Brexit

Welcome to the Rob Clegg blog. The potential fallout from Brexit for extradition and cross-border criminal justice security had been forewarned even before the first vote was cast in the Referendum. Whilst there is no reference in the TCA to ‘mutual trust’, the general provisions of Title VII, Article LAW GEN 3, state that cooperation between the UK and EU is based on the Parties’ and Member States’ long-standing respect for democracy, the rule of law and the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals, including as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the European Convention on Human Rights, and on the importance of giving effect to the rights and freedoms in that Convention domestically.  

For those facing extradition to an EU country the language of the TCA may herald a change in the approach to dealing with extradition requests. This may be optimistic thinking, but during the COVID-19 pandemic legal systems have had to adopt pragmatic solutions. The use of virtual interviews at the police station and full hearings via video link are now common and generally efficient. In certain cases, these tools would be a benefit to all parties in order to progress cases more swiftly and align with the principles espoused under Art 77 and the EA 2003.

The TCA’s incorporation into the Extradition Act 2003 offers some clarity to practitioners as to the process to be followed and is certainly preferable to a no deal scenario but it is too early to see what the practical impact of the changes will be. We expect interesting legal challenges at each stage of extradition proceedings under the new arrangements as practitioners, the courts and criminal justice agencies grapple with the changed regime.

Check back soon for more!

Rob Clegg is a consultant, entrepreneur, and a business founder. For further information on how Rob can help, please visit the Robert Clegg website here. Read more about Robert Clegg online here. Alternatively, you can also follow Rob Clegg on instagram here. 

    Entrepreneurship 

Welcome to the Robert Clegg blog. In business, it is widely believed that your competitors are to be treated as the enemy. As a newbie in any field, it may not be advantageous to your progress or reputation, to try and go after the top dog. The fact that you consider them a challenge to your success and/or business, demonstrates their ability and skill to drive revenue away from you. Otherwise you wouldn’t consider them as competition.  

When starting out, Rob Clegg advised to recognised those who have already done it, and are doing it well, is the first step to mastering success. The big competitors have already put in the time, money and effort to get where they are today. Using your competitors prestige and experience alongside your vision and sweat equity, can push your dreams into reality. This is probably one of the most surefire ways to 10X your results in any field.  

Finally, in any line of work, you should always do and give more than what is expected. This is especially true when developing relationships with those in your marketplace. While you would obviously refrain from giving away or up anything that could be leveraged against you, contributing time and effort to others’ needs, opens you to reciprocation. Doing big favors for big players can open you up to huge opportunities in the future. 

Rob Clegg is a business specialist. Learn more about Robert Clegg online on his IMBD page here. Visit the Rob Clegg website here. Follow the Rob Clegg Medium blog here for more entrepreneur tips.

Successful Product Launch

Welcome to the Robert Clegg blog. The tech industry is rapidly emerging. Launching a new product can be very difficult. No matter whether you’re launching a new app, a new software feature, or a complete software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, every product launch requires its own strategy so it gets introduced to the right people.

Before you do anything with your product, you need to be sure you know it well. but understanding the problem that you’re solving is important to communicating the product’s value with your customers. Focus on “why” you created the product and “who” can benefit from it. 

Once you have an understanding of the problem that needs solving, research the people who are facing this problem. Moreover, you need to understand your audience—the language they use, the way they communicate, the channels they communicate through, and the news they want to hear.

A buyer persona will also help you to develop an empathy for your customers. It will help you to know where they’re coming from, what they are doing, what problems they are facing, and help you to understand more thoroughly how to solve those problems for them.

 Having clear metrics will also help you to know what you’re going after. Are you seeking sales, clicks, shares, or likes? Make sure you choose good analytics tools before you start your campaign. This way, you will have a clear picture of what’s going on through a single dashboard. 

Testing can also save you from spending time and resources on unnecessary features your users won’t like, as well as reduce the need for customer support, discover potential threats from competitors, and improve conversion rate and customer retention. After you have generated enough feedback from testing, it’s time to use that information to improve your product. Eliminate anything that users didn’t like and add missing features. And if you’re still feeling unsure about the results, do more testing

In every product launch, you always have to be present, listening, and ready to take action. Remember, preparation is key to every success story.

