Another Rendez-Vous has been and gone and the autumn is upon us once more, tingeing us all with melancholy.
So it's great to have a little memento of the days when the Med sparkled azure and the sun still shone hot.
Over the years The Insurance Insider Roundtable has become the definitive event of the gathering.
In previous years the discussions that have taken place around this cramped table have set the tone for the whole meeting, and even on occasion changed industry practice.
It's always a lively affair. Back in 2010 a certain Mr Ajit Jain gave us a rare-as-hens'-teeth audience and we had an interesting debate about the validity of low-tax offshore domiciles. Of course, there was no mention of the facilitisation of the market back then.
Meanwhile, in 2011 a near legendary set-to between a prominent Lloyd's CEO and a senior broker changed the way reinsurance intermediaries have subsequently communicated their forward-looking price expectations at the Rendez-Vous.
In 2012 the room was gripped by real fear as the Eurozone crisis threatened to claim the scalp of one of the Piigs nations. This was the first time since 2008 that I'd seen a room full of CEOs talk for quite so long and in such detail about the dangers inherent in the world economy and the possibility of these spilling over into the global (re)insurance sector.
Optimism returned in 2013 as we saw global growth recover and we allowed ourselves to dream of a return to real interest rates for the first time in five years.
But by 2014 we were getting the collective hump that central bankers were still taking their sweet time with getting monetary policy back to normal, with too much yield-seeking capital coming into the market and lowering the tone. Still, loss trends were benign and we were continuing to make plenty of cash.
Back in 2015 we had the same meek complaint. Yes, our margins were eroding further and capital was flowing ever more freely and widely, yet a still-harmless loss environment and a modicum of consolidation allowed participants to examine the past with some detachment and discuss the future with greater optimism.
What of 2016?
This year we sought distraction and diversion wherever we could find it.
Everyone agreed the market was as tough as it had been for a generation.
Instead, we had a new star topic, with long and intense dissections of the disruptive influence of technology on insurance.
How fascinating that it is precisely as the market approaches the point of near maximum despair that InsurTech should find its time has now arrived to come to the fore...
Read on here for all the best bits.
Mark Geoghegan,
Managing Director,
Euromoney Insurance Group