
Europe’s May M&A market favoured control, certainty, and strategic patience. The largest stories centred on contested assets, public-market discounts, private-equity pressure, and boards testing whether premiums were enough to justify surrendering independence.

Fit note reform shifts attention to employers’ role in absence. New pilots could reshape return-to-work support, but only if employer involvement is clearly defined and practical enough to work across different roles, teams, and workplace settings.

Britain’s jobs market is losing momentum at the margins. Vacancies have fallen, payrolls are weakening, and pay growth is close to stalling, with the strain showing first among smaller employers and in lower-paid sectors.

Cyber crises demand more than technical teams and technical fixes. Dan Potter of Immersive argues HR, legal, and communications must be drilled alongside security staff, with rehearsed handoffs and role-swap exercises helping organisations respond faster, and with greater cohesion, when incidents hit.

Service-sector inflation is returning through contracts, transport, and energy bills. March data suggest companies are absorbing faster cost increases while demand, pricing power, and confidence soften.

Data infrastructure decisions now sit beside debt, power, and politics. TikTok’s Finnish expansion and wider financing moves show sovereignty is now a capital-allocation issue, not just a compliance one.

AP’s restructuring shows how knowledge work is being redesigned everywhere. As customer demand shifts, the harder task is reorganising workflows without losing expertise, trust, or institutional memory.

Conflict has made quarterly earnings harder to read this year. Shell and Exxon have shown how hedges, cargo delays, and working-capital swings can leave reported performance out of step with underlying operations.

March brought fewer US deals, but larger and sharper ones. A small group of food, power, insurance, and pharma transactions defined the month, as boards pursued scale and resilience in a volatile market.

The cyber weak point increasingly sits beyond the core stack. Fresh warnings on messaging app targeting, botnets built from neglected devices, and the resilience of threat actors after takedowns all point to the same problem: organisations still struggle more with behaviour, asset visibility, authentication, and third-party control than with encryption itself.