When Sir Charles Roxburgh, chairman of Lloyd’s of London, walked onto the stage in first Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers Risk Forum, he did not play up the historical competition between his institution and Bermuda. In fact, he thinks they need each other more than ever.

“I think a strong Bermuda is good for Lloyd’s, and a strong Lloyd’s is good for Bermuda, and we have an incredibly important and wholly symbiotic relationship,” he said on Wednesday to an audience full of industry players at the Hamilton Princess and Beach Club.

For an island that once heard London describe it as a threat, that language is a watershed moment.

Fiona Luck, a Bermuda market veteran, Bermuda Monetary Authority alumna and now deputy chairwoman of Lloyd’s, reminded the audience how far attitudes have shifted in just eight years.

“When I first joined the Lloyd’s board, the sense was, it was them and us. It was Lloyd’s and it was Bermuda,” she said. Now, under Sir Charles and Bruce Carnegie-Brown, former chairman, that has been replaced by an openly collaborative stance.

Sir Charles spelled out how tightly the markets are already intertwined: many of Lloyd’s most successful syndicates are owned by Bermuda companies, and several firms that “grew up” at Lloyd’s now run substantial Bermuda subsidiaries. Even Lloyd’s own central fund reinsurance is supported by major Bermuda reinsurers, he reminded the crowd.

If there was any doubt Bermuda is shaping global insurance policy as opposed to just participating in it, Sir Charles dispelled it with a rare “inside treasury” anecdote from his time as a senior British official.

Around 2014, Lloyd’s lobbied the UK Treasury about being “nowhere in the [insurance-linked securities] market” because Britain lacked the legal and tax framework. The chancellor at the time “threw that at me and said, ‘Charles, can you sort this out?’” he recalled.

The result: a tiny treasury team, fresh off Solvency II negotiations, drafted the Risk Transformation Regulations 2017 — “a direct response to the success of Bermuda in the ILS market,” he said. Those rules enabled Lloyd’s to launch London Bridge and London Bridge 2, two protected cell companies that now include Bermuda companies as investors.

His second example was more political. Sir Charles singled out the Bermuda Monetary Authority, alongside the Monetary Authority of Singapore, as one of “two of the world’s leading regulators” that proved how a jurisdiction can have high prudential standards and still welcome business and innovation.

That model, he argued, directly influenced the UK’s decision to give its regulators, namely the Prudential Regulation Authority and Financial Conduct Authority, a new secondary objective for growth and competitiveness, now being vigorously used by the Labour Government under Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

For Bermuda groups using Lloyd’s as a capital and distribution platform, the most tangible news may be buried in process details.

Historically, getting a new Lloyd’s managing agency approved could take 12 to 15 months, as Lloyd’s, the PRA and the FCA all worked separately.

“We worked with the regulator to redesign that process,” Sir Charles said. “We do it once, and we do it now in less than six months.”

Another pain point, the Senior Managers and Certification Regime, could take four to five months just to approve a senior person moving roles within the same firm. Lloyd’s and the regulators are now piloting a “do it once” model, which Sir Charles hopes will cut that to weeks while maintaining “unquestioned” prudential and conduct standards.

Crucially, he stressed, Lloyd’s is not asking for looser capital or conduct rules. Its entire agenda is about speed and simplicity, not lighter-touch supervision.

Sir Charles also sketched out where he sees the next wave of joint opportunity, and the list reads like a blueprint tailor‑made for Bermuda capital, including data centres and their growing systemic risk; the defence and security build‑up in Europe; and massive new infrastructure for the energy transition.

Lloyd’s Labs, meanwhile, a financial accelerator for start-up companies, has run Bermudian-based cohorts, but he admitted most innovations are still small. The next step, he said, is enabling innovation at scale like consortiums, bigger line sizes, and flexible reinsurance structures so leading underwriters (many of them Bermuda‑linked) can build truly large solutions for these global risks.