Bordereaux Reporting Guide for Lloyd's Coverholders 2026

If you manage a delegated authority arrangement at Lloyd's, bordereaux reporting is one of the most consequential operational processes you run. Get it right and your syndicate relationship is built on trust, your authority levels are maintained, and your book of business grows. Get it wrong — consistently late submissions, misaligned field mapping, missing records, calculation errors — and you face a delegated authority review, curtailed binding authority, or termination of the arrangement entirely.

Despite the stakes, bordereaux reporting is still done manually at many MGAs and coverholders. Spreadsheets, copy-paste from claims systems, manual aggregation across multiple data sources, last-minute reconciliation before submission deadlines — a process that is labour-intensive, error-prone, and fundamentally misaligned with the quality standards Lloyd's increasingly expects.

This guide covers what bordereaux are, what Lloyd's requires, where manual processes fail, and how automation changes the picture for coverholders who want to protect and grow their delegated authority relationships.

What Are Bordereaux?

A bordereau (plural: bordereaux) is a detailed report submitted by a coverholder to the managing agent of a Lloyd's syndicate, documenting the business written under a binding authority agreement. The word is French — meaning a memorandum or note — and has been used in the Lloyd's market for centuries, though the format and data requirements have evolved considerably in the modern era.

For a thorough grounding in the terminology, see our bordereaux glossary entry, which covers the full definition, legal status, and market usage. In summary, there are three primary types of bordereau that most coverholders need to produce:

Premium Bordereau

The premium bordereau documents all policies bound by the coverholder during the reporting period. It lists individual risks, showing the insured name, risk details, inception and expiry dates, sums insured, premium charged, commission retained, and net premium remitted to the syndicate. The premium bordereau is the primary mechanism by which the syndicate understands what risks it has assumed and verifies that premiums are being correctly calculated and remitted.

Claims Bordereau

The claims bordereau reports all claims activity during the period — new claims notified, reserve movements, claims payments made, and claims closed. Each entry is linked to the corresponding policy in the premium bordereau, allowing the syndicate to assess loss development against expected claims experience. The claims bordereau is typically the more operationally demanding of the two to produce, because it requires real-time accuracy from the claims management system and consistent field mapping across potentially hundreds of individual claims.

Technical Account Bordereau

The technical account bordereau (sometimes called a cash bordereau or account bordereau) is a financial summary reconciling premiums received, claims paid, and commissions deducted. It provides the syndicate with the data needed to post the coverholder's account and is the document most closely scrutinised by the syndicate's finance team. Discrepancies between the technical account bordereau and the premium or claims bordereaux are a common trigger for DA reviews.

Why Bordereaux Matter to Your Syndicate Relationship

It is worth being direct about why bordereaux quality matters so much to the ongoing coverholder-syndicate relationship. Lloyd's syndicates write business through coverholders because it is commercially efficient to do so — the coverholder brings distribution, local market expertise, and underwriting capacity deployment that the syndicate could not achieve through its own direct operations. But the fundamental information asymmetry of the arrangement means the syndicate is relying entirely on what the coverholder reports.

Bordereaux are the syndicate's window into the business. If the bordereaux are accurate, complete, and timely, the syndicate can price, reserve, and manage capital appropriately. If they are not, the syndicate is effectively flying blind on a portion of its book — and the consequences for capital management, Lloyd's central reporting, and ultimately the syndicate's own returns can be significant.

This is why bordereaux quality is treated not merely as an administrative matter but as a direct indicator of the coverholder's operational capability and trustworthiness. A coverholder that consistently delivers clean, timely bordereaux is demonstrating that it has the systems and discipline to manage delegated authority responsibly. One that routinely submits late, incomplete, or inaccurate reports is demonstrating the opposite.

Lloyd's Delegated Authority Requirements

DXC and Atlas Submission Standards

Lloyd's processing of bordereaux data is handled through its technology infrastructure, which in recent years has been consolidated around the Atlas platform (previously processed through DXC Technology systems). Submissions must conform to Lloyd's prescribed data standards, which define required fields, acceptable formats, and validation rules for both premium and claims data.

The Lloyd's DA Operations team publishes current technical specifications for bordereau submissions, including the required field set for premium bordereaux (typically 40–60+ fields depending on the class of business) and claims bordereaux (typically 30–50+ fields). These specifications are updated periodically, and coverholders are expected to implement changes within defined transition windows. Failure to update field mapping following a specification change is a common source of validation failures.

