Esure and Directline founder Sir Peter Wood leads insurance start-up funding round May 28, 2019 Esure and Directline founder Sir Peter Wood has led a £2.5m funding round in insurance start-up Pikl. Wood received £360m when he sold his stake in Esure to private equity firm Bain Capital last year. The serial entrepreneur also founded Directline in the 1980s, allowing customers to buy insurance over the phone, later selling his [...]
Old Mutual suspends chief executive Peter Moyo over ‘breakdown in trust’ May 24, 2019 Insurance giant Old Mutual has suspended its chief executive over what it termed a “material breakdown in trust”. Read more: Merian Global Investors boss steps down after Old Mutual spin off Peter Moyo is suspended with immediate effect, the board told investors this morning, with chief operating officer Iain Williamson stepping in to fill the [...]
Small businesses will be collateral damage in Corbyn’s war against the rich May 23, 2019 A new word was coined earlier this month. Joining the terms “Brexit” and “omnishambles” in the English lexicon, we now have “Corbygeddon” to describe the abject fear of a hard-left Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn, that’s set to drive the uber-wealthy (or at least a proportion of their assets) out of the country in [...]
British Steel falls into insolvency after government bailout talks fail, in ‘devastating’ blow for 5,000 workers May 22, 2019 British Steel has collapsed into insolvency after the last week of attempts to lobby the government for a £75m cash injection failed. Read more: Troubled British Steel braces for insolvency in last-ditch loan talks The industrial giant – which employs 5,000 people – has been asking the government for an emergency loan designed to save [...]
Employers want to use wearable tech to track the health, sleep, fitness and productivity of the office May 22, 2019 If you've woken up and checked your watch for last night’s sleep data, you’re not alone. In the UK, more than five million wearables (such as Fitbits and step counters) are now part of individuals’ everyday lives – 1.96m were sold in 2017 alone. So it’s only natural for employers to be interested in the power of [...]
The robots are coming – and they’re (potentially) after your job May 22, 2019 | City Talk By Ian Hall (City PM, for the CFA Institute) ‘You want your robot to be smarter than the other team’s robot’: advice that sounds like it belongs to a participant in combat competition TV show Robot Wars. But, actually, it’s the increasingly competitive and technology-affected situation that many investment professionals will face in the workplace [...]
How to cope with the confusion around social care costs May 22, 2019 Distracted by the ongoing Brexit crisis, the government appears to have shoved the not-so-small issue of social care to one side. With a growing elderly population (by 2046, a quarter of the UK population will be aged 65 or over), and proportionately fewer taxpayers able to prop them up, the rising cost of social care [...]
Lloyd’s chair says misconduct cases may emerge as soon as this week May 21, 2019 Lloyd’s chairman Bruce Carnegie-Brown expects two or three cases of serious misconduct at the insurance marketplace to emerge as soon as this week as his organisation tackles reports of widespread sexual harassment. Read more: Lloyd's of London unveils 'robust plan' following sexual harassment claims “There are two or three quite big live issues out there [...]
How a relationship break-up spurred this founder to build ‘Ebay for travel’ to help flog unwanted holidays May 20, 2019 When you think of unwanted items, holidays don’t tend to spring to mind. But according to Simon Powell, founder of TransferTravel, billions of dollars are wasted globally on unwanted travel every year, while an estimated 220,000 hotel rooms are paid for and never used every day in the US alone, wasting $8.6bn annually. And with [...]
Two-thirds of small businesses say government is not on their side, new poll reveals May 16, 2019 Two-thirds of small businesses do not feel the government is on their side, a new survey has revealed in a report calling for a radical shake-up of the tax system. A YouGov poll for the Centre of Policy Studies think-tank shows 62 per cent of small business owners and managers don’t believe those in power [...]
