Lloyd's Market Bulletin
An instruction published by the Corporation of Lloyd's to managing agents, which can impose an underwriting practice on the whole market, such as cyber affirmation in 2019 or the cyber war exclusion in 2022.
The market bulletin is the instrument through which the Corporation of Lloyd's communicates its requirements to the managing agents underwriting for syndicates. Each bulletin carries a number preceded by the letter Y and can range from mere information to an underwriting obligation, with application dates and checks. The Corporation underwrites nothing, but it approves agents, approves their plans and sets their capital requirements: a bulletin imposing a clause is therefore followed. For the insurance market as a whole, some bulletins have had a reach far beyond London, because Lloyd's is a reference venue for specialty risks and its competitors align their practices. They are where the market's response to a crisis is formalized: they require naming a risk that policies kept silent about, set a timetable and leave drafting to model clauses. For the underwriter, reading the bulletins means knowing what the market will have to write in twelve months.
Bulletin Y5258 of July 2019 required every policy in the market to clearly affirm or exclude cyber from January 2020, in stages by line. Bulletin Y5381 of August 2022 required, for stand-alone cyber policies written from March 31, 2023, an exclusion of state-backed attacks meeting minimum requirements.
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One letter a week. First, the week's underwriting note, when one is published: a dated, argued decision, signed by Paul Bernardski. Then what the observatory published on cyber risk, political risk and insurance. No account, no tracking.
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