Why Greater Manchester?

Manchester is a melting pot of talents, its universities have world class computer engineering and sciences programs, and 85,000 people have migrated to the northern region for better lives – opportunities as well as standard of living. People in the region have the “can-do mentality” and the Greater Manchester area has that real energy that has proven to synchronize with the tech and innovation vibe. For tech companies like Peak, the area has the right business conditions to succeed, the talents to help them from roots up, access to capital and travel connections. These are all in the area.

Another arsenal of the northern region is that it’s the location of the Graphene Institute, leading the world in knowledge-based graphene commercialization and technologies enabling manufacturers to come up with solid smart technologies and products that will revolutionize the way we live. This puts Manchester in the global playing field as more jobs and investments are made from graphene tech products.

How FinTech Comes Into the Region’s Playing Field?

Investment, capital and the shift in how business is being created, done and delivered is where FinTech comes in. Financial Technologies or FinTech by definition means the evolving intersection of financial services and technology. It’s now changing the way companies do business, technologies that disrupt sectors such as bill payments, money transfers, loans, fundraising and asset management. It’s the financial niche that flows with trends on how people are choosing to live their lives including how they make a living, work, and invest. It has the unadulterated essence of bringing to the masses what used to be only available to the elite – transparency and accessibility. The legacy of PayPal – an online system that uses electronic payments, an alternative to paper methods has now pivoted to other financial services that are faster, efficient, more transparent, accessible through multiple devices and cheaper. Technologies from startups are changing the game in giving financial services to people in everything from payments to fundraising which is now called crowdfunding and regional transfers.

In the forefront of this FinTech services are boutique banks such as GP Bullhound which opened their Manchester office in 2013.   Crowdfunding platforms have followed suit with the opening of the Crowdcube office in the northern quarter of the city.  AccessPay is another FinTech company that moved from London to Manchester with £2 million pounds of fresh funds. The company is expanding to the US and is looking to recruit 60 new talents.

As Greater Manchester is in the forefront of digital transformation in Europe, and becoming a global player in technologies and innovations; FinTech has taken root in the area to flow with the current trend in providing faster and cheaper services that big banks can only dream of at the moment. Hopefully the innovations started by these technologies are picked up by other sectors as well, such as healthcare and insurance. All the digital transformation from disruption brought about by technologies and innovations comes from the northern region of Greater Manchester.

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The meaning of those two words is radically different depending on where an organization is aligned technologically, but no matter what the definitions, the overall result is the same.

It means change.

For some companies, it may be the actual systems they use everyday in business while for others, it may be an entirely new business model based on eCommerce or cloud-based storage.  A common thread uncovered in a recent Microsoft survey of private businesses showed a majority of leaders felt that their current business model would need to be heavily modified within the next five years to continue to be relevant.

Other data from Microsoft suggests this could be linked directly to the companies themselves.  The average age of the companies that make up the SMP 500 has dropped from the historical average of nearly 58 years to less than 15 and continues to fall.  By their very nature, younger companies move to develop new paradigms more aggressively and are actively seeking new solutions to traditional industry problems through technology.  At the same time, the connectivity of people via technology has never been better and these younger companies are able to hire highly skilled individuals from any market in the world to aggregate their business model.  The result is free thinkers not bound by geography who have been exposed to innovative ideas.

Another key point of this is the move from “experience” to data.  The successful company of today is able to clearly understand key data from their clients – not in terms of “good” or “bad” but in tangible metrics – 15%, 75%, “yes”, “no”. 

Thus, new technology is implemented and acted upon in new companies and new industries far faster than at any time in history.

Digital Transformation is made more relevant when the sum of any company’s data can be stored securely in the Cloud and accessed easily from nearly any device.  The infrastructure to make changes is now accessible to any size company and the cost of the technology to do so has plummeted – taking with it one of the largest traditional objections to enhancing company business models.

So what does 2017 hold for companies looking to transform?

For starters, companies of all sizes need to clearly understand the goals of any transformation.  This starts with rethinking how the customer can interact with the organization – and is usually a very tough process for any company.  Companies using a “design thinking” model use a solution focused, not problem focused, system to design the desirable solution for clients and is critical to understanding how the company can use technology in the next model.

The overall results for a digital transformation in any size company stems from the basic move to engage the entire culture in a digital model.  Every aspect of the company – from Marketing, Finance, Sales, and Human Resources has to be engages in the transformation or the culture will never truly be in the digital age.  It may be difficult to think of creative minds in a digital culture, but the result of doing so allows you to channel artisanal energies into the new model.

No matter the industry, the use of imbedded technology is nearly complete – the overall infrastructure has been built and now the next step is to change not the look of the company but the way business is actually approached.  In many ways, the disruptions to come echo back to the first active use of computers in the 1980s and how they first impacted models.

Competitive businesses now, as they did then, will engage and seek to  and build successful models based on a full inclusion of technology.

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