Loans Explained

Who provides loans? Banks and building societies are the obvious places to get loans, however, supermarkets and other surprising sources are getting in on the game.

Unsecured Loans

An unsecured loan or an unsecured personal loan does not use your home or vehicle as collateral for the loan. An unsecured loan is best suited for those who do not own their own property, such as council or private tenants or people living with parents, although this is also available to homeowners. Even if you have a bad credit rating or poor credit history, you could still be approved for an unsecured loan with Vested Loans Ltd. We can still assist you to find a lender.

Secured Loans

A secured loan or a home loan is tied to your property; this enables lenders to offer a higher loan amount often at lower interest rates. However, you will need to be sure that you can re-pay the loan as your property may be at risk if you cannot repay the amount you borrow. A secured loan may be a good way of reducing your outgoings by consolidating more expensive borrowing, such as credit cards or store cards. You may also be able to raise more money if you take out an unsecured loan.

Credit Card Processing

These days, all, businesses require the means to accept credit card payments. To do that, a business needs to get a merchant account (this is why credit card processing is usually referred to as merchant services). This is an account started for the function of accepting credit card payments.

It is established completely apart from your bank account. Your merchant account functions as an arrangement between you, a merchant bank and a payment processor for handling credit card dealings. Unfortunately, in this less than stellar business climate getting credit card processing has become, like getting a loan, more difficult. Small, or new, businesses fall under the category of high risk merchant processing and as such will need to contact one of many high risk credit card processors, such as Paramount Payments, to be able to handle accepting payments by credit card.

The system for credit and debit card processing will involve a sophisticated group of participants communicating to execute every single transaction. All in all, five kinds of players are taking part: processors, issuers, networks, gateway providers, and independent sales organizations. To undertake a typical financial transaction, three actions need to happen: authorizing, batching, and funding. Every individual within this procedure gets a fee from the full amount of a financial transaction. The rest is settled in the merchant”s account. Acquiring a merchant account may be a difficult experience for nearly all individuals. An experienced processor like Paramount Payments can take the stress and anxiety out of the experience.

Keeping Your Business Safe

If you are a business owner it can sometimes be difficult to know what your priorities should be. Making sure you are safe trading at the level you are now? Trying to expand to increase revenue? Where and how to advertise? There are many factors that must be taken into account, but one that is sometimes overlooked is your company”s profile.

You should make sure that your company”s name and other associations are protected and make you look your best in the public eye. Things such as your branding, company logo, company representatives and anywhere else your name appears should all be known to you to ensure your customers know they are dealing with a trusted, reputable business.

One of the first steps to ensure this is to make sure that your company name is protected. When choosing a company name it should be informative, accurate and stick in people”s memory. It can sometimes be as easy as using the company founders name or initials, but can often be a point of contention, with different people”s ideas clashing.

Staying in people”s memories can make sure that your company is used over and over by your customers. Having associated branding is also good to ensure that people can recognize you when seeing your advertising, vehicles or staff. Nearly every successful business has examples of this, from recurring themes in chains such as McDonalds with names for items with the prefix ”Mc” or using color schemes.

Not only do you want to protect your brand, you want to make sure that if there is currently negative information about your company name appearing in Google searches that you remedy that. In such a case you want to hire an online reputation repair service to move negative results down in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages) so that negative comments or press about your business are not immediately noticeable to online searchers.

A great example of color schemes could be seen with the recent Olympic Games in London. The recurring pink theme, the style of writing and symbols for the events was one of the most recognizable parts of the games. It was arguably one of the most successful branding strategies of recent Olympic Games. When the designs were first unveiled there was some consternation over them, but during and after the event it got high praise.

For small businesses this is a good strategy, even on a smaller scale. When companies grow they often undergo re-branding which is implemented on a huge scale, often all over the globe for multi nationals. Using McDonalds as an example again, when they decided to change their slogan to ”I”m loving it” it was rolled out with huge advertising campaigns and very quickly became associated with the brand. I”m sure most people, like me, would struggle to remember their marketing tactic beforehand. This shows how effective it was in creating an idea for a brand practically overnight. This Business 2 Community article has more good information on protecting your company brand.

This shows how much advertising and appearance means to companies, who often rely on being known rather than a specific advantage over rivals. For companies who are starting out, it is very important to protect your reputation from local rivals in your field, so protecting your name and branding is of paramount importance.