Lloyd's Underwriting Room (the Room)

In March 2020, at the start of the first lockdown, Lloyd's closes its Underwriting Room, and the market finds out it can place without it: brokers move to electronic placing and the telephone, underwriters work from home. The Room later reopened, in stages, and the question it raises has not gone away. The Lime Street building, designed by Richard Rogers and opened in 1986, is built around it: an atrium over several levels, and on each level rows of boxes, the bench desks inherited from the stalls of Edward Lloyd's coffee house. Each syndicate keeps its box there. The broker queues in front, sits down across from the underwriter, opens the file, argues rate and wording, and leaves with a line or a decline. The placement is built that way, box after box, the lead first, then the followers, and the Room is where the mood of the market shows, in the length of the queues at the cyber or energy boxes. Supporters of face-to-face trading see it as the only place where a complicated risk gets negotiated in twenty minutes. Its critics see a fixed cost, brokers standing for hours and data entry that ends up on a platform anyway. The reality is mixed: the Room keeps specialty risk and the lead negotiation, the platform takes standard renewals and the followers. Not to be confused with the Corporation of Lloyd's, which owns the building and sets the rules without underwriting, nor with market modernization, which digitizes placing without closing the Room.