Underwriting consortium

Take a London market aviation consortium for the 2026 year of account: eight carriers, 120M USD of capacity per risk, shown to the broker as a single line. A member holding 8% of the consortium writes 9.6M USD on every risk without having quoted one of them. The structure answers a cost every broker knows. Getting fifteen underwriters onto a slip means fifteen meetings and fifteen parallel negotiations. Under a consortium agreement, several carriers give one of them, the leader, authority to commit their capacity on a defined class of business, under underwriting rules agreed in advance. The broker presents once and walks away with a line that can carry several tens of percent of the program. The authority comes from other risk carriers here, whereas a binding authority hands a commercial mandate to a coverholder. Each member stays liable in its own name for its own share, with no joint liability. A small syndicate gets to see business it would never have been shown alone. The price is that it delegates its judgment, and its book takes on the quality of the leader's, so performance monitoring has to split consortium business from what the member writes on its own pen.