SAN FRANCISCO—There was a repeated theme at Advisen’s Cyber Risk Insights Conference: the symbiotic relationship of insurance and technology is needed once more.
Maybe it was the fact our conference was held at the same time as the RSA Conference down the street; maybe it was part of a natural understanding of the complex properties inherent to cyber risk; maybe it was the serendipity of these things converging all at once.
The tech community and the insurance community are no strangers to each other by any means but, judging from panels and conversations at the conference, there is a sort of disconnect in that these two friends are speaking different cyber-risk languages… maybe just different dialects.
Roxane Divol, SVP and GM of website security for Symantec said on this topic during her keynote address: “The left and the right hand haven’t been talking. It is time for the technology companies to work with the insurance ecosystem.”
It did not take long for this theme to emerge. A breakfast held on the first day of our conference quickly made it clear the tech community and the insurance community are in agreement that they need each other—and maybe now more than ever—to understand and mitigate cyber risk.
The awareness in the insurance industry came quickly, following a series of some multi-$100million cyber losses such as Target (and the elephant in the room: aggregation). It did not take a genius to realize the insurance industry’s static approach to cyber-risk underwriting was no longer going to cut it. But oftentimes this is what the industry is going with: an assessment, some dialogue with an underwriter, a price set and a lot of fingers crossed, explained Ben Beeson cyber risk practice leader at Lockton, during the breakfast.
There simply isn’t enough sufficient data in the insurance industry for it to come up with solutions on its own.
“We need to find a better way to model and price this risk,” Beeson said. “That investment has started. Partnerships are evolving.”
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Chad Hemenway is Managing Editor of Advisen News. He has more than 15 years of journalist experience at a variety of online, daily, and weekly publications. He has covered P&C insurance news since 2007, and he has experience writing about all P&C lines as well as regulation and litigation. Chad won a Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Single Article in 2014 for his coverage of the insurance implications of traumatic brain injuries and Best News Coverage in 2013 for coverage of Superstorm Sandy. Contact Chad at 212.897.4824 or [email protected].
