Software houses: life beyond the financial crisis

Published on 19 Aug 2009

Company name: Teleinvest International AG

Starting point

TELEINVEST group is developing and selling top quality securities trading systems and has been a prominent niche player ever since electronic markets exist. The current crisis means that our clients suffer from multiple set-backs: profits turned into losses, trading volumes sharply declining, end users retreating from markets, potential clients disappearing or being merged, job losses in the trading rooms and so on.

Naturally, projects and budgets are scrapped, reduced or delayed indefinitely. Difficult to sell new software in such circumstances, you guess.

Small is beautiful

Deep crisis in any industry usually bring about lasting structural changes, which in turn offer opportunities for the ones who are in a position to seize them. This is verified again today in the financial and banking world. Market shares are shifting, hierarchies change significantly. The winners and losers are not the same as before in many ways. Software vendors in the financial sector may not escape this logic, as the years to come will certainly prove.

However, small companies always enjoyed the advantage of flexibility and superior reactivity over big organizations, even more so in times of crisis. In addition, small teams are inherently more efficient in exploiting every employee’s talents and potential of creativity and motivation.

Small is also beautiful when it comes to cost cutting, as bigger companies traditionally have to cope with high overhead and structural costs, which take time to cut back and are very painful and disrupting to your business.