From the people who brought you LIIBA Brexit weekly a new, hopefully occasional set of musings on the sole topic of the day. We will aim for the level of actual useful information to exceed sarcasm in each edition. But we all know that is not going to last.

Placing in your pyjamas

As the majority are now obeying Boris and working from home, it is worth reminding ourselves of the facilities available to help you continue to provide excellent service to your clients. By far the best way to place and endorse business remotely is via one of the recognised electronic trading platforms such as PPL or Whitespace. The key advantage they bring is the legal certainty provided by their underlying interchange agreements. So at no point will there be a dispute over whether or not your client is on cover.

If you are not currently signed up to one of these solutions, firstly, where have you been? And secondly contact james.livett@liiba.co.uk and he can remotely take you through your remote options.

For claims it is all about ECF.

All this is set out at much greater length in the Lloyd’s Emergency Trading Protocols. This includes a fall back method of trading via email. But that is distinctly sub-optimal compared to PPL or Whitespace so we would strongly suggest you err towards those solutions.

Extension tension

There has been significant discussion at the market level around standard wordings to allow for automatic extensions to contracts where the inability for brokers and underwriters to establish contact because of coronavirus causes delay. LMA has published some suggested drafts. In general our membership consider these too Lloyd’s focussed (references to “the room” etc). Our larger members are pursuing this and trying to agree more client friendly language. If successful, as this is an operational market issue and not a question of competitive advantage, they would then seek to share these drafts with LIIBA and we will pass on to members.

Frequent Coronavirus Advice

FCA has published some of its thoughts on how firms should be managing the current situation. Whilst the insurance specific sections focus more on travel and health, you should take close note of the bits that talk about how you should do the right thing by your clients; and the section about operational resilience.

What are that lot up to?

You will all, no doubt, have had multiple messages from carriers around what their plans are for the foreseeable future. Basically these do all boil down to “working from home” but there is some nuance – and some useful contact details provided. So we have started to pull them together into a single document (attached). It is lucky we own the IP on such summary offerings. Aviva currently holds the prize for succinctness.

These have been gathered by various members of our Board forwarding them on. So if you have others and are willing to share, please send through and we will continue to update this. We are also pursuing a more scientific method via LMA and IUA.

In general, where it says “today” in any of the messages, it means yesterday (Monday). We will go through and edit these out, but wanted to get an initial version out as soon as we could. We have also included one or two other entities (CII, DXC, IIL, us) where we thought that would be helpful.

That is it for now. Do get in touch if there is stuff you would like us to cover in future editions of this. Whilst we are now all at home, landlines, mobiles and email work to get hold of us. We are here to help.

Another edition will follow as soon as there is more to say. So look out for that and for news of a LIIBA corona-tion on Thursday…
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