The historic marketplace for specialty insurance and reinsurance, organized into syndicates that carry the risks.
Lloyd's of London is not an insurance company but a marketplace, whose origins go back to a seventeenth-century merchants' coffee house, where specialty insurance and reinsurance risks, often complex or large, are traded. Risk there is carried not by a single entity but by syndicates, which bring together capital providers and underwrite through managing agencies, with brokers presenting risks to underwriters. This market structure, overseen by the Corporation of Lloyd's, which sets its rules and guarantees the chain of payment, gives the market a strong capacity for innovation on emerging risks, from historic marine to space, cyber or reputation risks. Lloyd's plays a major normative role, its underwriting directives influencing practices across the global market. It was precisely Lloyd's that, from 2019, imposed the elimination of silent cyber by requiring policies to state their position on digital risk, then issued model cyber-war exclusion clauses. Understanding Lloyd's is therefore essential to grasp how cyber cover standards are formed and spread, the market often acting as a laboratory and a standard-setter for the whole sector.
By issuing its directives on affirmative cyber and its model war exclusion clauses, Lloyd's shaped underwriting practices well beyond its own syndicates, influencing the global market.
Lloyd's, Lloyds of London, marché de Londres