Business owners are answering “How is the COVID-19 pandemic affecting your company?” Detailed answers below!
The 2020 pandemic is shaking up the economy and how businesses are operating globally. While it’s true that some industries like pharmaceuticals and telecommunications have seen positive effects during these times, most companies are in decline and waiting for the world to go back to normal to resume their day to day activities. Until that day comes, I tried to find out how hard companies all over the world have been affected by recent events and, despite all of this, how they manage to stay afloat.
Business owners and CEOs have one of the hardest decisions to make as they need to split their resources between supporting their partners, suppliers, and employees and satisfying the few customers who still need their products and services. And, navigating the impacts of the pandemic is just one challenge. Once the economy will be set for recovery, new competitive threats will come in their way. On a global scale, we can see that cultural norms and societal values changed, imposing more responsible business practices. For example, in an office, the workers should be spaced six feet apart from each other, only one-way paths should be used for access, and the restrooms and lunchrooms should be igenized after each use.
With the current study, my focus was on fintech companies, especially because global fintech funding was up 30% in 2019 and most of these companies weren’t directly affected by the supply chain restrictions. Anyway, the pandemic slowed down its growth, and, despite the previous prolific times, 69% of small businesses are already experiencing cash flow issues.
Let’s find the truth directly from the source! Here, business owners and CEOs weigh in on the impact the pandemic over their company and share with us their strategy for overcoming their current shortcomings:
Brendan Mannion is a Director at ClinTex - a software solutions company developing a suite of tools for the collaboration of clinical data and the sharing of insights across corporate borders.
In the scramble to find a vaccine or effective treatment, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the embedded lack of collaboration across the pharma industry, which is one of the precise problems that CTi was developed to solve. Also evident now (due to the emergency measures being implemented) is that where the will exists, cross-industry collaboration can work to deliver medicines to the people that need them faster. ClinTex wants this to be the new normal in medicines development, and we believe that the CTi platform will be one of the key enablers of this paradigm shift. If anything, the pandemic has highlighting and validated the CTi use case and as a result we are busier than ever and have had to accelerate our development plans accordingly to match.
Maggie Ng, SVP Head of Marketing at Crypto.com - a leading payments and cryptocurrency platform
Fortunately, we’ve seen minimal negative impact from the pandemic for a couple key reasons. First, the closing of physical offices has not been detrimental. We were among the earliest to start working from home, beginning in mid January, though that hasn’t slowed down our product rollout. Amidst this pandemic, we have started shipping our MCO Visa cards to 31 countries in Europe, received approval to launch in Canada, secured a new $100M insurance policy and launched a non-custodial wallet, to name a few. Secondly, we’ve actually seen an all-time high
retail demand in our platform during this pandemic, as people have
turned to cryptocurrencies for their store of value and potential hedge
against side effects from quantitative easing steps taken by some central banks. We’ve doubled our user growth in 6 months to 2 million, and tripled the trading volume between Dec 2019 and Apr 2020.
Fortunately, we’ve seen minimal negative impact from the pandemic for a couple key reasons. First, the closing of physical offices has not been detrimental. We were among the earliest to start working from home, beginning in mid January, though that hasn’t slowed down our product rollout. Amidst this pandemic, we have started shipping our MCO Visa cards to 31 countries in Europe, received approval to launch in Canada, secured a new $100M insurance policy and launched a non-custodial wallet, to name a few. Secondly, we’ve actually seen an all-time high
retail demand in our platform during this pandemic, as people have
turned to cryptocurrencies for their store of value and potential hedge
against side effects from quantitative easing steps taken by some central banks. We’ve doubled our user growth in 6 months to 2 million, and tripled the trading volume between Dec 2019 and Apr 2020.
And that’s exactly what fintech businesses across the world are doing right now. You heard it from their leaders, not from statistics. If you are a business owner I hope that it helped you recheck your long-term strategy or motivate you to keep going at the very least.