“Our biggest competitor isn’t any of the other insurers who are offering cyber insurance, it’s apathy to the topic and it’s uninsurance.”
Speaking yesterday at the launch of Aviva Cyber Respond, Stephen Ridley (pictured), head of cyber at Aviva, identified the cyber protection gap facing UK companies of every size and sector, and the mindset shift required to bridge that gap. With education at the heart of the issue and the solution alike, he highlighted where efforts to educate brokers and their clients on cyber risk have fallen short in the past.
It hasn’t been down to a lack of effort, he said, but rather a lack of consistency and clarity in the messaging being delivered. From his time on both the broker and carrier sides of the market, he has seen that the communication and education delivered around cyber has tended to be sporadic, untargeted and all-too-often ineffective, as seen by how relatively little the dial on uptake has moved in the last 10-plus years.
In conversation with Insurance Business after the launch, Ridley noted that the key challenge to delivering the right messaging, education and training on cyber is largely rooted in the perceived complexity of the product line.
“There are just so many different conflicting messages around what can be a very complicated area,” he said. “So, what we’ve looked at doing is distilling and removing some of that complexity to give our brokers something that helps them cut through some of that noise. We’ve taken a step back to really think about how to have a meaningful impact and how to get this message across in a better way to businesses.”
It was with this in mind that Aviva has rolled out its Aviva Certified Cyber Insurance and Risk Professional (ACCIRP) accreditation - a certified computer-based cyber training course aimed at educating and empowering insurance brokers. The certification, which will be available free of charge to brokers through the Aviva Development Zone platform when live, features seven modules and is expected to accrue participating brokers between eight and 10 hours of CPD.
“Brokers can dip in and out of the modules as they please, and some of the modules are shorter than others,” he said. “For instance, there’s one that looks at the policy cover in depth, which is quite a lengthy module with lots of sub-components to it, but brokers can leave and then pick up where they left off. And if they want to go back and refresh their memories of the modules, they can repeat them. There’s a 50-question assessment at the end but there are also micro-exercises throughout to make sure the key learning points have been reinforced as you go along.”
Aviva is working with the CII to make sure the certification is benchmarked against its standards, he said, and each of the modules has been developed with the ambition of providing a truly comprehensive overview of the basics of cyber. From policy wordings, to understanding the wider risk environment, to digging into the terminology used in cyber insurance – Aviva has looked to address many of the conflicts or tensions that arise when the same concept is referred to by multiple different names.
“What we’re doing is taking it right back to basics, to deliver something that doesn’t assume any knowledge to start with,” he said. “And it starts from moment one of the cyber proposition because we’ve seen that so much of the information around cyber jumps too far down the process – to why clients should buy a policy. All that does is add confusion, or it just doesn’t land as well as it should.
“This is taking it right the way back and considering the very foundations – what is cyber risk? We’ve got a module that is all about that terminology and looking at the main terms you will come across in cyber, almost adding a thesaurus – ‘you may have also heard this referred to as…’ etc.”
Critical to the integrity of the ACCIRP accreditation is that it is proudly carrier-agnostic, Ridley said.
“Of course, it has an Aviva lens on it, because we’ve developed it and we use our cyber policy wordings to illustrate how some of the product works,” he said. “But this is intended to be a generic qualification that brokers can use to help give them confidence and knowledge about cyber risk in its fullest sense, to help combat what is still a big knowledge gap.”
Given the cyber protection gap, growing the cyber insurance market itself in a meaningful and sustainable way is more of a focus for Aviva than zeroing in on just growing its market share. And Ridley voiced his support for every insurer providing cyber coverage to think about how they can create greater consistency across the space.
A focus on competition just adds greater complexity to the market, he said, because rather than educating brokers and clients on the fundamentals of cyber insurance, the emphasis is on explaining the nuances between different policy wordings. Focusing on the overall health and sustainability of the market should be key right now, and that’s what Aviva is looking to do with the ACCIRP certification.
As to what a successful rollout looks like, Ridley said his key metric for success is to see more brokers engaging with customers on cyber risk. What he wants to see is a bigger market full-stop, he said, with a higher quote volume from a larger range of brokers as this will show that both brokers and customers are more engaged in conversations about cyber insurance and its potential to protect and support their businesses.
“I would hope that everything that we’ve delivered and will continue to evolve and deliver over the course of the coming weeks, months and years, will set us up to be in a really strong position to benefit from that,” he said. “But for me, this is about how we use our platform as the biggest general insurer in the UK and the most well-known insurance brand in the UK, to help grow this market.”
Read now: Bringing cyber insurance back to basics
