Cyber: from ‘nice to have’ to ‘need to have’ coverage

Brokers are finally recognizing product as core coverage

Cyber: from ‘nice to have’ to ‘need to have’ coverage

Cyber

By Bethan Moorcraft

The cyber insurance market in Canada has a huge growth opportunity. The country has experienced wide cyber coverage evolution and the marketplace is actively pursuing education and awareness.

Insurance brokers are becoming much more capable of presenting and selling cyber insurance and the number of products available in the market is booming.

“From an awareness perspective, clients are asking their insurance brokers about cyber based on some of the larger incidents like WannaCry and Petya,” said Matt Prevost, senior vice-president, cyber, Chubb.

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“We are also seeing more contractual-driven buyers who are required to purchase cyber coverage, and more people considering cyber insurance for the value-add services that come with the insurance transaction.”

Chubb has recently broadened its North American cyber risk management solutions with two new policy forms: Cyber Enterprise Risk Management (Cyber ERM) and Digitech Enterprise Risk Management (DigiTech ERM). Both combine risk transfer, loss mitigation services and incident response services to cater for organizations of all sizes.

“A key aspect of what we wanted to accomplish with our two new policy forms was making sure that we delivered a product that was accessible to all companies from small businesses all the way up to Fortune 100 businesses,” Prevost told Insurance Business.  

“At Chubb, we have been writing cyber for more than 15 years, so we have lots of experience in claims, products and services. Over the past several years, we have put lots of time and effort into broadening our offering of services that come alongside a risk transfer policy, such as incident response and loss mitigation services.”

But these value-added services are pointless if people don’t purchase cyber coverage. Only better education and awareness will really drive uptake in purchase, according to Prevost. He said it’s important for brokers to simplify what a cyber event (of any scale) really means and what impact it could have on an individual business.

“Objections to cyber insurance haven’t necessarily been price-based complaints,” Prevost commented. “Most of the objections revolve around a complete misunderstanding of the product. People don’t know what cyber insurance is or why they need it. As an industry, we need to solve those problems by communicating cyber in an accessible and scalable way so that a company can actually relate to their exposure.”


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