F**k Business by Iain Anderson

Author:Iain Anderson [Iain Anderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785905438
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2019-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

10

GETTING ON WITH IT

If business needed a wake-up call to start preparing for a chaotic Brexit process, the 2017 election had provided just that. Alongside the UK regulators’ assertive push to ensure our economy would be able to function throughout the negotiations and out of the EU, firms had long since moved out of the ‘emotional’ phase and had resorted to their usual mindset. Rational and coldly economic, business was now starting to spend on Brexit mitigation in earnest. That was indeed the mindset for most business I could see. The sunlit uplands of any ‘new world’ outside the EU would be years away for most. The immediate priority was to secure market access with the biggest trading bloc right on our doorstep. This wasn’t political at all – it was just good business.

At Cicero, we had seen our business grow over 20 per cent by the end of 2016, despite the concerns of the effect that the referendum result might have upon us, as it became clear there was a huge appetite for political risk analysis. Uncertainty, sadly, was rather good for business. I had never seen a period like it. Brexit was perhaps the biggest planned political risk event for most large businesses. At the same time, my friends in the big management consultancies and ‘magic circle’ global law firms told me they were not immediately able to monetise the Brexit effect. By the end of 2016, most of them had launched their Brexit services to clients but they all told me that there was no money to be made as most business remained paralysed by their inability to decide on what to do.

However, by the summer of 2017 things were very different and I could see that colleagues in the major firms including EY, Deloitte and KPMG, as well as the big City law firms like Clifford Chance, Freshfields and Hogan Lovells, were starting to work on major restructuring projects for the City. The promises – some called them empty threats – made during the referendum to locate business into the EU area were starting to take place. Omar Ali, lead financial services partner at EY, told me:

By the summer of 2017, doing nothing was not an option any more for most of the global financial firms who had used London as their passporting route into the EU. With so much uncertainty around they needed to start work on rewiring their businesses to make sure they could safe-guard market access and to satisfy their regulators in time.

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