Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Hurricane Milton could trigger insurance losses of up to $60bn if it stays on its current path, with analysts warning the US’s 2024 hurricane season will “dent” insurers’ profitability.

The National Hurricane Center forecasts that the storm, which is heading towards Florida, will make landfall about 40 miles south of the city of Tampa as “an extremely dangerous major hurricane” on Wednesday night. It is currently a category 4 storm, with winds of up to 155 miles per hour.

Credit rating agency Morningstar DBRS estimates that a change of course leading to a direct hit on Tampa could trigger losses of up to $100bn, which would be on a par with those of Hurricane Katrina, and would make it one of the costliest natural disasters in US history.

Milton is the second major hurricane to hit the US in a fortnight. It comes after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across several south-eastern states, killing more than 225 people and destroying roads across western North Carolina.

Morningstar warned that accumulation of losses over the 2024 hurricane season, which runs until the end of November, would “likely make a dent in insurers’ profitability”, particularly for those with “significant exposures to personal lines in Florida”.

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, said it was “closely monitoring” the impact of Hurricane Milton on investors and capital markets, and would consider offering relief from filing deadlines for those affected by the storm. 

Florida governor Ron DeSantis said 6,000 members of the Florida National Guard and 3,000 from other states were standing ready to respond to the aftermath of the hurricane.

“This is the largest Florida National Guard search and rescue mobilisation in the entire history of the state of Florida,” he told reporters on Wednesday. 

DeSantis also tried to reassure Florida residents about the availability of fuel, following reports that some petrol stations had run dry because of panic buying. Highway patrol cars were escorting tankers through traffic to replenish supplies at petrol stations, he said.

In the Tampa Bay area, officials were sending text messages and calling people to warn them of the dangers of failing to evacuate their homes. In Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay, officials warned people to “get out now”. 

Emergency management director Cathie Perkins said 13 public shelters were open for people with no other options to escape the hurricane, and warned bridges across to Tampa would soon close. “Everybody in Tampa Bay should assume we are going to be ground zero,” she said.

Meanwhile, an independent group of climate scientists said human-caused climate change had boosted Hurricane Helene’s devastating rainfall by about 10 per cent and intensified its winds by about 11 per cent. 

Global warming from the burning of fossil fuels had made the high sea temperatures that fuelled the storm 200 to 500 times more likely, the World Weather Attribution group found in a new report. 

Climate Capital

Where climate change meets business, markets and politics. Explore the FT’s coverage here.

Are you curious about the FT’s environmental sustainability commitments? Find out more about our science-based targets here

Don’t want full access? REGISTER NOW for limited access and to subscribe to our newsletters.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In the cinema of science-fiction, corridors take a lead role. It’s within those interstitial spaces that the action and beauty unfold, from intense moments of peril to the panning of backlit walls configured to look infinite in scale. Each possible future has its own design. There are the hexagonal passages of the Death Star in Star Wars circa 1977, and the octagonal ones in Alien: Romulus. The corridor is a sci-fi trope – and the extreme nature of these spaces gives interior designers something to draw from. 

Set designer Gary Card created the original and recently refreshed interior for the LN-CC store in London, with its much-photographed octagonal corridor. “It has a definite retrofuturism to it,” Card says of the bright-orange wood tunnel. “I liked the idea of making something futuristic out of an economical, simple material and seeing how far we could push it. When we saw its parallels with 2001: A Space Odyssey, we leaned into that feeling further. Something I’ve learnt with corridors is that they’re a good way to envelop an audience as well as anchoring a space.”

The corridors of the future take disparate visual paths. Some look like an intergalactic take on Gaudí, as in the David Lynch version of Dune; others are chillingly reductive, like the warren of whitewashed underground halls in Westworld, where Yul Brynner’s rogue cowboy android pursues the last surviving guest of the theme park. 

I give hallways a feeling of ‘no gravity’

Norma Kamali’s New York penthouse in the Herzog & de Meuron 160 Leroy building in New York is all white, including the bare internal corridors, where shadows cast by doorways change during the day. It’s a bold, deliberate choice. “I want things as simple as possible,” says Kamali of the design. “It works creatively for me, so I still feel that there’s another idea coming tomorrow. I hate looking back.”

