If you’re a chief executive, it may be worth looking over your shoulder – for new research has found the nation’s chief financial officers have corner office aspirations. According to findings from Robert Half, 86 per cent of finance chiefs want to be chief executive of their current organisation. Some 44 per cent of finance […]

Mutual insurance, retirement and investment group LV= revealed today that operating profit had dropped to £33m in the six months to 30 June, down from £79m this time last year. The firm’s chief executive, Richard Rowney, who replaced previous boss Mike Rogers this year, said the lower group operating profit “reflects lower operating profits in the […]

XL Catlin has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Brooklyn Underwriting, an Australian underwriting agency and Lloyd’s approved coverholder, it announced today. The acquisition will be made by an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of XL Group Ltd. Operating in the Australian market for more than two decades, Brooklyn offers more than a dozen specialist insurance […]

Phoenix Group Holdings (PHNX.L), Britain’s largest owner of life insurance funds closed to new customers, said on Friday it was in advanced talks to buy Deutsche Bank AG’s (DBKGn.DE) British insurance business, Abbey Life Assurance. Deutsche Bank has been weighing the sale of Abbey Life since October, sources had told Reuters, as Germany’s largest lender restructures its […]

JRP Group has set aside £5 million to cover the cost of redundancies following the merger of Just Retirement and Partnership. In the combined company’s first financial results since the merger was completed in April, JRP Group posted a pre-tax operating profit of £50.6 million in the first six months of the year. By comparison, Just Retirement and Partnership would […]

Insurance executives meeting in Monaco are preparing for another wave of mergers and acquisitions, driven by competition and new money entering the market and driving down returns. After record insurance deals totaling $126 billion in 2015, the figure for the first seven months of this year is only $15 billion, insurance broker Willis Towers Watson said. Eye-watering […]

Google is looking to establish partnerships between insurance companies and some of its businesses including Nest, which makes smart thermostats and smoke detectors, the managing director of its French division said. But the U.S. firm was not focusing on entering the insurance market directly, Nick Leeder added. “With some of the things we have done […]

Britain’s exit from the European Union creates an opportunity to rethink the bloc’s burdensome solvency rules for insurers to better serve consumers, British lawmakers said on Tuesday. Prudential, Aviva and the Lloyd’s of London insurance market comply with EU rules known as Solvency II that came into force in January. Overseeing their implementation was the single biggest […]

Rebalancing the economy away from financial services and our capital city has been the preoccupation of successive governments since 2008’s financial crisis. The sheer size of the banking sector, so the thinking went, alongside the absence of any second, truly global city beyond London, had made the UK too reliant upon the dominant industry of our […]

London’s firms are still taking on staff despite the uncertainty caused by June’s referendum, two new surveys of the capital’s businesses have found. Recruitment outfit Manpower said the number of employers planning to hire more staff in the final three months of the year has increased, taking London to second place on the nationwide league table […]