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On the morning of 30 November 2019, the Vietnamese cargo ship Toan Phat 68 was hit suddenly by unexpected stormy weather, and sank four nautical miles off the coast of central Vietnam, dumping its consignment of 2,950 tons of cement and 25 tonnes of oil into the sea. The 10 crew members were saved, but the captain died of a heart attack.
More than 8,000 miles away, on news of the tragic accident, a man took a quill and pot of ink, and recorded news of the loss in a leather-bound ledger kept on the trading floor of an office in London.
“Captain reportedly sent coordinates before ship lost contact,” he wrote. “All crew saved but captain found dead by rescue team.”
Lloyds of London is the world’s oldest and largest insurance market, where £35B of insurance premiums were written in 2018, and is one of the epicentres of the global insurance industry. The way it does business is antiquated, but over the course of its 333-year history it has been hugely successful.
As a result it has created an ecosystem of companies and offices clustered around its building at 1 Lime St. in the City of London that is unlike anything else in the world of global finance in 2020.But Lloyds, and the insurance industry more generally, is at a turning point. And…
Read the full story here.
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