The influence of sci-fi design on the psyche has become an obsession for many. Between 2012 and 2015, the artist Serafín Álvarez assembled an online archive – scificorridorarchive.com – collecting stills of hundreds of scenes set in connecting halls on film. The process itself was the artwork, as Álvarez brought various worlds together on the blog, inviting you to imagine connections between them. But you can also enjoy the graphic arrangements.

Nerds of all kinds are fixated on sci-fi sets, from the obsessives who can tell you that Clara in Matt Smith-era Doctor Who walks through the same distorted, honeycomb corridors in “The Name of the Doctor” as she does in “Journey to the Centre of the Tardis”, to the architects who have made it their career goal to turn fiction into reality. The Zaha Hadid signature is sci-fi – the corridors and staircases of the 520 West 28th building in Manhattan that she designed shortly before her death have amorphous apertures, windows and bends, and her studio still creates similar silhouettes. 

Marc Newson has created numerous projects with poured floors, seamless curves and dramatic sheen that’s a universe away from traditional tongue and groove in architecture. What could be sexier than a reflective floor in a material you can’t quite identify? Think of Darth Vader’s menacing walk, at pace, on those shiny black Imperial surfaces. Likewise, backlighting of walls in sci-fi corridors lends a celestial glamour. Some sci-fi is purposely grubby – Andrei Tarkovsky’s art direction was the work of genius but has a dank, dripping vérité. But most sci-fi is pure gloss. The tube-shaped corridors in Gattaca look like a series of ring lights around a runway and feel very Prada.

“I have always been obsessed with hallways and giving them a feeling of ‘no gravity’ or an illusion of the information age,” says New York-based designer Karim Rashid, who has created numerous projects with hyper-real graphics in carpets and walls, including the Magic Hotels in Norway and the Prizeotel chain. “I want to transport people from public to private. It creates a mood shift. I was brought up with science fiction, watching 2001, Logan’s Run, Solaris and Blade Runner. Sturgeon’s Law [90 per cent of everything is crap] applies to corridors – 90 per cent are badly designed. But lighting and technology now afford us Tron-like spaces with long lines of LEDs. For example, the hallways at the Nobu hotel in Warsaw and the Belgium Nhow hotel.” 

The interlocking fabric Clouds tiles by the Bouroullec brothers could easily be used to create an astounding fractal tunnel, while recent designs by Paddy Pike – who cites the film Ex Machina as an inspiration  – include polished-steel portals and the striped rugs of his Cresco Collection, which he has shown installed as arches to pass through from room to room, like a kind of trompe-l’œil 1970s starship corridor. “My recent focus has been on doorways,” he says. “I’m drawn to creating pieces that dominate a room, offering a sense of transformation as you move through the space.”

Cate Blanchett’s home in Tár was shaped by the owner’s fascination with 007

Many public and private spaces take their cues from sci-fi corridors. Most of Tadao Ando’s buildings on the art island of Naoshima in Japan feature concrete corridors that recall the work of set designer Ken Adam (most notably the beautiful but abysmal Moonraker). Australian design practice Wood Marsh has created fabulous spaces with concrete curves that are wonderfully Ken Adam too. In the same vein is the concrete walled gallery and private penthouse of the Boros Bunker in Berlin, which was also home to Cate Blanchett’s eponymous character in Tár. Speaking to the FT in 2017, owner Christian Boros talked of his fascination with 007, which helped shape the penthouse. 

When architects George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg moved into their Richard Meier-designed apartment overlooking the Hudson River, they left most of the walls and columns gallery-white, but panelled one corridor with smooth wood from a single log sourced from India. This is backlit at each corner with a disorienting concave Anish Kapoor lacquer dish hung at the end of the hall, where the axis of each line of light meets. The effect is totally sci-fi but also quietly sensual. To play against it, a Napoleonic French chair sits midway down the corridor.  

Next May, Tate Modern opens a survey of work by Do Ho Suh entitled The Genesis Exhibition, including installations featuring coloured translucent corridors. The artist is not the first to explore internal spaces. In 1959, utopian architect Frederick Kiesler created “Model for the Endless House”, a cement sculpture in the permanent collection of the Whitney. Each space meets another in a never-ending loop, like the corridors that sci‑fi characters run through on repeat. 

