QBE is pleased to announce the appointment of Sharon Smallridge as Portfolio Manager for its UK Casualty team.
Leading QBE’s London Major Client Portfolio for the UK Casualty team, Sharon joins from commercial insurer AIG. Effective from 9 December, her role will be based out of QBE’s London office.
Bringing over 35 years of insurance experience across claims and underwriting, Sharon has spent the last 12 years in various senior roles, most recently as General Liability Manager.
The appointment is the second senior hire for QBE’s UK Casualty team . . .
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QBE is pleased to announce the appointment of Sharon Smallridge as Portfolio Manager for its UK Casualty team.
Leading QBE’s London Major Client Portfolio for the UK Casualty team, Sharon joins from commercial insurer AIG. Effective from 9 December, her role will be based out of QBE’s London office.
Bringing over 35 years of insurance experience across claims and underwriting, Sharon has spent the last 12 years in various senior roles, most recently as General Liability Manager.
The appointment is the second senior hire for QBE’s UK Casualty team . . .
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Few insurers know the minibus market like QBE, which has been one of the leading insurers to the UK bus, coach and minibus sector for over 30 years.
QBE’s Minibus Operator Handbook provides comprehensive information for drivers and operators when using or preparing to use a minibus. It outlines key legal requirements, best practices, and safety standards to ensure safe and efficient minibus operation whilst meeting regulatory obligations.
The FCA has set out their proposals to further reduce some of the regulatory burden on insurance intermediaries and pass on some efficiency savings to regulated firms. We summarise the areas which are specific to our members below.
As part of the Transforming Data Collection programme the FCA are proposing changes to two returns:
REP021d Pricing Information for Closed Books of Business will be decommissioned. The FCA have reviewed the data collected in this return and have determined that they no longer need to collect this data. Decommissioning . . .
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As we approach the end of 2025, you will most likely be starting to look at what new opportunities may emerge from becoming more holistic and how you can keep in touch with your clients.
For those who have not discussed PMI with their client’s, then there has been no better opportunity, whether looking to provide assurance to your individual clients or covering a company’s workforce to ensure that they are receiving that quick prompt treatment.
As AXA Health looks forward to 2026, we are keen to provide the support you may need . . .
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Welcome back to our Club Blue Business Development Series with Zurich Resilience Solutions. We are thrilled to invite you to our first webinar of 2026. Please see below for joining instructions.
Webinar Details:
• Date: 23 Jan 2026• Time: 11.00 – 12.00• Hosts: Gary Howe• Platform: Microsoft Teams
As electric vehicles gain momentum across the UK, so does the demand for charging infrastructure and dedicated parking spaces. But with this growth comes a complex set of risks.
In this session, Gary Howe, Senior Fire Risk Engineer at Zurich Resilience . . .
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AI Risks in Medical Technology and Life Sciences
“Artificial Intelligence is transforming medical technology in ways that once seemed confined to science fiction — but it has also generated new layers of risk.”Our latest article explores how UK businesses can harness AI’s potential in healthcare while managing these emerging risks.
Open Site Explorer is a great free tool for checking your website domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can plug your URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links. In addition, you can also check your competition. Note – the free version of Open Site Explorer gives you 3 reports per day, only. If you want more you’d need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Looking for a way to run your email marketing efforts without breaking the bank? There are a number of free email marketing services that let you send thousands of emails per month without spending a single penny. If you have lots of subscribers but you don’t need to message them all at the same time, our top pick is Sendinblue. If you want to send out email blasts to all your subscribers at the same time, a good alternative is Mailchimp. Mailchimp free plan includes 10,000 emails per month for up to 2,000 subscribers.
Sendinblue has a great free plan (unlimited contacts) along with support for SMS text message sending, SMTP, in-depth analytics, powerful marketing automation features all in the same dashboard. The free plan lets you have an unlimited number of contacts, but you’re limited to 300 emails per day.
We could dedicate a whole website on choosing a CRM system as there are so many of them out there and so much discussion around which is best. Keeping things simple, if you’re looking for a better way to manage customer relationships, but don’t have the budget, our top pick is Hubspot free edition. It’s an all-in-one business solution with hubs for sales, marketing, and customer service.
HubSpot’s comprehensive free plan is better than many paid CRMs out there. You get hundreds of powerful features and the ability to manage up to a million (1,000,000) contacts without ever paying a penny. But it’s not always perfect and it doesn’t come without its share of drawbacks. Then again, no CRM does. Not even the most expensive!
Finding decent images for your brochureware, social media and or websites can be one of the biggest headaches and can eat into time you don’t have. You can spend hours (days) searching to then discover that perfect image you’ve found is not royalty free or it costs a small fortune. Thankfully, there are some amazing sources of free, royalty free imagery, in addition to Canva, which we mentioned in the design category. It’s knowing where to find them. Here’s a selection of some of the best resources for downloading free imagery.
Canva is another great time and money saving tool especially where you don’t have an internal design resource or budget to outsource. One of its best uses is to help create images for social media and blog posts, but it can be used for practically most basic design requirement and you don’t have to have any design skills!
Canva has a suite of built-in templates that you simply select and add your company logo, edit as required and download. If you fancy yourself as a budding designer or have someone in the business who is, there is also the option to create bespoke designs and resize to your requirements within Canva, so you don’t have to buy additional design software. Canva also has a free suite of images built into the system which you can simply select and use. Plus, you can also upload your own images.
Canva is quick and easy to use and with over 2 million registered users there’s a wealth of free tutorials and tips you can find online. We also love the upgrade if you do have some budget. It’s around £10.99 a month, so won’t break the bank, but it’s worth it for the wider access to images alone that you get.
The best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles, and Hootsuite is a tool that will enable you to do that.
It has a free plan that gives a single user a social media dashboard for three social accounts. You can set up a social media posting schedule with up to 5 messages scheduled in advance. Note – if you need to schedule content for more than three profiles you’ll need one of the paid Hootsuite plans instead, but for most, the free plan should cover your needs.
Currently, Hootsuite supports Twitter, Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups), LinkedIn (profiles and pages), Instagram (business and personal profiles), Pinterest, and YouTube channels. It also supports Google My Business through the Hootsuite app directory.