Leading business web site www.freshbusinessthinking.com reports that business owners are turning to the Internet for information during the current economic downturn.

Founder, Nick James, said; “Not only are we seeing a significant increase in our traffic but also it’s interesting to observe the words and phrases that people are typing into search engines to find us.”

‘Search’ is now so prevalent in our society that identifying search terms and key words is a quick way of taking the temperature of the economy.

The top two search terms on www.freshbusinessthinking.com in the last 28 days have been; ‘Sales Strategy’ and ‘Redundancy Regulations’ – interestingly ‘Sales Strategy’ is five times more popular indicating that perhaps there is a determination in businesses to ‘sell’ their way out of recession.

Bluecycle is an independent company with close ties to Norwich Union, the UK's largest insurer, which has since 2000, designed and applied new web-based systems that have dramatically improved the business of buying and selling commercial assets. The result is a secure and robust trading system that uses state of the art technology to maximum effect.

Bluecycle itself brings buyers and sellers together in an automated environment that offers exceptional levels of value and convenience. It is proud of the fact that it has built in all the security, logistical backup and human help its customers need to allow them to trade with complete confidence.

Bluecycle’s largest areas of business are auto and plant salvage. In just a few years, it has transformed the face of the vehicle salvage market in the UK. It has built a comprehensive salvage operation from the ground-up, encompassing vehicle recovery and storage and online auctioning.  

Nassau, Bahamas, New York and London, 2nd December, 2008 – International Private Banking Systems (IPBS, www.ipbs.com), the specialist provider of wealth management software for the private banking sector, announced today that Queensgate Bank and Trust has turned to the IPBS system to cope with its high transaction volumes.

Queensgate Bank and Trust is a niche private bank and trust company.  The bank is focused on providing high quality banking services to an international client base covering multiple financial jurisdictions.  Queensgate has to cope with a high volume of cheques, deposits and wire transfers.  These are time consuming to process manually and potentially leave a bank open to greater risk of errors and operational risk.

• Bureau Service delivers a reduction in processing costs, increased efficiency and improved control

LONDON, 19th November, 2008 – SMA Financial (www.sma.co.uk), SWIFT Regional partner for UK, Eire and Channel Islands today announced that HiFX Plc, the UK’s premier provider of corporate foreign exchange and cash deposit services has achieved 99% straight through processing (STP) rates despite a 1,000% increase in its message volumes, thanks to the SMA fully accredited Bureau Service.

HiFX is now one of the world’s largest Corporate users of SWIFT, accounting for approximately 2% of the total Corporate SWIFT message traffic volume.  The company has built a long term relationship with SMA Financial and its Bureau Service for outsourced SWIFT connectivity.

“Our transactions volumes have doubled year on year and we now process over 2,000 messages per day, a 1,000% increase compared to when we joined SWIFT.