Cyber insurance rates have fallen roughly 43% since late 2023, yet claims severity has continued rising throughout the same period, and the gap between the two is reshaping what brokers are being asked to demonstrate on behalf of clients at renewal.
That tension is the market problem Aon is trying to solve with CyQu Marketplace. The new capability sits within Aon's existing CyQu cyber risk platform and connects businesses with cybersecurity service providers once a risk assessment has identified control gaps. A client completes an assessment, the tool surfaces prioritised remediation options, and the output can then be used to show underwriters documented evidence of risk improvement rather than a static snapshot of current posture.
Carriers are increasingly moving away from checkbox-style questionnaires and towards evidence of ongoing control improvement. Marsh noted last year that policies are likely to increasingly reward organisations that can demonstrate strong defences with more favourable terms.
Brent Rieth, global cyber leader at Aon, said the challenge is not information. "Businesses today have greater access to cyber information than ever before, but many still face challenges turning those insights into action," he said.
International cyber rates have dropped 43% since the fourth quarter of 2023, even as claims severity has continued rising, according to specialist underwriter DUAL, which warned in April that several markets could turn unprofitable by 2027 if current trends persist. The UK is, in DUAL's own framing, already in late-stage softening. That combination - falling prices against rising and more sophisticated threats - is the setup that has preceded corrections in previous insurance cycles.
Aon's own Global Risk Management Survey, referenced in the product announcement, found cyber retained the top position in the global risk agenda and is forecast to hold it through 2028. Social engineering incidents rose 53% year-on-year, according to the survey, while social engineering and fraud claims increased 233%.
Aon attributes those figures in part to AI-enabled deepfakes and impersonation techniques. Both data points are from Aon's proprietary research, but they point in the same direction as independent analysis. Moody's 2026 Cyber Risk Outlook found AI has compressed attack timelines into hours and warned that underwriting discipline, and not premium growth, will determine which carriers remain well-positioned when the pricing cycle turns.
Cyber renewals increasingly require clients to produce evidence of control improvement over time, rather than just attestation that controls exist at a single point. Underwriters at the hardening end of the market are already asking for dated exports - patch compliance rates, MFA deployment logs, backup restore-test records - rather than self-certified answers on a proposal form. A client who has completed a risk assessment but taken no documented remediation steps since the last renewal is in a weaker submission position than one who can show active gap closure.
CyQu Marketplace is one broker-led response to that problem. Brokers building integrated assessment-to-remediation workflows to support underwriting conversations are likely to intensify as the claims environment continues to diverge from premium levels.
