Credit professionals still consider the economy to be their biggest concern for the coming year, according to an annual survey conducted by NACM. For the third straight year, when asked “Looking forward to 2012, as a credit professional, what are your biggest concerns?” the largest percentage (26.7%) of the nearly 1,000 participants chose “lingering uncertainties about the still-sluggish economic recovery.” The result was expected, as credit professionals continue to face stagnant business conditions along with lingering bankruptcies, preference actions and customer difficulties.
The top concerns garnering the majority of survey responses included:
- Lingering uncertainties about the still sluggish economic recovery (26.7%)
- Slow payment, delinquencies and general customer creditworthiness (19%)
- Job security, the future of your career, or ensuring that salary keeps pace with cost of living (11.7%)
New to this edition of NACM’s annual survey of credit professionals was a deep sense of pessimism tied to the fact that 2012 will be an election year. Just over 11% of respondents listed “election-year politics, and the elections themselves, and their effect on economic growth” as one of their chief concerns for the coming year, and many participants took the opportunity to lament the current state, and future, of American politics in the survey’s comment section.
Find out more about credit professionals’ concerns for the coming year in the forthcoming January 2012 edition of Business Credit magazine. Courtesy National Association of Creditmanagement, Jacob Barron, CICP, NACM staff writer
National Association of Credit Management (NACM) is the advocate for business credit and financial management professionals nationwide
