Could this ruin your business in three years?

Short term financial challenges could cause fashion businesses to fail within three years, research conducted by American Express has revealed.

The Payment Revolution study was drawn from detailed interviews with 355 senior financial executives, 14% of which were from the retail and fashion industries.

60% of industry respondents said current insufficient cash flow was hurting their business’ ability to innovate in areas such as payment. 

As a result of this 42% of retail respondents said their business were at moderate to severe risk of failing in the next three years because of issues related to managing finances.

31% of retailers said they had insufficient funding to drive innovation within their business, with 27% indicating that the improvement of finance departments was either not a priority, or a low priority for their business.

Retail businesses were identified as one of Australia's most archaic when it came to finance practices as results showed that almost most a third (30%) still used mostly paper-based or entirely manual processes.

More than a third of businesses spent less than $20,000 on introducing, replacing or repairing current financial systems, only the construction industry spent less.