The Old Daytime-Drinking, Sexual-Harassing Ways Are Thriving at Lloyd’s

Rising from the heart of London’s financial district along Lime Street is a tower so otherworldly that Marvel Studios cast it as an office building for a highly advanced civilization in the film Guardians of the Galaxy. The building’s guts—air ducts, stainless steel staircases, even power cables—are mostly on the outside, creating the futuristic-looking facade. The reality within, however, is years in the other direction.

The tower’s iconic inhabitant, Lloyd’s of London, occupies the most archaic corner remaining in global finance, where life vacillates between the 17th century and the 1980s. Lloyd’s runs a 331-year-old exchange for the worldwide insurance market, not too dissimilar from the New York Stock Exchange of old. But while electronic trading has transformed exchanges across the rest of finance, including at the NYSE and the Chicago Board of Trade, the underwriters and brokers of Lloyd’s mostly do business the old-fashioned way: face-to-face, using rubber stamps, pens, and sheaves of paper. Thousands pack Lloyd’s cavernous trading floor in the well of the Lime Street tower’s 12-story atrium. Four additional open trading floors reach up the atrium’s sides like balconies over a noisy courtyard. The throngs work for insurers bidding to sell trillions of dollars in complex coverage to brokers representing the world’s largest corporations. If you fly on a commercial airliner, work on a deep-sea oil platform, or occupy a desk at a Fortune 500 company, you’re probably covered by a policy arranged through Lloyd’s.