Core Required Fields

While the full field specification varies by class, core premium bordereau fields typically include: unique risk reference, original currency, premium in original currency, exchange rate, premium in GBP, coverholder commission rate, coverholder expenses, net premium to syndicate, policy inception date, policy expiry date, insured name, risk postcode or territory, class of business code, and Lloyd's unique market reference (UMR). Claims bordereaux additionally require: date of loss, date of notification, claim reference, reserve amounts (outstanding, IBNR), paid to date, and claim status.

Submission Timing

Managing agents set submission deadlines in the binding authority agreement. The standard is typically 15–20 business days following the end of the reporting period, though this varies by agreement and class. Coverholders should note that "reporting period end" and "submission deadline" are different concepts — the clock starts when the period closes, not when data is ready. A premium bordereau for January business might be due by 25 February, regardless of how long it takes to extract and format the data.

Monthly vs Quarterly Submissions: What Determines Your Frequency

The question of whether a coverholder reports monthly or quarterly is determined primarily by the binding authority agreement, but it is not fixed for the life of the arrangement. Several factors influence whether Lloyd's or a managing agent requires or requests a move to more frequent reporting:

• Premium volume. High-volume books typically require monthly reporting to allow the syndicate to manage its premium trust account position and Lloyd's central reporting obligations.
• Claims frequency. Books with high claims frequency (such as motor or travel) typically require monthly claims bordereaux because quarterly reporting would leave claims reserves significantly out of date.
• Performance concerns. A coverholder experiencing adverse loss development or whose quarterly reports show reserve inadequacy may be moved to monthly reporting as part of enhanced oversight. This transition is almost always triggered by performance concerns and should be treated as an early warning signal.
• Lloyd's oversight requirements. Lloyd's Delegated Underwriting team can impose monthly reporting on a managing agent's entire coverholder panel, or on specific coverholders, as part of its performance framework. Managing agents who receive such a requirement cascade it to their coverholders.

For coverholders currently on quarterly reporting, it is worth understanding that the operational gap between quarterly and monthly reporting is larger than it appears. A process that takes two weeks to complete quarterly is a significant burden when it needs to run every month. Automation is the only sustainable path to monthly reporting at scale.

Common Errors That Trigger DA Reviews

The Lloyd's Delegated Underwriting team monitors coverholder performance across several dimensions, and bordereaux quality is a significant factor in the annual coverholder performance assessment. The errors that most commonly attract scrutiny fall into the following categories:

Late Submissions

Persistent late submission is the single most common trigger for an escalated DA review. A one-off delay with clear communication and a valid explanation is generally tolerated. A pattern of submissions arriving three, five, or ten days late is treated as evidence of operational incapability.

Inconsistent Field Mapping

Bordereau validation rules check not just that fields are present but that values are consistent with expected formats and ranges. A class of business code that changes between submissions without a corresponding change to the risk profile, a currency field that switches between ISO codes mid-year, or a date format that changes between submissions (DD/MM/YYYY vs. MM/DD/YYYY) will all generate validation failures. In a manual process, these errors often reflect different staff members preparing the submission each month with slightly different approaches.

Missing or Duplicate Records

Every policy bound during the period must appear on the premium bordereau. Every claim notified or active during the period must appear on the claims bordereau. Missing records — typically caused by incomplete data extraction from the source system — create gaps in the syndicate's view of the book. Duplicate records — commonly caused by manual entry errors or failed de-duplication — overstate premium or claims volumes and require manual correction.

Premium and Claims Reconciliation Failures

The technical account bordereau must reconcile with both the premium and claims bordereaux. Where a claims payment appears in the claims bordereau but does not match a corresponding reserve in the prior period, or where the net premium per the technical account differs from the sum of the premium bordereau entries, the reconciliation fails. In a manual process, these discrepancies are often caused by timing differences — a payment processed after the data cut for the claims bordereau but before the technical account is prepared.

Calculation Errors

Manual calculation of commission, brokerage, and net premium in a spreadsheet introduces formula errors, especially when exchange rates are applied. A commission rate applied to gross premium when it should apply to net premium, a rounding difference on currency conversion, or a formula that breaks when a new row is inserted — these are precisely the errors that automated validation should catch before submission, not after.

The Manual Reporting Problem

Bordereaux reporting at most small and mid-size coverholders and MGAs is still largely a manual process. The workflow typically looks like this: extract data from the claims system (often in a format that requires significant reformatting), manually aggregate premium data from the policy administration system, cross-reference the two against the prior period's submission to identify new records, apply exchange rate conversions using a separate rate source, calculate commission and net premium, format the output to match Lloyd's specifications, validate manually, submit, then correct errors identified by the Lloyd's validation engine.

