The cyber insurance market has been through significant changes over the last few years — premiums are continuing to rise while terms and conditions are becoming more restrictive. The fast-evolving cyber threat landscape is playing a major role in this change, so brokers need to go even further to ensure they are making the right recommendations.
Ultimately, brokers need to become better cyber risk advisors. Having the appropriate data and the right cyber knowledge are key to achieving this.
This blog will delve into three ways brokers can become better cyber risk advisors to continuously deliver value and expertise to their clients during the cyber insurance buying process.
Gain access to the right data and analytics
Risk advisors must be equipped with comprehensive data to quantify coverage and limit recommendations to inform better risk transfer decisions. However, getting the right data on businesses is difficult — while cyber insurance is still a relatively new industry compared to traditional P&C lines, there’s still a lot of data for brokers to wade through.
Brokers need the correct platform that will not only make it easy to access data, but also distill the large volume of it, helping to streamline the broker’s workflow.
Brokers need to get the most relevant information in their hands as quickly as possible, in a format that is ready for conversations with clients and prospects. The tool should also provide this data in a simplified manner, allowing brokers to make informed recommendations that can also be justified to other stakeholders.
Demonstrate a deep understanding of cyber risk management
Because brokers must play the role of risk advisors, it’s critical that they understand cyber risk management. They must differentiate by assisting clients in building a roadmap to minimizing their exposures, hopefully resulting in better price/coverage when they buy insurance.
However, brokers often don’t know what data they should be prioritizing. They want answers to questions such as:
- How can they better prepare their client for obtaining a better insurance product and minimizing their risk?
- What data can they leverage?
- When should they be having these conversations with their clients?
- How much time does it take for clients to implement better processes, technology, controls, etc.?
How to help clients proactively manage cyber risks:
A cyber analytics solution can help brokers gain the data they need to better advise clients. For example, the right cyber analytics partner will guide brokers on better understanding how clients should be managing their cyber risk, what the future cyber risk landscape looks like and any policies/structures organizations should be implementing to prevent cyber attacks.
A solution like CyberCube’s Broking Manager can help intermediaries better inform clients about managing cyber risk, advising on areas such as:
- What limits to buy
- What peers are doing
- What clients are exposed to
The tool is able to quantify cyber loss potential and identify the exposure of your client to various cyber threat scenarios. All of this information is provided quickly in a clean and concise manner without the noise of irrelevant data. The technical details are delivered in a format you need, ready to be communicated with clients.
Another major feature that Broking Manager provides is the ability to indicate security “red flags” that should be addressed prior to approaching an underwriter, allowing intermediaries to assist their clients when preparing for insurance placement. This also helps brokers set expectations for clients as well as smoothing the path to insurability.
A cyber knowledge gap in the market
The complexity of cyber insurance means that brokers must be aware of the cyber risk landscape and its impact on the market. Intermediaries need to understand cyber technicalities better in order to more effectively communicate this to clients. They also need to support clients to be more proactive in managing their cyber risk.
Ideally, brokers should hire cyber security professionals who can educate them on the intricacies of the current and future cyber risk landscape. However, this is difficult as it's a tight labor market and it’s difficult to hire security professionals.
Instead, to be an effective cyber risk advisor, brokers need to up-skill employees in cyber. This can be accomplished by allowing existing internal cyber employees to partner with an external cyber insurance analytics expert.
What a cyber risk analytics partner can offer:
The right expertise should not only include cyber security experts, but also data scientists, actuarial scientists and insurance experts who understand the complexity of the cyber insurance market.
This expertise can pinpoint what is crucial for employees to know about cyber and share that knowledge with the necessary teams, allowing them to make better recommendations to clients. Having access to specialists who also have a comprehensive knowledge of the current and future threat landscape will also help brokers to best advise clients around navigating cyber threats.
Delivering value to clients
It’s clear that due to the fast-changing market and evolving cyber threat landscape, brokers need to have more than a basic understanding of cyber threats and cyber security. The valuable advice they provide to clients around cyber risk will help ensure they are taking a proactive approach to cyber security.
CyberCube understands many of the problems cyber brokers are currently facing and how the right cyber risk analytics can help address them. From our cyber threat model, to our risk transfer benchmarking feature, Broking Manager can help cyber brokers advise their clients on cyber risk accurately and efficiently.
If you want to find out more, check out our blog — How to get the most out of your analytics solution.
