Lloyd’s chairman highlights Bermuda partnership
The Bermuda insurance market and Lloyd’s of London have many common interests and should focus more on growing the size of the insurance market for mutual benefit than on competing against each other, according Bruce Carnegie-Brown, the chairman of Lloyd’s.
Carnegie-Brown was speaking to an audience of industry leaders at a Lloyd’s Market Briefing, organised with the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers in Hamilton on March 18.
According to a report in the Royal Gazette Carnegie-Brown said: “I come here in a spirit of partnership from London. There are some people who focus on competition and market share between the two markets.
“I would much rather focus on us all growing the whole marketplace of insurance in a profitable way and I’m very confident that both Lloyd’s and Bermuda have a great future.
“We are the two pre-eminent centres for the type of insurance that we do and there are more things that unite us than separate us,” he said.
With great uncertainty remaining about a possible delay of Britain leaving the European Union, Carnegie-Brown said: “I think Lloyd’s has Brexit-proofed its future, even though we don’t know what that future will look like.”
The market set up a subsidiary in Brussels for the purpose of dealing with all business from the European Economic Area.
“We chose Brussels because we wanted a serious regulator,” Carnegie-Brown said. He added that Paris’s insistence that all documentation should be in the French language had counted against it, because of the extra expense that would have entailed.
“Also we did not want the suggestion that we were going to some tax haven with a regulatory light environment, which might have been the case if we’d gone to a place like Malta,” Carnegie-Brown added. “We wanted to be at the heart of Europe and very good communications with London.”
In addition Carnegie-Brown also warned of the dangers of growing protectionism around the world, saying that there were signs that the tendency of financial regulators to ring-fence capital in the banking industry was also touching the insurance industry.
