A specialist cyber insurer has updated its policy wording this week after consulting with brokers on the ever-broadening coverage required by their commercial clients.
Cyber pioneer Emergence Insurance announced yesterday that it had upgraded its policy features to encompass a wider range of threats and offer greater protection to businesses of every kind – whether they’re a two-person café or an ASX-listed organisation.
Gerry Power, national head of sales for Emergence, said the firm revisits its policies on an annual basis as frequent updates are necessary in order to keep pace with the rapidly evolving cyber environment.
“We’re seeing a change in criminal activity but there is also a change in regulatory environment,” said Power, pointing to Australia’s new Notifiable Data Breaches scheme as well as the EU’s GDPR regulation.
“Clients were saying that, with this change in regulatory environment, they need confidence that the cyber solution they buy is responding to their needs.”
New key policy features that Power says set the insurer apart are international jurisdiction cover as well as comprehensive cyber theft coverage.
“For those companies that are setting up legal entities in other countries, they were telling us that they wanted their policy to deal with the change in jurisdiction – that was a need we felt was growing for Australian businesses,” said Power.
“Another important area where we’re providing a level of cover that very few can provide is in the cyber theft space,” he told Insurance Business. “A lot of insurers provide a limit of around $250,000 but under our new wording you can buy $1 million worth of cyber theft cover.”
Other upgraded policy features include a reduced time excess for business interruption, greater clarity on what’s included in IT infrastructure, cover for costs incurred for crisis management, and cover for costs to third parties as a reward for assistance leading to the arrest and conviction of a cyber-criminal – among many others.
Insured cyber events include crimeware, cyber espionage, cyber extortion, denial of service, distributed denial of service, hacking, payment card skimming, point-of-sale intrusion, web app attacks, cyber theft, or telephone phreaking perpetrated against insureds.
Another key point of difference is instant access to a response team of experts who can immediately mitigate potential threats to insureds’ businesses.
“The important thing from Emergence’s perspective is cyber insurance is all we do,” said Power. “We do nothing else so we’re very unique when it comes to cyber insurance in the Australian market.”
