“Escape of Water” (EoW) is widely acknowledged to be a major problem for the insurance industry. Burst pipes and their consequences are estimated to cost insurers at least £1.8m in claims every day and last winter’s “Beast from the East” cost them £194m in one quarter alone according to the Insurance Times. Whereas older properties…
We’ve invested in and supported smart home start-up geo since its inception six years ago. Over that period, the company has gone from strength to strength. “We’ve developed 25 different products and delivered more than four million energy monitoring systems that can accurately read the energy use of a home in real-time,” said Patrick Caiger-Smith,…
The role that fashion plays amongst investors is often underestimated. One would be forgiven for thinking that investment policy is driven principally by expected future financial returns but with the rise of ethical investment funds, this is not necessarily the case and perhaps never has been. “Sin” stocks are increasingly traded at a discount and…
I think it’s fairly safe to say that technological advances on their own will not reduce per capita use of the Earth’s resources. That requires different ways of doing things, some new regulation and above all, changes in attitudes amongst consumers themselves to what they actually need. The Brookings Institution predicts that the “global middle…
Turquoise team members share their thoughts on business issues and give some career insights. Business What has been the most significant technological development of recent years? Quantum computing because it has the potential to revolutionise the way computers work and how data is stored and transmitted. In terms of process, it’s Blockchain because it…
Fear of needles (trypanophobia) is a surprisingly common thing. Approximately 20% of the general population have some fear of injections and about half of those have an acute fear of them! With modern medicine making increased use of blood tests and injectable medications, foregoing medical treatment because of a fear of needles can be dangerous…
The simple act of compelling larger retailers to charge 5p on plastic bags in England at the end of 2015 has had a dramatic effect on people’s behaviour – you now see shoppers emerging from supermarkets with trolleys filled with an assortment of reusable household bags rather than the one-off sort. The insistence of the…
The simple act of compelling larger retailers to charge 5p on plastic bags in England at the end of 2015 has had a dramatic effect on people’s behaviour – you now see shoppers emerging from supermarkets with trolleys filled with an assortment of reusable household bags rather than the one-off sort. The insistence of the…
It must have been incredibly dispiriting, and at times scary, to have spent the holidays in the north of the British Isles being inundated with torrential rain day after day as Desmond (not me!), Eva and Frank swept in from the west. Two years ago, it was the south & west that bore the brunt…
My eye was recently caught by an interview given by David Palmer-Jones, chief executive of Suez UK, to Andrew Cave of The Sunday Telegraph in which he fondly remembers some of the Grimsby Town FC squad emptying old-fashioned metal dustbins in order to get themselves fit and earn some extra cash during the 1970’s. How…