It was in an interview with Insurance Business that the director of cyber at the Geneva Association Dr Rachel Anne Carter noted the role of collaboration in increasing cyber insurance uptake. This is growing ever more significant, she said, as the threats sweeping the sector continue to evolve.
Furthering this point, Tom Spier (pictured), commercial director, global markets, at Cyberscout, highlighted that the service provider industry is a tight-knit sector where people are very happy to share information.
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However, Spier noted that 2020 has been a very different kind of year from that perspective. Data gathering remotely means you lose a lot of anecdotal information, he said. Yet, this has been balanced out by the sheer amount of organised feedback Cyberscout has amassed – something that has become vital given a recent discovery it made in a survey that the number one reason why insurance companies do not have a cyber insurance proposition for either small businesses or for private individuals today is that they feel they lack the internal expertise to develop those products.
“And so that that really highlighted to us that we needed to do more to leverage our experience and our expertise of what works from a distribution standpoint and from a coverage standpoint, and to really help the market to step up and address a need that’s very clearly been identified,” he said.
“The other options in the survey asked, ‘is there customer appetite?’ And yes, they know there’s customer appetite. ‘And are you being asked for it by brokers?’ And yes, they’re being asked for it by brokers. ‘And is this a priority?’ And the answer is that, ‘yes, it’s a priority’, but they simply don’t have the in-house expertise required to change a desire for a product to something they can deliver to their consumers and, by doing so, help them.”
This is why insurers need to recognise the role that cyber solutions providers are looking to play when it comes to providing support and assistance through the development of products. If insurers can embrace that understanding, he said, then they have an opportunity to unlock solutions.
“The insurance industry is somewhat renowned for doing things the way they’ve always been done,” he said. “And that’s not true of everybody, but it is a challenge. Cyber insurance as we know it today was formed in the early 2000s and it was aimed at the large technology companies on the west coast of America. And some insurers think that the same principles still apply today. But given how the risk has changed, given how we need to serve very small businesses and need to serve private individuals, it requires a new approach. And some [insurance companies] have been slower than others in waking up to that fact.”
