Sudden work-from-home circumstances personalized interaction in business settings. Even CEOs of the world’s biggest banks displayed their human side, finews.asia co-founder Claude Baumann tells in an interview.
Claude Baumann, you are an expert on business media, you also write a lot yourself and you are CEO of the best-known financial news platform finews.asia. How are you, as a businessman, experiencing the crisis?
With its sheer dimension, the crisis came as a huge surprise – also for us. But when I was in Singapore in February – where I wore a face mask for the first time – it became apparent that something big was in store.
We were therefore pretty quick in going into home office mode and we were able to continue our business without interruption. This proved important because the number of page impressions literally surged overnight.
The revenues from advertising must have declined strongly. Was your company able to make up for the shortfall with other sources of income?
Thankfully, we have been able to evade this blow. We haven’t seen our revenues slump – quite the contrary. We had a well-filled pipeline of contracts and we told our clients that the world would keep turning despite the coronavirus.
«Asia is the salt in the (noodle-) soup!»
In other words: we have strongly extended our marketing activities and launched new forms of advertising. We were – and still are – available for our clients. Working from home turned out to be a period when you could speak to each other in a personal manner. It was rather special and helped us a lot.
Would you dare take the plunge again and open an office in Asia?
For sure! Asia is the salt in the (noodle-) soup! Tomorrow’s growth takes shape in Asia, and this evidently has a lot to do with the financial market.
«A historic document for sure that will always remind us of a crazy time»
With today’s technology (Slack, Zoom, Whatsapp), we were able to keep in contact with our colleagues in Singapore and Hong Kong at all times.
Looking back over the past weeks, which story will you never forget?
It must be our compilation of 31 banking CEOs with quotes and pictures from their personal home office. The idea at the beginning was more of a spleen, but suddenly some CEOs themselves started contacting us to be included!
A historic document for sure that will always remind us of a crazy time – and a document that has lent some bank manager a «human face» for a change.
What are your plans for the future or is this a time for consolidation?
The primary target is to avoid introducing short-time work and to survive by our own means, which requires us to keep a strict cost discipline and forces us to generate good returns. In short: we haven’t been sitting around and we’ve been working at full speed.
«Living sensibly as I would call it»
From a content point of view, we aim to further build our finews.life coverage, where we publish stories on the work-life-balance, careers, training, education and mindfulness – or living sensibly as I would call it. This is of great interest to our readers as we see from the clicks these stories generate.
Claude Baumann is the co-founder and CEO of finews.ch and finews.asia, which is based in Singapore. Previously, he wrote for «Weltwoche» and «Finanz und Wirtschaft». He also co-founded the publisher Nagel & Kimche and launched business travel magazine «Arrivals». He is the author of several books on the banking industry. (Interview by Thomas J. Caduff, founder of financial website fundplat.com.
