Lloyd’s of London’s boss said the UK insurance centre had avoided a significant hit from the Crowdstrike IT outage in July because the policies written had 48-hour lapse periods included.
Estimates of the cost of the incident in the UK alone are £1.7 billion-£2.7 bn, but Lloyds chair Bruce Carnegie-Brown said the insurance payouts were “not particularly big” because of the delay before insurance cover kicked in.
He said it was more of a "wake-up call rather than a huge insurance industry event”, adding: “As you get into algorithms and AI, the dimensions are going to grow and the potential risks evolve... we can be very smart in terms of the advice we give about best practices to mitigate risk."
Carnegie-Brown added that Lloyd's had also avoided significant claims for Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster as most of those policies were written in the US.
Profits in the six months to the end of June rose by £1 billion to £4.9 billion with gross written premiums at £30.6 billion, up from £29.3 billion.
Net investment income rose to £2.14 billion, up from £1.81 billion.