Week in Post: Softball, Millennials, results season, beards, Beale and Jason Bourne

The event, which has previously been more commonly fuelled by booze than home runs, took a more professional turn this year with both teams kitted out in uniforms. They were even seen discussing tactics in the days leading up to the Hyde Park slug fest.

Unfortunately, I was interviewing a host of bright up-and-coming brokers for the next series of Insurance Age's Broker Apprentice. But when I met up with the team later, it transpired that Post's new reporters Rosie Quigley and Will Kirkman had come through their first softball match with flying colours on the victorious team.

Rosie and Will fall very much into the millennial camp, a camp that is proving very popular with the insurance sector as proven by a number of recent start-ups.

The freshest of these is Back Me Up, which is backed by Ageas and launched this week with some fanfare. In what was a packed week for interesting new online ventures, Post also spoke to new legal services aggregator Law Superstore and social media/peer-to-peer insurance offering So Sure about how they would stand out.

Elsewhere, we are fully into results season. As a result, the Post team has been busy getting the lowdown from a host of senior figures.

To find out what Direct Line Group's Paul Geddes, Axa's Amanda Blanc, Aviva's Colm Holmes, Allianz's Jon Dye, RSA's Steve Lewis made of their results, please look at each of the respective stories.

The quintet certainly spoke more than Matt Damon does in his latest film Jason Bourne. And although each of these CEOs saw some adverse losses because of the winter weather events, none were on the receiving end of the size of destruction meted out at the end of this spy thriller.

Other highlights from Post this week included an in-depth interview with Lloyd's CEO Inga Beale, who spoke frankly about Brexit, modernising One Lime Street, diversity and Desert Island Discs.

I was also interested to read the recent blogs on cloud outsourcing data standards and why the industry needs to blow its trumpet about good service.

Although there is a lot of talk about insurtech presently - indeed my latest comment piece asks whether the presence of too many beards in this space might be its undoing - I am not hearing even half as much about legaltech.

So it was interesting to read the results of the recent Travelers research into where the legal fraternity is in terms of adoption here; findings that formed the cornerstone of two pieces that are well worth a look to see what parallels there are with the insurance market, and whether we could learn any lesson.

Ending where I began, talking about Millennials, I would finally like to draw your attention to a piece written by Ed Ventham & Ola Jacob Raji - both Next Generation Insurance Network board members with bright futures - who offered their own fresh take on the importance of Big Data.

Neither might have any facial hair, but they understand that it is not software or hardware that will disrupt the market on its own, but the people, especially those coming into the market now with different perspectives. It is no wonder the team behind Back Me Up spent so long speaking to and working with young people when building their app.

Anyway, I'd better go, the winner/loser of the Post Wall of Shame is due to be announced and I might be in the running. More of which next week... maybe!

Ciao!