Providing comprehensive cyber risk protection, including incident response, to businesses in Australia is Emergence Insurance’s mission.
Emergence is the only standalone cyber insurer in Australia, and its impressive products and services led to recognition as one of Insurance Business’s 5-Star Cyber award winners in 2023.
“We found that by having incident response in-house, we have a greater control over the process,” said chief operating officer Colin Pausey (pictured above). He likened a cyberattack to a car accident where the person involved needs immediate assistance.
“Somebody can actually talk you through the process of how to avoid the worst-case scenario. That’s really what our guides are doing. They’re taking the call when our client has discovered they are in the middle of a cyberattack ... And they’re able to talk the client through the obvious and immediate processes.”
Pausey said in this interview that Emergence had kept its premiums stable in 2022 despite rising premiums in the industry.
“Not only did we hold our premiums well, but we also managed to maintain coverage, [while] some competitors’ premiums increased significantly, some competitors reduced covers or tried to restrict others. We managed to be consistent throughout that period of time … We’re the ones that had less seismic shocks with premiums last year,” he said.
This stability may have been due to the company’s knowledge of past figures as a basis of pricing. Since Emergence was founded in 2015, it has been gathering data for eight years, allowing it to study previous prices to predict future ones.
Pausey saw last year’s premium increases as necessary, but expects a decline in rates because of the entry of more capital and participants into the industry.
Commenting on the few small and medium-sized businesses using cyber insurance to deal with sophisticated cyberattacks and ransom demands, Pausey highlighted the importance of Emergence’s extensive range of mechanisms to protect its clients.
“There’s a policy for 12 months. Ironically, the risk sometimes changes the day after the policy issues, but that’s the set-and-forget format, the insurance contract,” he said. “It’s the real-life risk management, it’s being able to write smarter cyber solutions that I think is going to become quite a differentiator going forward.”
Pausey also emphasised immediacy as the best way to address cyber threats. He said insured companies would “have a much better chance of having a less significant impact as a result of a cyber event than an entity which is uninsured.”
