Remember when Lloyd’s of London closed its underwriting room for an entire day last week as part of a resilience test? Tomorrow (March 18) it will be the turn of QBE to do the same with its UK offices, which include the insurer’s European operations headquarters in London.
“In response to the COVID -19 pandemic, we are escalating our contingency measures in case it becomes necessary to close one or more of our UK offices for the safety of our employees,” noted QBE in a statement.
“As such, QBE will be further testing the resilience of its business continuity plans by closing its UK offices on Wednesday, March 18, and instructing all of our employees to work from home on this date only. A large proportion of our workforce currently have the ability to work agilely and to ensure the test is valuable we are asking our employees to continue their daily activities.”
QBE said the exercise will allow them to re-test employees’ personal circumstances and, in turn, the effectiveness of the company’s business continuity plans in the UK. The stress test will run for 24 hours, during which time no visitors will be permitted to the offices.
“To help test our resilience we would like to encourage our customers to keep scheduled meetings by conducting them virtually,” added the insurer. “We do not expect any interruption to our services and our customers as a result of this test.”