This process typically takes several days per submission cycle for a coverholder writing even a modest volume of business. For a coverholder managing multiple binding authorities across different syndicates, each with slightly different field requirements and submission deadlines, the cumulative burden is substantial. Staff time that could be spent on underwriting, claims management, or business development is consumed by data wrangling.

Beyond the staff cost, the manual process creates structural quality risk. Every step that depends on human attention is a step that can introduce an error. Errors that are not caught before submission create downstream problems: validation failures, resubmissions, and the reputational damage of consistent inaccuracy in the syndicate's eyes.

Effective document processing automation is the foundation of addressing this problem — ensuring that source data entering the bordereau process is already structured, validated, and mapped correctly before any human touches it.

How Automation Eliminates Manual Bordereau Errors

The automation opportunity in bordereaux reporting is straightforward in principle, though implementation requires careful attention to the specific data architecture of each coverholder. The core components are:

Automated Data Extraction

Rather than manual exports from the claims or policy system, automated extraction pulls data on a defined schedule — daily, if necessary — directly from the source systems. Extraction rules are configured once and run consistently, eliminating the variation introduced by different staff members running different export queries.

Field Mapping and Transformation

Every source system uses different field names, formats, and coding conventions. Automated field mapping translates the source data into the Lloyd's submission format, applying standardised transformations (date format normalisation, currency conversion using a defined rate source, class of business code mapping) consistently on every run. When Lloyd's updates its specification, the mapping is updated once in the configuration, not across multiple spreadsheets maintained by multiple staff.

Pre-Submission Validation

Before a bordereau is submitted, automated validation rules check for the common error categories: missing required fields, out-of-range values, reconciliation discrepancies between premium and claims data, duplicate records, and calculation inconsistencies. Issues are flagged to a named reviewer before submission, not discovered after the Lloyd's validation engine rejects the file.

Submission Formatting and Delivery

The validated bordereau is automatically formatted to the required file specification and delivered to the submission endpoint on schedule. Submission confirmation and any validation feedback from the Lloyd's system are captured and stored against the submission record, providing a complete audit trail of what was submitted, when, and what the outcome was.

The Audit Trail Connection

There is a direct and often underappreciated connection between claims data quality and bordereaux accuracy. The claims bordereau is only as good as the claims records it is built from. If claims are incompletely recorded — missing dates of loss, unresolved reserve positions, uncaptured payments — the claims bordereau will reflect those gaps.

This means that improving bordereaux quality is not just a reporting problem — it is a claims data quality problem. MGAs that invest in structured claims intake, consistent field capture at first notification of loss, and rigorous reserve management processes see the benefits downstream in cleaner bordereaux and fewer reconciliation failures.

The claims management disciplines that produce clean bordereaux are the same disciplines that enable accurate reserving, effective litigation management, and defensible compliance records. The data infrastructure is shared, and the investment in getting it right pays dividends across all these use cases simultaneously.

How Regure Helps Coverholders Produce Accurate Bordereaux

Regure's platform is designed specifically for MGAs and coverholders operating in the Lloyd's and London market. The claims management infrastructure we provide captures structured data at every stage of the claim lifecycle — intake, reserve setting, payment processing, closure — in the formats that bordereaux reporting requires.

Rather than extracting data from a claims system designed for operational management and reformatting it for bordereaux purposes, Regure's data model is built with downstream reporting requirements in mind. Field definitions align with Lloyd's submission standards. Validation rules flag data quality issues at the point of entry, not at the point of bordereau preparation. Automated bordereau generation pulls from the single source of truth, applies the required transformations, and produces submission-ready files on schedule.

For coverholders managing multiple binding authorities with different syndicates, Regure supports multiple submission configurations from the same underlying claims data — different field mappings, different reporting periods, different submission formats — without requiring separate manual processes for each relationship.

For a deeper understanding of what bordereaux represent in the delegated authority context, our bordereaux glossary entry provides comprehensive background on the terminology, regulatory context, and market usage.

The coverholder that submits clean, timely bordereaux every month is not just meeting a contractual obligation — it is demonstrating to the syndicate that it has the operational discipline to be trusted with delegated authority at scale.

Ready to Automate Your Bordereaux Reporting?

If your bordereaux process still depends on spreadsheets, manual data extraction, and last-minute reconciliation before each submission deadline, the question is not whether you will encounter a significant error — it is when. And when that error surfaces in a managing agent's performance review, the remediation process is substantially more disruptive than the investment in getting automation right before a problem occurs.

Request a Regure demo to see how our platform handles end-to-end bordereaux reporting for Lloyd's coverholders — from structured claims intake through automated submission and validation feedback.