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Finding the right fit: a career in wordings
Lloyd Martin, Executive, Technical Underwriting, discusses his route into the Lloyd's market and life as a wordings professional at the LMA.
Like most people outside of the industry, up until relatively recently I had never heard of a career in ‘wordings’. In fact, I had very little knowledge or understanding of the insurance industry outside of the standard home, car and health insurance. For anyone reading this who finds themselves in that same position, ‘wordings’ is the collective term used for the language, clauses and conditions that make up an insurance policy, or can be used to refer to the entire policy itself (e.g. a 'commercial property wording'). In my role at the Lloyd’s Market Association (LMA), I work with business class-specific committees of underwriters to produce model wordings for use across the market. We do this by learning about their challenges, discussing the best approach to help address those challenges and producing model wordings (clauses, endorsements and entire policies) that they can choose to use (or amend) on live risks in the market.
While I’m not yet a wordings or insurance expert, my first taste of a career in wordings has been full of diverse work, granting me exposure to interesting topics and allowing me to develop many of the skills that are becoming ever-more essential to the Lloyd’s market and the insurance industry more generally (see Lloyd’s report: The Market’s Oversight of Contract Wordings).
A role in wordings is largely comprised of the drafting and reviewing of insurance policies and clauses across different business lines and making suggestions for how the text could be altered to better reflect the intent of the parties and their commercial goals. Wordings may seem like a niche area and skillset to build a career upon, but it also forces you to be versatile, dynamic and flexible in your approach, whilst being at the forefront of the most pressing challenges across the industry. Ultimately, our industry’s sole product is the words on the page, so it has to be right!
When working with policy wordings, you are essentially dealing with the foundation of any insurance placement and will need to be commercially minded to ensure underwriters are able to transact business that benefits their clients and mitigates risk. You will need to be conscious of compliance – making sure that anything going into a policy is compliant with the ever-evolving regulations. Bear in mind that a policy document is a contract by its very nature and therefore legal considerations should be high up on your list of priorities. Not to mention a part of the role that appeals to me personally: the opportunity to be creative in solving problems by using clever drafting.
A career in wordings might not be for everyone, and may have been overlooked by talent in favour of underwriting and broking roles in the past. However, the recognition of the importance of expert wordings professionals has drastically increased over the last few years, as managing agents have identified a talent gap in a role that is vital to the market on so many fronts. So, now may be the perfect time to consider a career in a role that the market is crying out for talented people to get involved in. Anyone with an interest in words and writing, with a commercial mindset and an eye for detail, should consider a career in insurance wordings.