(Bloomberg) -- Lloyd’s of London launched a consultation on changing its internal rules to crack down on both financial and non-financial misconduct, as the world’s largest insurance market seeks to shed a reputation for heavy drinking and sexual harassment.
The insurance exchange said its existing processes for dealing with poor conduct are unclear, and published on Thursday a non-exhaustive list of bad behavior. The list includes harassment, bullying, and “conducting Lloyd’s business when under the influence of alcohol where it leads to unprofessional behaviour.”
The insurance market, which first allowed women on its floor in 1973, proposed changes to its bylaws to include a clarification that behavior need not take place in the office to classify as misconduct, aligning itself more closely to the policy of the Financial Conduct Authority.
Another proposal clarified that it was not necessary for the market to demonstrate that it had suffered harm “at an institutional level” for misconduct to have occurred.
The measures are the 336-year-old insurance exchange’s latest efforts to show that it’s working hard to tackle inappropriate behaviour after a 2019 Bloomberg Businessweek article that detailed endemic sexual misconduct, including inappropriate comments, unwanted touching and sexual assault at Lloyds.
The insurance exchange provided a link to the proposed conduct framework in response to a request for comment.
“Some conduct (for example, illegal drug-taking, harassment or bullying) is inherently unacceptable by its very nature and ought to be actionable as such, irrespective of whether or not tangible harm to Lloyd’s,” the document said.
The exchange also proposed a new category of misconduct specifically aimed at those who may mistreat witnesses and whistleblowers.
The exchange handed out its first penalty for non-financial misconduct in 2022, when it said that Atrium Underwriters failed to tackle complaints of harassment and bullying. In that case, a Lloyd’s statement said Atrium staff also held annual events involving heavy drinking and initiation games where male staff, including senior managers, made inappropriate and sexualized comments about female colleagues.
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