Rob Clegg is a consultant, entrepreneur, and a business founder. Learn more about Robert Clegg on his website here. Follow Rob Clegg on his Facebook for more technology news, perspective and insights impacting the business service sector. Read the latest Rob Clegg news here.

 Entrepreneurial Success

Welcome to the Rob Clegg blog. One of the biggest areas where first-time entrepreneurs fail is in failing to launch. They spend so much time perfecting an idea that it never actually gets off the ground or offered for sale. If you can effectively solve the problem, you can launch and gather information and insights from customers as you go. It saves time, money and a lot of heartache.

According to Rob Clegg, marketing is everything! You may have the best product the world has ever seen, but if the world never actually sees it, your business will fail. Whether you work with an agency or choose to do marketing in-house, it needs to exist to get your product in front of the right eyes at the right time and increase sales.

Remember that you don’t need a perfect product, you only need a customer support staff available to make your customers feel valued and to address any issues that arise. People form relationships with people, not products. From there come positive reviews/testimonials and great referrals. 

Lastly,  know your competition. If you haven’t already (and hopefully you have), complete market research on competitive products to establish what sets you apart. When you start doing marketing, these are the bullet points on which you’ll want to focus. Set up Google Alerts to monitor what is happening in your industry and what moves competitors are making. Keep your customers close, and your competitors closer.

Following the tips above can provide some peace-of-mind and help you elevate! 

Rob Clegg has a vast amount of experience in raising business capital. Learn more about Rob Clegg on his IMDb page here. Connect with Robert Clegg on his Linkedin profile page here. Read the latest Robert Clegg news here.

 Paperless Business

Welcome to the Rob Clegg blog. With automation suites and digital platforms finding their way into the workplace, going completely paperless is a reality. One of the key reasons why companies prefer to go paperless is the reduction in errors. Incomplete forms, illegible writing, and unvalidated forms are all potential reasons why manual errors are so common with traditional paper-based forms. 

In case of mistakes, fingers are pointed at stakeholders while in fact, an incompetent workflow is to blame. Understandably, when workflows are unclear, it leaves room for errors. With automation systems, the workflows are improved and no form is accepted into the system without filling in all mandatory fields. This leaves no room for errors in the flow and the resulting blame. 

Auditing your processes is also a lot easier when you are not trying to scramble into heaps of paperwork digging into them last minute. Important documents and client contracts should never just be another file lying around to get lost. Automation ensures that you have timely access to confidential information kept securely in digital files and folders. This goes a long way in ensuring that you can simplify complying with government and industry regulations.

And from just a cost standpoint, a paperless office with a digital automation platform has a massive return on investment. Not to mention, going paperless would help you do your bit in protecting the environment.

Building Digital Transformation - Lessons Learned

Welcome to the Rob Clegg blog page. Global retail banks are very risk-averse, slow-moving, bureaucratic behemoths that will struggle to survive unless they embrace change and accelerate their ability to adapt to and adopt new technologies and ways of working. This problem is probably accepted by most big global banks as a theme and challenge. However, they still seem incapable of doing much about it. 

In 2015, Robert Clegg started working to set up one of the core teams for a global bank embarking on a Digital Transformation. There was a high level of excitement and apparent commitment by the bank and its senior managers to deliver a true Digital Transformation globally. They wanted to completely change both the technical services and products offered to customers as well as change the way the bank operated and managed its technology through the introduction of Agile Methodologies.  

This involved building a team from scratch ( he joined when the team was 20 people), changing the embedded ways of working within the technical teams (as well as in the operating country teams who had had the run of the place for many years doing their own thing with very little cohesion or overall strategy) and trying to do this in 40+ countries all at once.

Over the next 4 years, the team grew to include 6,000 people globally. This brought with it insurmountable problems of management, control, and communication. Changing the culture and ways of working amongst these many people that quickly was almost impossible. The projects taken on were sensible and targeted at the right problems and solutions for customers – the introduction of customer-led product management techniques and the process was novel and new for the bank but was adopted. However, over time they were severely hindered by constant specification changes mainly driven by inter-country arguments and infighting or the sheer scale and complexity of trying to fix the biggest problems in the biggest markets first rather than starting small and scaling up. 

