London Market Group (LMG)

In 2014, the London Market Group publishes London Matters, a study that puts numbers on the market, its premiums, its share of global specialty risk, and above all what it loses to Singapore, Bermuda and Zurich, with a placing cost seen as too high. The group answers a structural problem. The London market has two halves, the Lloyd's syndicates and the companies, and three families of players that each have their association: the LMA for managing agents, the IUA for the companies, LIIBA for the brokers, not counting the Corporation of Lloyd's itself. On a model clause, each can move alone. On promoting the market before government and regulators, or on a project that works only if everyone joins, such as placing data, a common table is needed, and the LMG is that table. It ran a target operating model program, the TOM, which aimed to have a risk's data entered once for the whole chain, and which the LMG wound down in 2019 and whose thread Lloyd's picked up in Future at Lloyd's, then Blueprint Two. The group regulates nothing and binds nobody. Its weight depends on its members' agreement, and it shows mostly when brokers and underwriters, whose interests diverge on the cost of change, agree to sign the same text. When they do not agree, the project slips by a year. Not to be confused with the Lloyd's Market Association or the IUA, which each speak for one half of the market, nor with the Corporation of Lloyd's, which has the power to impose.