Category: 3. Business

Acquisition enhances NFP’s technical underwriting, product expertise and distribution

BIRMINGHAM, England — August 6, 2025 — NFP, an Aon company (NYSE: AON) and leading international insurance brokerage and consulting firm, today announced its acquisition of Bspoke Insurance Group, a platform of multi-class niche and specialist managing general agents, managing general underwriter and specialist insurance distributors. Headquartered in Leeds, Bspoke has offices in Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Essex, Liverpool and London.

NFP and Bspoke will operate independently, with the Bspoke management team reporting into Matt Pawley, President of NFP Europe. All Bspoke businesses will continue to operate under their existing brands.

“I’m excited to welcome the talented team at Bspoke to NFP,” said Pawley. “With their industry experience, diverse range of specialist solutions and customer-centric approach, they’ve driven exceptional growth and client-retention. The Bspoke team will strengthen our existing suite of insurance solutions while expanding our technical underwriting expertise and specialist product knowledge.”

Bspoke was formed in 2022 through the merger of the Precision Partnership Limited and UK General Insurance Group. The merger provides the market with coverage across sectors, including property, lifestyle, high-net-worth and transportation, as well as flexible distribution options for brokers, affinity groups and schemes. Bspoke’s businesses are built around individual product specialisms and led by highly experienced, technically skilled underwriting teams. They recently earned ‘MGA of the Year’ at the 2025 National Insurance Awards.

Tim Smyth, founder of Bspoke said, “NFP offers Bspoke a fantastic opportunity to build on the platform we have developed over the past two years. With NFP’s support, we can drive strong organic growth, attract top talent and pursue further acquisition opportunities to sustain Bspoke as a leading niche and specialist player with a relentless focus on meeting dynamic client needs.”

About NFP

NFP, an Aon company, is an organisation of consultative advisors and problem solvers helping companies and individuals address their most significant risk, workforce, wealth management and retirement challenges. With colleagues across the UK, Ireland, US, Puerto Rico and Canada, we serve a diversity of clients, industries and communities. Our global capabilities, specialised expertise and customised solutions span commercial business insurance, employee benefits, people consultancy, health and safety and individual financial planning. Together, we put people first, prioritise partnerships and continuously advance a culture we’re proud of.

Visit NFP.co.uk to learn more.

About Bspoke Insurance Group

Bspoke Insurance Group brings together a collection of multi-class niche and specialist MGAs, each clearly focussed on individual product specialisms and run by highly experienced and technically skilled underwriting teams. Their product range includes property, leisure, lifestyle, HNW, commercial and trades, haulage and transportation, and they are able to offer distribution options for brokers, affinities and schemes. Their structure and focus on IT and data enables the Group to operate as a ‘virtual insurer’, with full sales, underwriting, pricing, business intelligence and reserving capability. Bspoke Insurance Group is uniquely positioned to understand, manage and deliver superior performance outcomes for their business partners. 

Bspoke Insurance Group is based in Leeds, West Yorkshire with subsidiary offices in Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Essex, Liverpool and London.

Roblox, the online gaming platform wildly popular with children and teenagers, is rolling out an open-source version of an artificial intelligence system it says can help preemptively detect predatory language in game chats.

The move comes as the company faces lawsuits and criticism accusing it of not doing enough to protect children from predators. For instance, a lawsuit filed last month in Iowa alleges that a 13-year-old girl was introduced to an adult predator on Roblox, then kidnapped and trafficked across multiple states and raped. The suit, filed in Iowa District Court in Polk County, claims that Roblox’s design features make children who use it “easy prey for pedophiles.”

Roblox says it strives to make its systems as safe as possible by default but notes that “no system is perfect, and one of the biggest challenges in the industry is to detect critical harms like potential child endangerment.”

The AI system, called Sentinel, helps detect early signs of possible child endangerment, such as sexually exploitative language. Roblox says the system has led the company to submit 1,200 reports of potential attempts at child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the first half of 2025. The company is now in the process of open-sourcing it so other platforms can use it too.

Preemptively detecting possible dangers to kids can be tricky for AI systems — and humans, too — because conversations can seem innocuous at first. Questions like “how old are you?” or “where are you from?” wouldn’t necessarily raise red flags on their own, but when put in context over the course of a longer conversation, they can take on a different meaning.

Roblox, which has more than 111 million monthly users, doesn’t allow users to share videos or images in chats and tries to block any personal information such as phone numbers, though — as with most moderation rules — people constantly find ways to get around such safeguards.

