By Joanna Massey, President & CEO, JDMA Inc. Millennials hate their label. Welcome to the club, because so did Gen X! Millennials were first called Gen Y back when they were just kids born in the early 1980s. Then 2000 happened—we partied like it was 1999, the 20th Century became the 21st Century, and overnight the young adults entering the workforce stopped being Gen Y and became known as millennials. As marketers tried to identify this generation, so they could better...

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By Scott Ferguson, CEO | World Trade Centers Association  The way organizations approach global commerce is undergoing a radical change. Geopolitical instability is slowing growth in a volatile global economy as organizations are forced to adapt their tactics, making complex decisions that increase operational costs and, if mishandled, make them less competitive in an unforgiving business landscape. So, what can organizations do to navigate this ‘new normal’? As an association whose members deal with small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) at the...

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Tradewind has provided a $15 million credit facility to a 75-year-old manufacturer headquartered in Europe with a subsidiary in the USA. The company sells globally and is using the facility to support 120-day open account payment terms. The deal took shape after the client was pressed to extend longer payment terms to a major buyer of theirs. The buyer previously had a vendor finance program in place that arranged for early funding to the client and other suppliers. When the...

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The Polish tax authorities have announced that, with effect from 1 November 2019, Poland is introducing what is known as a Split Payments Mechanism (SPM). Non-resident businesses that are registered for Value Added Tax (VAT) will need to have a bank account in Poland, and will require an additional VAT bank account that is dedicated to receiving and making VAT payments. Under an SPM arrangement, the seller of certain goods must include some additional wording in its sales invoices, indicating...

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The global economy is evolving quickly, and tech and other startups are looking beyond traditional expansion targets like the UK and China. Popular targets now include relatively low cost, talent-rich countries like Israel, Ireland, the Czech Republic and Poland, which recently joined the ranks of FTSE Russell advanced economies, the first country to do so in nearly ten years. Throughout this evolution, many of the basic concepts of international expansion continue to hold true. As enforcement by tax and immigration...

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By Yumiko Olsen, Dennis Schmidt, Christian Schröder and David Curtis | Orrick  On June 28, 2019, the German parliament (Bundestag) passed new legislation imposing several changes to the current German Federal Data Protection Act (“BDSG”).  Although many of the changes addressed privacy aspects of criminal proceedings, the new legislation makes an important change for small companies by increasing the threshold to designate a Data Protection Officer (“DPO”). Whereas currently companies have to designate a DPO if they constantly employ at least...

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