Operate Smart in a Soft Cycle: A Practical Guide for the London Market

Early signs point to softening across several London Market classes. Rates are levelling, competition is edging up, and buyers want more than price. Soft cycles don’t just test technical pricing—they test how well you run the business. The firms that win protect margin, move faster and make their value easy to understand.

This post lays out a practical, plain-English approach you can use right now. It’s built around four themes: pricing discipline, execution speed, governance around delegated authority, and clear customer value.

Pricing discipline without the drama

When the market softens, “just this once” decisions multiply. That’s how appetite creeps without anyone noticing. The fix isn’t complicated: write down what you want to write, where, at what limits, and what requires a referral. Make the referral path obvious and time-bound—hours, not days. If you approve an exception, give it a reason, an owner and an expiry date so it doesn’t quietly become the new normal.

Keep your wording library tidy. If appetite shifts, ensure endorsements and clauses follow suit. Nothing undermines pricing discipline faster than contracts that say “yes” where underwriting means “maybe”.

A few dials worth watching each week: hit ratio inside vs. outside appetite; how long referrals take to approve; and how those exceptions perform in loss terms. If those numbers slip, you’ve got early warning that discipline is starting to fray.

Speed as a strategy

In a soft market, execution speed is a competitive edge. Buyers expect quicker responses and cleaner renewals. You get there by shifting from “heroic inbox work” to simple, role-based workflows: who does what, in what order, by when. Give steps owners and SLAs. Add automatic nudges so nothing stalls. Collect data once and reuse it from submission to binder to audit. Anything that still involves re-keying—from a policy admin system, bordereaux file or document store—should be on a shortlist to integrate.

Renewals are where this shows. Build a short pre-bind checklist, get documents ready early, and set decision gates so you don’t scramble the day before expiry. Track a few basics: average days to bind, handoffs per case, emails per case, and the share of renewals completed 10+ days before expiry. If those move in the right direction, you’re winning time back without cutting corners.

Guard the back book: governance and delegated authority

Small leaks add up in soft markets, and they often hide in delegated authority programmes. The goal isn’t bureaucracy—it’s clarity you can prove.

Start with contract control. Store binders and TOBAs in one place with version history and named approvals. Treat scope and limits as structured data (territories, classes, attachment points, referral rules) so your checks and MI run off the same source of truth.

Handle bordereaux exceptions like any other workflow: run automated checks, route anomalies to named owners, and give them due dates. Close the loop by tracking fixes to completion, not just noting them. Set audit cadence by risk, and keep findings in the same system you use to do the work. That way, remediation tasks aren’t forgotten after the report is filed.

Keep a living risk register for partners and binders with inherent/residual ratings, triggers and actions. Tie each risk to specific evidence—assessment answers, documents, or MI snapshots—so you can show what changed and why.

Good health checks here include exceptions per 1,000 records (and how quickly they close), audit findings reopened, and a simple “evidence completeness” score: do steps have the approvals and attachments they should?

Make value visible (beyond rate)

When price pressure rises, service and clarity become differentiators. Use renewal packs to explain coverage in plain language and call out what changed. Share simple service MI—speed to bind, first-response time, exceptions resolved, claims progression—so clients can see improvements rather than guess. If you operate in niches, package helpful insights: for example, cyber control posture advice or sector-specific loss trends.

And if you promise SLAs, measure them and show the results. That builds trust and makes renewals more straightforward, even when rates are easing.

A simple 90-day plan

You can make real progress in a quarter without a huge project.

Days 1–30: Stabilise. Write down appetite and referral rules in one place. Map onboarding and renewal steps end-to-end and remove the ones no one can justify. Consolidate contract templates and approvals; clean out dead clauses.

Days 31–60: Orchestrate. Turn those maps into role-based workflows with owners, SLAs and automated reminders. Stand up exception handling for bordereaux with clear routing and escalation. Assemble a modest monthly pack of metrics: days to bind, referral volume and turnaround, exception closure and audit findings status.

Days 61–90: Prove and scale. Run a live renewal cohort through the new process and compare before/after numbers. Do a quick “tabletop audit” of two binders to check evidence is where it should be. Share a one-page service summary at QBRs and capture feedback to refine the next cycle.

Evidence by default

The best way to make audits painless is to capture proof while the work happens: approvals, documents, referrals, exceptions, and decisions. If someone asks for the story behind a binder, you should be able to open the record and see the current scope and limits with history, the onboarding assessments and rationale, a timeline of endorsements and overrides, MI snapshots, exception logs, and audit findings with proof they were fixed. No hunting, no reconstruction—just the facts.

What to watch

To know if you’re defending margin with discipline rather than bleeding it in the chaos of execution, keep an eye on a handful of signals: hit ratio inside appetite, referral volume and turnaround time, days to bind (by segment), renewals completed before expiry, exceptions per 1,000 records and time-to-close, audit findings to closure and re-open rate, and simple loss trend deltas by class.

The takeaway

Soft cycles reward firms that operate with clarity, speed and control. Pricing discipline keeps you honest. Workflow basics make you faster. Solid DA governance protects the back book. Visible service and coverage clarity make renewals easier. None of this requires a moonshot—just a few deliberate changes that turn good intentions into everyday habits.