Elongated transitional spaces can be emotive and dramatic. Back in 1987, Foster + Partners created a store for Katharine Hamnett on Brompton Road that was revolutionary – a white tunnel that led from the street into the industrial store incorporating a 35m glass bridge, lit from below, with a gentle arch. It created a sense of awe and mystery. Its most recent reincarnation was as a now-closed restaurant, festooned with fake foliage and Chesterfields and serving bottomless brunch. The world will change again. The only way is forward, whichever corridor you choose. 

The chief executive of Seccl has claimed that “crap technology” has compromised the adviser-client digital experience.

David Ferguson said most of the technology in the advice sector “is quite old” and not “built for connectivity”.

He said: “We now talk about API, but if you look at the end-to-end thing, the adviser client digital experience has been compromised by crap technology and their business efficiency has been constrained by that as well.”

Ferguson made his comments at Money Marketing Interactive in London yesterday (8 October).

He was speaking as part of an industry panel for advisers on how they can choose the right systems and tech stack for their business.

He noted that though technology has grown in leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, the advice sector technology still lags in several areas, including integration.

Ferguson said the issue is affecting adviser businesses.

“One thing that troubles me is a lot of the cost in adviser businesses is [because] they are dealing with providers that can’t do the job properly.                                                                                                                                                                      “And that’s technology not speaking to each other even in the inside of these provider companies. The idea that they’re going to magically speak together outside with other systems – that’s just completely nuts,” Ferguson said.

Speaking on the same panel as Ferguson, Timeline founder and CEO Abraham Okunsanya, dispelled the myth about a ‘best of breed’ technology stack.

He said: “This idea of best of breed versus all in one doesn’t exist.

“There aren’t many technology stacks in the market today that will do everything you want and equally the idea that you bring together all these various tools, and you will get the same level of efficiency or effectiveness as you do with an all-in-one [system] is just not true.

“Ultimately you have to figure out what you want to achieve with your business and try to find the technology solution that does that.

“I would argue that the direction of travel is that we’re moving towards more joined up technology, more integrated ecosystem than multiple tools that just don’t talk to each other.”

Zerokey co-founder and CEO, Joseph Williams, said that advisers should have the choice of the technology solutions they want to adopt.

“They shouldn’t be faced with the compromise of choosing best of breed [and] the inefficiencies that it brings.

“If they wish to use an all-in-one solution and that’s what they believe is best for them and their clients, then that’s the route they should go down,” Williams said.

He said that whatever route advisers chose, their tech stacks should “talk to one another”.

“There are ways that we can solve this solution other than the traditional approach to integration that we’ve always forged and clearly it hasn’t worked,” he added.

Williams cited the Lang Cat report, published five years ago, that showed 85% of advisers blamed lack of integration for major cause of inefficiency.

The figure has risen to 94% in Intelliflo’s latest adviser efficiency survey.

On addressing the integration question, Okunsaya said he believes the sector needs to address the trust issue between institutions and regulated entities.

“Unless we can remove the lack of trust between regulated entities, we’re always going to find ourselves in this position,” he said.

“This is why I gave up hope on this idea of multiple third-party integration being the primary way that we drive efficiencies within financial planning firms.

“I strongly believe that the solution is you have an integrated ecosystem being probably 70, maybe 80% of what you want as a firm and then you plug one or two other things on top of that.”

Benchmark Capital CEO, Ed Dymott, said the problem is due to too many players in the advice space trying to outcompete each other.”

He said: “When I look at the adviser ecosystem, there are too many people trying to be in the same space. I think that’s not a trust thing. I think that’s everyone trying to compete in the same area. I think that’s a big challenge.

Dymott blamed regulation, particularly the Consumer Duty, for not addressing this issue.

“The Consumer Duty should have mandated better service levels and better access to providers,” he said.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The journey that Daniil Trifonov has made in his life is also reflected in his music. Born in Russia, he started out as a star performer of the great Russian piano concertos. Now resident in the US, he has taken up American piano music in all its open-minded variety.

His latest album, My American Story: North, ranges across concertos, jazz and swing, film soundtracks, modernism and minimalism. With a nod towards his young, Russo-Latino family, he is also promising a second volume, My American Story: South, which will showcase Latin American music.

A pair of concertos, both with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, form the backbone of this first release. Gershwin’s Concerto in F, most popular of all American piano concertos, gets an electric performance, less bluesy than some, but bristling with virtuosity.

