Weekly Blog by Philip King, CEO of the ICM - 'New Year - more professionalism and greater recognition'

A warm welcome to the new year and may it prove to be successful, peaceful, and prosperous.

Two articles in The Times caught my eye over the new year:

1. Patrick Hosking shared ten good reasons to be cheerful, four of which I found particularly interesting:

• Business leaders are in relatively good cheer and boards are far from despondent - they're investing, they're hiring, they're spending.
• Interest rates are staying very low.
• The pound will cushion us from external blows.
• The private sector is capable of taking up the slack from a shrinking public sector.

2. The last point was echoed a day or two later in a piece about a Deloitte Report showing that confidence among Chief Financial Officers at some of the country's biggest businesses rose sharply in the last quarter of 2010, and their appetite for risk jumped to the highest level since before the credit crunch began in earnest. The report findings boost hopes that the private sector might be able to compensate for deep public sector cuts.

This makes heartening reading and let's hope it proves right although I still believe that many smaller businesses are under-estimating - or at least failing to recognise - the impact that public sector cuts will have on them.

Whatever the year holds in store there can be no doubt that cashflow will remain crucial to business survival and credit management needs to raise its game further. We have undoubtedly made progress in recent years but we need to do so much more in raising our professionalism, profile and the recognition we are afforded for the value we add to business. Organisations like the ICM have to play their part and we will continue to do so; and so do individual professionals who need to make sure their peers and Boards understand the significance of their contribution to profitable selling, risk mitigation and cash generation.

2011 is the year when we need to make sure members of our teams get better trained and qualified so they are recognised for their achievements, and when the quality of what we deliver gets recognised by the independent validation and accreditation available through the Institute's Quality in Credit Management scheme.

Feel free to ask me for more details of how we can support, motivate and strengthen credit professionals - ceo@icm.org.uk