Our Business Risk Adviser, Nick Hood looks at the prospects for the UK and global insolvency markets in 2017 in an article for Corporate Rescue & Insolvency magazine:

The beginning of every year brings a mix of hope and apprehension, but in the business world few can have started with so many geopolitical risks as 2017. The world is so busy rejecting traditional political and social values, that as fast as it generates new normals, they are overtaken by even more unthinkable developments. Prior research and analysis seem to have gone out of the window as pre-requisites for economic policy making now being driven by alternative facts.

The process is being fed by a steady stream of major disruptive events: the global immigration crisis, the rise of anti-establishment and anti-globalisation nationalist movements across Europe, Brexit and now the election of the first truly loose cannon US President in modern history.  The only certainty for 2017 is uncertainty.

Lawmakers and business rescue professionals were already running hard to stay ahead of change, adapting outdated laws to modern technology and new commercial ethics. Public opinion has played a role in demanding change, seeing insolvency as an unnecessarily value-destructive process and its professionals as unduly rapacious in their approach to financial misfortune. As always with such pressure, it matters little whether these views are justified or not. Politicians will inevitably react and not always in a constructive manner.

The insolvency world has done little to help itself; woefully ineffective PR has failed to spread any sort of consistent message about the good that IPs do: the consumer debtors they help, the jobs they save, the businesses they rescue and the non-performing financial resource they recycle back into productive use.  The big question is how will this disruption impact on IPs and their professional advisers in 2017?