The pitch most brokers were taught to sell cyber cover contains two words a small business client does not understand and one of them is wrong. "Even things like stop selling it as a liability insurance," said Joe Jackson (pictured left), business development underwriter at Emergence Insurance in New Zealand. "It's been called cyber liability for a number of years but it's primarily first party."
Jackson is worth listening to on this because he was on the other side of it. He was a generalist broker before moving to Emergence three years ago and he is upfront about his own record with the product: "didn't sell very much cyber myself".
"I'm not saying this is an easy sell, I know that it can be difficult to convince a small business in New Zealand that they require cyber," he said.
Jackson uses this admission as an opening with brokers, positioning himself as someone who was stuck in the same conversation rather than a specialist arriving to lecture them - "rather than a liability underwriter coming in and trying to push a product that they're underwriting off the side of their desk," he said.
His colleague Matthew Taylor (pictured right), also a business development underwriter at Emergence in New Zealand, made the same move two months ago from a medical mutual where he broked for predominantly medical clients. Two brokers turned cyber underwriters is not a common pairing and it produces a particular kind of technical adviser: one who knows exactly why the cyber conversation gets skipped because they skipped it.
Taylor described the adjustment from broker to underwriter as akin to opening up a toolkit he used to keep closed.
"I suppose talking to brokers instead of talking to clients and sharing my secrets," he said. "It is like opening up the toolbox and letting others have at it as opposed to just trying to get an end solution for the insured."
Both are candid about where cyber sits on a broker's list.
"Cyber does slide to the bottom of the list for most brokers," Jackson said. "If you're at capacity, it's the first thing to slip off the list."
Taylor is also under no illusions that it's a priority. "We found a lot of brokers in the past have been bringing up cyber to check that box and move on."
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Jackson's explanation is that nobody ever gave brokers a reason to do otherwise. "When I was broking, we might have seen an underwriter every year, maybe every 18 months and it wasn't the best education, I don't think."
He declined to blame the underwriters he did see. "Not that it's the underwriter's fault but maybe they didn't have the education themselves because they're underwriting a suite of insurances and that's just landed on the corner of their desk."
That could be an argument for a monoline specialist underwriter like Emergence - and Jackson made it without decoration.
"What's the big appeal for us is that it's the only thing we write, so we actually do have a pretty good understanding of it and how to make it easier," he said.
Taylor found the same gap even among clients who should have been the easiest sell. Health providers hold volumes of sensitive data and sit near the top of any exposure list.
"So it's a high concern, it's a high-risk industry, there's a lot of sensitive data," he said. "So a lot of them are quite worried about getting their risks covered but don't really know where to start."
Even there, he said, "it was still an education piece."
The fix Jackson proposed is a change of vocabulary and it works because it replaces terminology that doesn't fit with one the client already buys.
Cyber cover, he argues, behaves far more like property and business interruption than like a liability policy. "There's a very small liability portion but it responds in the same way as a material damage and business interruption policy," he said.
Emergence's framing for that is a fire.
"And when you frame it like that, we use digital fire as our terminology because it responds in the exact same way as if there was a fire at your building and then your BI was triggered."
The analogy carries through into the claim. "So instead of firefighters, we would have digital forensics and incident response come in and the cost to get you back up and running."
Jackson's argument for why it lands is psychological rather than technical.
"And even little things like that, in reframing it to clients and to brokers, it's way easier to understand than telling a client, 'We're going to talk about cyber liability,' and psychologically they go, 'I don't know anything about cyber, I don't know anything about liability either,' and it's not a conversation where they want to be in."
Material damage and business interruption cover, by contrast, is something a client has probably bought for a number of years and understands.
The response he reported suggests the appetite was always there and the explanation was not. "And I genuinely feel we go out and you can see the light bulbs going off because it has actually been made clear for the first time," said Jackson.
It is, said Taylor, about "trying to arm our brokers with the tools to have those meaningful conversations".
For many brokers this reframing and renaming may come as actionable intelligence. The reason cyber has been hard to place may have less to do with client indifference than with a product name the market inherited and never questioned. Two people who could not sell it under that name now spend their days explaining why. Emergence is likely taking the same argument into the United States this week, launching a cyber business aimed squarely at the small and mid-sized segment where uptake is thinnest - which suggests the agency believes the obstacle it has been working on in New Zealand is not a local one.
