As we all know, the last 12 months have severely tested our supplies of resilience and patience. Despite enforced spells of home-working meaning that many people have spent more time with their families than normal, simply keeping households and businesses going has been a challenge. Yet, as some of the restrictions are lifted and the UK's economy prepares to gradually open up once again, I believe that it's essential to dampen down any expectations that life either in or out of the office is going to instantly return to what we used to regard as normality. In the last few

Last week, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced plans to gradually ease the current Covid-related restrictions imposed across the UK. The phased relaxation of rules designed to limit the spread of the virus have, naturally, come as something of a welcome relief to those who have spent almost an entire year under some form of lockdown. Many individuals, perhaps frustrated at having cancelled trips overseas, will have paid particular attention to references about when they might be able to take foreign holidays once more. However, there was a reason why Downing Street referred to the strategy as a "roadmap" rather

Over the course of the last year, we have once again become used to the idea of living in a bubble. However, whereas the term is now taken to refer to groups of individuals at work or at home trying to limit exposure to the coronavirus, the definition previously held rather negative connotations. For example, people living outside London have often described the capital as existing in a bubble of its own, with a particular outlook and different economic or cultural circumstances to those in the rest of the country. It's a concept which came to mind while I was

The last year has seen the health of the world's populations and its economies take a battering. With a renewed spread of infection and governments across the globe introducing ever tighter measures to protect their citizens, the coronavirus pandemic has shown few signs of releasing its grip on personal or commercial confidence. In the UK this week, the Office for National Statistics released a brace of reports providing a snapshot of the current severity of the financial consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak. The first - the latest instalment in a series of surveys of businesses from across the country operating

The last 12 months have been remarkable for the degree in which the certainty of how we live and work has been turned upside down. In having to work from home, we've not just become estranged from our desks but our friends and colleagues too. Mind you, social distancing has even required us to change how we interact with family and neighbours - a topic which is of particular sensitivity as I write, only days before Christmas. Stability is something which we all fundamentally crave. Even as Santa prepares for his yearly delivery run, I reckon that we're all a

Emerging risks. Rising premiums. Reducing insurer capacity. Limited Business Interruption (BI) contract terms due to Coronavirus. Many UK companies are facing an altogether more challenging insurance marketplace as they prepare for their next renewal. Furthermore, the UK broking market remains in a constant state of change and evolution. Independent insurance brokers continue to be targets for acquisition by Private Equity interests and large brokers. Year on year, continued consolidation has led to a reduction in the number of specialist brokers in the market, leading to established brokers becoming more focused on internal reorganisation as they seek to harvest cost reduction

Young future leaders are no longer content with the beaten path. Instead of making their way up the traditional corporate leadership path like their predecessors, the absolute best are seeking opportunities to prove themselves right from the outset. To meet these shifting demands, the most agile organisations are re-examining their existing business structures. Tomorrow’s leaders have arrived. In truth, they entered the workplace sometime ago and did so armed with a quite different set of skills, behaviours and expectations. In recent years, the insurance industry has welcomed the arrival of new technologies, big data and artificial intelligence (AI). Valuable tools

When contributing to devising a risk management plan some years ago for a FTSE 100 company, I read many Corporate Governance articles encouraging me to do the expected.  Categorise the key risks to the strategic plan and the budget so as to be sure to identify those relating to financial, operational, infrastructure, people, IT and legal and regulatory matters and give each a score by assessing their likelihood and their impact.  Then came the most difficult part.  How best to mitigate each risk? At this stage I stopped reading the articles and used a simple acronym -TRAP or Terminate, Reduce,