At CyberCube, we have made several strategic investments on data, models and technology to solve mission-critical problems for the cyber insurance market. I will highlight a few macro trends that we have uncovered working jointly with the insurance market.
- Increased focus on alternative data - As cyber risk is non-stationary, the insurance market is turning towards alternative data, which can be defined as data assets that go beyond exposure and claims information.
- Deeper interrogation of models - As vendor models have evolved over the last few years and increased in complexity, insurers have increased scrutiny on the assumptions and limitations in the models with a view towards implementing them for business use on underwriting, pricing and portfolio management
- Broader use of modern day technology - As on-premises software makes way for cloud-based software and legacy systems get disrupted by new platforms, application programming interfaces (APIs) have moved from being an IT concern to a business concern.
As we think about the future of our products, we keep our activities aligned with the macro trends and utilize detailed client feedback to improve our products for the long-term. So what have we achieved over the last few months?
Portfolio Manager was launched as the world’s first fully-probabilistic cyber catastrophe model in 2018. It allows insurers to stress test (re)insurance portfolios against a range of systemic cyber-related scenarios including data breaches, cloud outages, global ransomware attacks and financial fraud. This April, we released a new version to take into account the evolution of cyber threats on a forward-looking basis. The new edition has an updated scenario catalog that includes 29 scenario classes with over 200,000 simulated events that have broad applicability across multiple coverages and lines of business in the P&C insurance industry. We have revamped frequency and severity parameterization to reflect changes in the cyber risk landscape and made significant improvements to the exposure data schema, model configurability and reporting capabilities. The knowledge management framework that brings together a combination of detailed documentation and access to experts has increased model transparency and aided a systematic validation process undertaken by our clients.
Broking Manager, our latest addition to the product portfolio that supports brokers with cyber insurance advisory needs, was released with financial exposure quantification and threat benchmarking capabilities in May. Insurance advisors need to be able to educate prospects and clients while demonstrating an understanding of their needs and exposures. With cyber risk, this means understanding the types of scenarios that may cause financial loss and the costs that would drive losses. Streamlining the curation of data and presentation of relevant, timely analytics to insurance buyers reduces friction in the insurance purchase process and enables better decision making.
Account Manager, CyberCube’s product focused on underwriters has been enhanced in its latest edition to provide access to alternative data at scale to enable users to make better decisions on risk selection and incorporate alternative data into how cyber insurance policies are priced. The thesis behind this product is to facilitate underwriting with less friction and fewer questions to the insured with the vision of supporting zero-question underwriting for certain markets. To enable this, we’ve added several risk-specific indicators on security and exposure such as digital supply chain information, vulnerabilities, web traffic risk indicators and breach history to an existing database that consists of a compilation of “behind the firewall” and outside-in risk indicators that are correlated to cyber risk.
There are several exciting projects that we are pursuing at CyberCube currently and you should expect to see further innovation that tangibly moves the needle on the topic of cyber risk in the coming months. For additional information about CyberCube’s products and services, please visit our website at www.cybcube.com.
