On October 21, Hanna Mikulytska, co-founder and CEO of a financial consulting company FIN ADVICE, and MIM-Kyiv’s visiting professor and finance expert with more than 20 years of experience came to MIM-Kyiv to discuss risks and trends of personal and business finance. In Hanna’s opinion the following trends dominate:

• Mental health;
• Critical thinking;
• Short attention spans;
• Environmentalism and minimalism;
• Social rankings;
• Concentration on truly important things;
• Urbanism.

Her list of top risks looks as follows:

1. Digitalization lagging or “deliberate non-digitalization”;
2. Poor understanding of good reputation, management quality, and personal brand importance. 

“I strongly recommend checking information about the company and yourself in open sources regularly. Even mere coincidence or similarity of your name or your company name may have negative consequences”

3. Lack of service or product unicity focus 

“Service is the best differentiator, especially when products are similar. Humans-rendered service is more expensive. Non-human service provided by bots is cheaper. But if it is fine-tuned of digitized service is a good differentiation point. Quality service is a good future-oriented strategy”.

4. Word of mouth underestimation

“It is the cheapest and the most reliable instrument to recruit new and loyal customers. The marketing focus is shifted from looking for new customers to retaining the current ones who do the recruiting for you. Besides, retaining is cheaper. ”

5. Fear or hatred to competitors

“Collaborations with competitors or related companies may be more efficient than separation. When I worked in Asia, I followed Nestle’s Nescafe and Starbucks coopetition. Nescafe does not have a café chain but they sell their Nespresso coffee machines. Starbucks sells Nespresso machines and produces and sells coffee capsules for those machines. Nestle expanded its sales channels whereas Starbucks launched the new product. Follow their example and look for win-win situations.”