is becoming the benchmark of good design and development of a successful company.

How can my financial well-being profit from web standards?

admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:53:41 +0000

Web standards are frequently described as being profitable only to various types of people with disabilities. Although helping this group is a crucial element of the standards rationale, there is a great number of other reasons why standards-based finacial websites are a mark of the future of online money making pages, not the least of which is the way they affect your bottom line and income. In the financial sector with sites concerning loans, real estate or forex trading, it is in most cases about saving some of your money. Because of that financial sites such as ESPN have got rid of all layout tables and decided on structural markup and CSS-driven layout (and saved as much as 3 terabytes of bandwidth a day) instead. The same drivers are true in case of government.

It is important to cut your financial expenses. Standard compliant websites are in many cases less expensive to maintain, develop and run. Consequently your pages are able to be much lighter, reducing load costs in the process. There are no tables or framesets that need to be deciphered down the track – older table-based sites are especially inflexible (and expensive to keep) to any updates. As a result, your longevity improves. You also should avoid various costs of producing code forking, spacer pixels, deeply nested tables and various propriety hacks.

Prepare your business for the future – use valid CSS and HTML

admin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:33:00 +0000

The fact that your financial website is rendering just fine on all current browsers is no guarantee that a business site that contains invalid markup will as render fine in the future. What is more, there are no guarantee that your website will be displayed fine (or at all) in the constantly increasing number of non-traditional devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. As companies involved in the browser business make further efforts to make their products compliant to web standards, the issue of “rendering fine” in specific browsers becomes moot, anyway. Standards-compliant markup your financial website will be even more of an assurance that it will work properly on every platform in contrast to error-laden and proprietary markup.

Designing your real estate or loans website to the current level of standard indicates your website should be marked up using the so called XHTML – an XML-compatible version of plain old HMTL. If you resort to this format will allow your business to venture into the inevitable world of XML without the necessity for any significant alterations of your financial site’s structure. XML features can be added without much time and effort involved.

Deal with credit-specific issues in the past

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:24:09 +0000

The bonds of Ericsson, Tyco and ABB. All three companies had credit-specific issues in the past and seemed to have overcome those at the time of writing (December, 2003). Their lowest prices were quoted almost at the same time (October, 2002) where risk tolerance reached the lowest level in a decade (measured by VIX). The important point to illustrate is that nonsystematic risks induced the first price falls in all three companies at different points in time. Idiosyncratic risks were responsible for the first massive downward price movement. In this situation, an assessment of the credit should not be based only on credit fundamentals but every credit portfolio manager has to evaluate what volatility his portfolio can sustain because the main task for a high-yield portfolio manager is to manage risk. Technical factors have to be considered because it is likely that market liquidity for a troubled bond will disappear quickly which will result in a “free fall” in price.

Flourishing financial websites, but with invalid CSS/HTML

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:13:00 +0000

Along with the explosive increase of the Web and flourishing financial websites that deal with a variety of topics such as payday loans, stock exchange, forex and real estate, companies have realized the profits that wait for those eager to build a strong online presence. When they decide to publish a financial website on the Internet, companies are able to build their brand, market their products, support any existing customers, release publicity pieces, and even take orders. However, very often lost in the fast pace of growth has been an eye on the influence that their current web-building business will exert on the bottom line and the perspectives of their online presence. Remember that not only does your website financial content have a significant influence on your company’s income but so does the way your website itself is created.

Preparing your site with necessary commitment to web standards – and continuously testing to ensure it keeps constant compliance to those standards – can save your business much money and possibly increase income generated by your website.