The teams in the Digital Transformation organisation tried every single thing they could to ensure success and drive to completion. There were many successes over time and the bank launched one of the best mobile apps in the market, relaunched a great set of online services, launched tablets into branches linking online with in-branch, increased customer security levels considerably, introduced Apple Pay and other innovations faster than other high street banks. Momentum was built and, if allowed to continue, with continuous changes and improvements could have been a huge success. Legacy culture and process, resistance to change, infighting, risk aversion, and misalignment of outcome goals meant, in reality, that progress was not as fast as it could have been and ultimately resulted in the demise of what was a great project and opportunity to truly transform a global retail bank. Lots of great work was completed and customers have a better digital service by far but the culture change did not happen and old inefficient, risk-averse, slow ways have returned.

What now? Banks such as this will struggle over time. They will start to shrink unless they adopt appropriate measures. Fintech startups, challenger banks, new ways of banking with trusted and innovative suppliers will challenge the status quo and over time market share of the global banks will fall and the global institutions we know today will not survive. 

In summary, Robert Clegg's main learnings from the Digital Transformation are: 

• One of the potentially best ways to prove the case is to build from scratch a new challenger bank and then scale it back into the bank. Do this with an architecture fit for purpose and to meet this need from day 1.

• Try one country first and build from there. Start small, make mistakes, learn your lessons, and build scale over time. Take a smaller market and make it work from top to bottom and then scale out to other markets. Trying to focus on the two biggest markets from day one is suicidal and highly inefficient especially if those two markets do not work together or have other agendas

• Get absolute buy-in and commitment from every level especially across the board and most senior management level with a commitment to see the project through 

• Appoint the right oversight management who understand the project and aims from day one

• Cut out any infighting or alternative agendas at source by either working through the differences and get agreement and commitment or cut the problem out 

• Be inclusive of all levels and opinions

• Bring in new fresh ideas and talent

• Give talent the ability to execute the projects fully – do not tie their hands behind their backs and expect success

• Recruit carefully. Ensure the makeup of the team is balanced

• Build a fully integrated and managed team and do not try and do it too fast

• Do not let it get too big or unwieldy

• Communicate openly and fully 

• Embrace and encourage failure and trial and error. Learn early, learn fast, adapt, and change, and go again. Banks are inherently risk-averse but legislators and regulators are keen on change and progress so work with them to ensure risks are minimised and understood 

• Build rewards appropriately around delivery, change, performance improvements. Do not allow old legacy rewards structures, inertia, and risk aversion to getting in the way.

Rob Clegg is a business founder in the finance and tech industry. Learn more about Rob Clegg on his Zimbio here. Visit the Robert Clegg website here. Read more on how to integrate new technologies into your core businesses, while evolving management model on the Rob Clegg Medium blog here.

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 Contactless Payment System

Welcome to the Rob Clegg blog. The digital transaction field is getting more and more crowded. Sure, there are industry standards like PayPal. But small business owners have a lot of digital payment options when it comes to accepting payments from your customers and clients.

In 2018, 8 billion people around the world purchased goods online, according to data from market research firm Statista and fifty-three percent of online shoppers prefer to pay with their credit cards, data compiled by Shopify. Digital payment systems, such as Apple Pay, are at a close second of 43%, while 39% of shoppers use their debit cards. 

Contactless payments are not only simple, but they’re also fast, allowing you to reduce your checkout time. Whether it's shopping or ordering a pizza at home, customers increasingly prefer digital payment. 

According to  finance industry veteran Rob Clegg, contactless payment options are becoming increasingly popular because they guarantee the necessary distance between cashier and customer and are an excellent alternative to handling physical money.

With mobile payments you can carry out transactions directly from your smartphone. As a merchant, encouraging and being able to offer different payment solutions is definitely an advantage. When deciding which digital payment options your company will adopt, consider what your needs are and then pick the service that suits those needs.

Offering your customers different payment methods increases your business revenue. Today's digital payments are more convenient and faster, greatly improving the payment experience for everyone.

Rob Clegg is on a mission is to help people grow their business, plain and simple.Visit Rob Clegg website here. See our business guide on the Rob Clegg Medium blog here. Read the latest Rob Clegg news here.