It also doesn’t allow kids under 13 to chat with other users outside of games unless they have explicit parental permission — and unlike many other platforms, it does not encrypt private chat conversations, so it can monitor and moderate them.

“We’ve had filters in place all along, but those filters tend to focus on what is said in a single line of text or within just a few lines of text. And that’s really good for doing things like blocking profanity and blocking different types of abusive language and things like that,” said Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer at Roblox. “But when you’re thinking about things related to child endangerment or grooming, the types of behaviors you’re looking at manifest over a very long period of time.”

Sentinel captures one-minute snapshots of chats across Roblox — about 6 billion messages per day — and analyzes them for potential harms. To do this, Roblox says it developed two indexes — one made up of benign messages and, the other, chats that were determined to contain child endangerment violations. Roblox says this lets the system recognize harmful patterns that go beyond simply flagging certain words or phrases, taking the entire conversation into context.

“That index gets better as we detect more bad actors, we just continuously update that index. Then we have another sample of what does a normal, regular user do?” said Naren Koneru, vice president of engineering for trust and safety at Roblox.

As users are chatting, the system keeps score — are they closer to the positive cluster or the negative cluster?

“It doesn’t happen on one message because you just send one message, but it happens because of all of your days’ interactions are leading towards one of these two,” Koneru said. “Then we say, okay, maybe this user is somebody who we need to take a much closer look at, and then we go pull all of their other conversations, other friends, and the games that they played, and all of those things.”

Humans review risky interactions and flag to law enforcement accordingly.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits rose modestly last week, a sign that employers still retaining workers despite economic uncertainty related to U.S. trade policy.

Jobless claims for the week ending Aug. 2 rose by 7,000 to 226,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday, slightly more than the 219,000 new applications that economists had forecast.

READ MORE: Trump says he plans to put 100% tariff on computer chips, likely increasing electronics costs

The report is the first government labor market data release since Friday’s grim July jobs report sent financial markets spiraling downward, spurring President Donald Trump to fire the head of the agency that tallies the monthly jobs numbers.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as a proxy for U.S. layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since COVID-19 throttled the economy in the spring of 2020.

It was just the second time in eight weeks that jobless benefit applications rose.

While layoffs remain low by historical standards, there has been noticeable deterioration in the labor market this year.

Last week, the government reported that U.S. employers added just 73,000 jobs in July, well short of the 115,000 expected. Worse, revisions to the May and June jobs figures shaved a stunning 258,000 jobs off previous estimates and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%.

Many economists contend that Trump’s erratic tariff rollout in April created uncertainty for employers, who have grown reluctant to expand their payrolls.

The grim jobs data raised the ire of Trump, who alleged that the data was manipulated for political reasons and ordered the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the monthly jobs figures.

The firing was roundly criticized by economists, who, along with Wall Street investors, have long considered the job figures reliable. Stock and bond markets often react sharply when they are released.

U.S. markets recoiled at last week’s jobs report, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling more than 600 points on Friday.

The BLS does not contribute to the weekly unemployment benefits report except to calculate the annual seasonal adjustments that account for changes in weather, holidays, and school schedules.

The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration collects the weekly unemployment insurance claims reported by each state.

There was another indicator that the labor market is softening in a government report last week that revealed employers posted 7.4 million job vacancies in June, down from 7.7 million in May. The number of people quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence in finding a better job — fell in June to the lowest level since December. Hiring also fell from May.

Major companies have announced job cuts this year, including Procter & Gamble, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Google and Facebook parent company Meta. Most recently, Intel and The Walt Disney Co. announced staff reductions.

The deadline on most of Trump’s stiff proposed taxes on imports kicked in on Thursday, though some deals have been made and other deadlines to negotiate have been extended. Unless Trump reaches deals with countries to lower the tariffs, economists fear they could act as a drag on the economy and spark another rise in inflation.

Thursday’s report also showed that the four-week average of claims, which smooths out some of the week-to-week volatility, fell by 500 to 220,750.

The total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits for the previous week of July 26 jumped by 38,000 to 1.97 million, the highest level since November of 2021.

President Donald Trump on Thursday demanded that the CEO of the tech firm Intel resign immediately, saying he is “highly conflicted” because of alleged ties to China.

“There is no other solution to this problem,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s attack on the Intel chief is his latest attempt to pressure the semiconductor industry, which has fueled the boom in artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, he said he would hit imported computer chips with a 100% tariff unless companies are making them, or plan to make them, in the United States.

