You only have to pick up a paper any day of the week to be aware that the world is in a rapidly changing period, with major names in most industries reporting financial difficulties and governments around the world having to step in to protect their economies. Unfortunately nobody will be immune to the effects of this turmoil, however whilst it does mean uncertainty and a need for extreme caution on expenditure and flexibility by all companies to adjust to the new circumstances, it does not have to mean bad news. Howard Smith is providing us with an insight into how he sees the world today in this edition of the Bridge, I would like to concentrate more on the opportunities specifically facing The Precision Group today.

Our major client, Financial Partners, have seen a decline in new business of some 50% in the last 6 weeks, they however are adjusting to this challenge and I would expect to see them using their dominant position in the offshore financial world to consolidate and then expand into new opportunities. This will however, in the short term, mean we have potentially less activity to process for them, and as our fees are derived from the activities I would expect us to have a lower fee income for the near term from them.

If they were our only client, or we had remained their back office support function then this would be devastating, however they are not and we are not – so we are in a position to expand into the changing environment, but we will need to do so together and as a unified team – Quality will be the differentiator between success and failure.

Inevitably due to the speed of the changes we will have to tighten our fiscal belt, and I would look to each of you to support all initiatives to keep unnecessary costs down and to maximise our work time to support our current clients to the best of our ability, remember they need our help to keep support and retain their clients, Quality is the key word more now than ever before.

We are continuing to source other revenue streams and I hope to be able to share some successes with you during the coming month.

Priority initiatives include;

• Precision Publishing – discussions underway with a potential partner in Hong Kong to provide custom publishing solutions to European and Asian publishing houses.
• Precision Payroll – discussions underway to provide an integrated solution for payroll, tax advice and banking to the domestic Indonesian companies who will be facing the new tax regime from January 2009. I note my further article in this edition of Bridge on how Precision will be implementing these changes and how it affects you.
• Fund Administration – discussions underway with a potential partner to provide a comprehensive software solution to allow us to start to provide licensed fund administration services.
• Corporate Data Processing – We are continuing to market ourselves to other parties to secure data management contracts and this will be an ongoing task for the Account Executives as we strive to grow the business through this period.

Whilst this period of our development will be a testing one for all I am confident that we will continue to grow throughout 2009 and I look to each and every one of you to ensure we remain the service provider of choice by focusing on quality and the needs of our clients.

Make sure we keep looking for the opportunities and act prudently upon them.

Good Luck!