Pool of capital assembled for one year of account at Lloyd's, run by an approved managing agent, and which forms the market's underwriting unit rather than the company.
Lloyd's is not an insurance company but a market, and its underwriting unit is the syndicate. A syndicate brings together, for a given year of account, the capital of members, mostly corporate today, and entrusts underwriting to an approved managing agent employing the underwriters. A syndicate has no legal personality and is reconstituted each year: its capacity, its members and its plan may change from one year of account to the next, even though practical continuity is the rule. The Corporation of Lloyd's underwrites nothing: it approves the agents, approves each syndicate's annual business plan, sets capital requirements and administers the chain of security. That separation between capital, management and market explains two features found nowhere else. One investor can spread its stake across several syndicates without managing any. And the market can refuse a business plan, hence stop a syndicate from growing in a line, with no shareholder involved.
The market counts on the order of a hundred active syndicates, run by around fifty managing agents, for underwriting capacity of several tens of billions of pounds per year of account. Annual plan approval is the market's most direct steering tool: it is through that channel that Lloyd's imposed reductions in the least profitable books from 2018 onward, in the initiative known as Decile 10.
syndicate, agence de gestion, membre du Lloyd's, capacité de syndicat