The demand also comes after Sen. Tom Cotton wrote to Intel Chairman Frank Yeary to “express concerns about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations and its potential impact on U.S. national security.”

Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, claims in the letter that Intel’s recently named CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, “reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”

Cotton asked Intel whether it had asked Tan to “divest from his positions in semiconductor firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party or the People’s Liberation Army and any other concerning entities in China that could pose a conflict of interest?”

Cotton also asked the company if it was aware of any subpoenas that Tan’s former firm received and if Tan has disclosed any other ties to China.

Intel has not responded to NBC News’ request for comment on Cotton’s letter and Trump’s social media post.

The senator’s letter cites a recent Reuters story that said Tan “has invested in hundreds of Chinese tech firms, including at least eight with links to the People’s Liberation Army, according to a Reuters review of Chinese and U.S. corporate filings.”

In March, Yeary announced that Tan had been named Intel CEO. Tan started working at the company on March 18. Tan was previously chief executive of Cadence Design Systems, an American chip design company based in California, from 2009 to 2021.

Intel’s rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung, GlobalFoundries and Nvidia have all announced plans to invest billions of dollars in their existing U.S. chipmaking infrastructure or deepen partnerships with U.S. companies like Apple to dodge those long-promised tariffs.

Further management turmoil for Intel likely spells more trouble and delays as it continues to try to play catch up with its competitors. The company’s stock market value, just shy of $90 billion, lags far behind most of its rivals. Its stock dropped more than 2% Thursday, erasing its gains for the year and underperforming the S&P 500’s 9% gain this year.

Intel’s last CEO, Patrick Gelsinger, was forced out at the end of 2024 after the company fell behind Nvidia, AMD and other chip firms in the AI race. That came as Gelsinger sought to transform the long-struggling company by attempting to build major chip factories in the U.S.

But Intel’s debt load and the lead time that other companies already had on Intel were too much for Gelsinger to overcome.

In November, Intel received a nearly $8 billion grant under the Biden administration’s “CHIPS Act” for factory build-outs and to make secure chips for the Defense Department.

But that grant was less than Intel was originally set to receive. It was reduced because U.S. officials worried about Intel’s ability to deliver what was promised, The New York Times reported.

Press Release:
14:30 CEST • 07 Aug 2025

News release from Vestas Northern & Central Europe
Hamburg, 7 August 2025

Vestas is proud to announce the following order as part of our Q3 order intake:

Country	Region	Customer	Project name	MW	Turbine variant	Service agreement	Delivery & commissioning
Germany	EMEA	Prezeller Wind GmbH & Co. KG, Lanze-Lomitz Wind GmbH & Co. KG and Eurowind Energy A/S	Prezelle and Lanze-Lomitz	74	12 x V162-6.2 MW	20-year AOM4000 Service Agreement	Delivery planned to begin in Q3 2026, commissioning scheduled for Q4 2026

For more information, please contact:
Frederikke Lundskov Røhl
Communication Coordinator, Vestas Northern & Central Europe
Mail: frlkr@vestas.com
Tel: +45 2894 2984

About Vestas
Vestas is the energy industry’s global partner on sustainable energy solutions. We design, manufacture, install, and service onshore and offshore wind turbines across the globe, and with more than 190 GW of wind turbines in 88 countries, we have installed more wind power than anyone else. Through our industry-leading smart data capabilities and unparalleled more than 157 GW of wind turbines under service, we use data to interpret, forecast, and exploit wind resources and deliver best-in-class wind power solutions. Together with our customers, Vestas’ more than 35,000 employees are bringing the world sustainable energy solutions to power a bright future.

For updated Vestas photographs and videos, please visit our media images page on: https://www.vestas.com/en/media/images.

We invite you to learn more about Vestas by visiting our website at www.vestas.com and following us on our social media channels:

Delaware’s chancery court stands between Elon Musk and investors willingly offering him a fortune. In 2018, when Tesla was worth around $50bn, the carmaker’s shareholders approved a plan to link Mr Musk’s pay to the value of the company. By January 2024, when the court ruled that the pay package was illegal, the carmaker and Mr Musk’s stock options were worth more than $600bn and $50bn respectively. Tesla’s board of directors had not been transparent about how Mr Musk’s pay was set, the judge said. That summer Tesla’s shareholders voted to reincorporate the company in Texas and reapprove the compensation package. The court killed it again in winter.