Trifonov gave the premiere of Mason Bates’s Piano Concerto in 2022 and a live recording of that performance is included here. Although the concerto goes through some thin and disjointed passages, it is packed with vivid and individual ideas freed from any stylistic expectations. It is American music through and through.

The solo works include Aaron Copland’s terse Piano Variations, John Adams’s delicately minimalist China Gates and John Corigliano’s intriguing Fantasia on an Ostinato. Throw in film-score themes, several short jazz numbers, some dazzling finger-work in an Art Tatum arrangement, and John Cage’s iconic 4’33”, and the range of how much has been fitted in here is a marvel.

★★★★★

‘My American Story: North’ is released by DG

BANKS including Nationwide and RBS are now charging a new £100 fee amid a major rule change.

New rules, which came in earlier this week, mean banks must now reimburse authorised push payment (APP) fraud victims.

1

A reimbursement limit of £85,000 has been applied under the rules, although banks can choose to go further than this and repay higher amounts.

But banks now have the power to impose a £100 excess fee when settling claims, a policy that five banks have now adopted.

So, if your claim is for a payment of £100 or less, trying to recover the money may not be of any benefit.

Excess fees will not apply to vulnerable consumers due to guidelines by the Payment Systems Regulator.

THE FIVE BANKS CHARGING THE FEE

The five banks implementing this fee are HSBC, First Direct, Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland.

A HSBC spokesperson told The Sun: “All of us have a role to play in preventing fraud and scams – we want to encourage customer caution, particularly when it comes to lower value purchases made online.”

The Sun reached out to the other banks mentioned above for comment, and we will update readers if we get any further responses.

Liz Edwards, a money expert at Finder previously told The Sun: “£100 is a lot of money to many people.

“Based on 2023 fraud figures, more than 58,000 cases would have resulted in no refund if all companies had applied the excess, and now only four of the major providers have confirmed they won’t.”

THE BANKS WHICH ‘MIGHT’ CHARGE THE FEE

Others have said they ‘may’ apply an excess or judge each case independently.

For example, Starling Bank has said it may apply an excess of £50 rather than £100.

A Natwest spokesperson also confirmed that they would assess claimants on a case-by-case basis and with regard to the specific circumstances of each customer.

The only way to avoid this caveat is to switch to one of the four banks which have pledged not to apply these charges.

THE BANKS NOT CHARGING THE FEE

Meanwhile, Nationwide, Virgin Money, TSB and AIB have said they will not implement the excess fee.

A Virgin Media spokesperson said: “Where customer circumstances result in a reimbursement under the rules, we are not planning to apply the voluntary excess, and this includes claims under £100.”

While a TSB said that the bank is “prioritising fraud protection for customers”.

They said: “Charging £100 could exclude a third of all victims from claiming refunds – and it’s not right to penalise people for scams that take place largely due to weaknesses on social media platforms.”

Last year there were 232,429 cases of APP fraud in the UK – a 12% jump since the year before.

Overall, £459.70 million was lost in 2023 to this type of scam.

Two-thirds of the total APP cases in 2023 were also down to purchase scams – which is when someone pays for goods or services which are never received.

This usually happens when purchasing off social media, as more than three-quarters of authorised fraud starts online.

Banks such as TSB emphasise that these scams are not the fault of the customer, while HSBC claims that by implementing the excess it will encourage shoppers to exercise more caution.

Shoppers should now be extra wary of dodgy deals when browsing online.

HOW CAN I PROTECT MYSELF FROM SCAMMERS?

When shopping online, always be cautious about where you’re buying from and what you’re buying.

If a price looks too good to be true, sometimes it actually is.

It’s much safer to stick to reputable websites where you know people in the UK usually shop from.

If you’re not sure about a website, it’s worth googling customer reviews and asking friends for their experiences.

Fraud cases which begin through phone conversations or emails are typically less common, but can lead to scammers getting hold of larger amounts of your cash.

Always check the source of the phone call by googling the number, or making sure the email is from an official domain.

Scammers can pose as banks and other trusted sources to get the information from you which they need to enter your bank account.

Always be sceptical not to provide any personal details over the phone – do not give away your PIN or full password as your bank will not need this and you are likely being scammed.

If you’re unsure, end the call and ring the trusted number of the organisation so that you definitely know you’re talking to the right people.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories