Cyber Insurtech Dissected in CB Insights’ Q4 2018 Insurtech Briefing
Industry incumbents can leverage emerging technologies to enhance cyber insurance products and services to maximize the opportunities this new market has to offer them.
CB Insights and Willis Towers Watson released their Quarterly Insurtech Briefing for Q4 2018 in February. This quarter’s industry theme discussed how industry incumbents can leverage emerging technologies to enhance cyber insurance products and services to maximize the opportunities this new market has to offer them.
The briefing noted that the many faces of cyber threats today, as depicted in the chart above, mean that no one single incumbent can confront it alone—and this is where insurtechs come in. Due to their nature, startups are inherently positioned to provide “deep technical expertise on very specific pieces of the overall puzzle,” according to the report. For example, each of the companies in the graphic below is attacking a different problem in the cyber space, empowering insurers, insureds and brokers.
To highlight this, the briefing spotlighted a handful of innovative companies in the cyber space, including Coalition, Corax, and Guidewire/Cyence, three organizations with whom The Council has had the opportunity to previously interact.
Josh Motta, CEO of Coalition, spoke at The Council’s 2018 Insurance Leadership Forum about the evolving cyber risk landscape and how Coalition can streamline the rate-quote-bind process for cyber coverage to a matter of minutes (listen to the podcast).
The Council also hosted Jonathan Pope, CEO of Corax (listen to the podcast) at our 2018 Legislative & Working Groups Summit to discuss automating cyber risk analytics, providing brokers with the necessary info analyze their client’s cyber posture and ensure they are adequately covered.
Lastly, we had the opportunity to sit down with the CEO of Cyence, Arvind Parthasarathi at The Council’s 2017 Insurance Leadership Forum (listen to the podcast).
Coalition, a Managing General Agent backed by Swiss Re and Argo Insurance, offers comprehensive cyber and technology error & omissions insurance to small and midsize businesses through brokers. Alongside their cyber insurance offerings, Coalition provides risk management services through their platform, which hosts a number of apps customers can use to monitor threats and test whether their system patches are up to date.
Corax is one of the world’s largest sources of cyber exposure data and loss analytics for the insurance industry, assisted by its AI-enabled platform and automated discovery tools that ingest and analyze a number of third-party data sets. Used by (re)insurers, MGAs, and wholesale and retail brokers worldwide, its cyber risk analytics tools help the industry design, price and sell better cyber insurance products.
Guidewire (Cyence) “combines economic/risk modeling, cybersecurity and big data analytics to create an economic cyber risk modeling platform”. Using a process they call “data listening,” Cyence collects vast amounts of public data, open-source data, proprietary data and third-party data, and then applies machine-learning techniques to curate and package it all into something useful for its customers. Through a cloud-based application, Cyence customers can glean insights about accumulation risks and cyber threats, based on real breach data.
