Cyber underwriting transformed – past, present and future view of risk

Three data feeds from ecosystem partners together transform AdvantageGo’s cyber Underwriting workbench.

In recent months, developers at AdvantageGo have been hard at work with a project to build a cyber specific edition of the company’s successful Underwriting Workbench – a version of the platform tailored specifically to the needs of cyber risk insurance underwriters, providing the risk intelligence to take better informed decisions.

Why the cyber focus? The estimated cost of cybercrime has increased exponentially. Meanwhile the cyber insurance market has tripled in volume in the past five years, expanding to $13 billion gross premium in 2022, according to the Swiss Re Institute, expected to grow to $23 billion by 2025. That’s a dangerous cocktail of rising risk and insured exposures.

But this isn’t a blog about  ‘Team AdvantageGo’ confronting the enormity of this challenge. It’s a collaborative story, about the external partners that have teamed up with the company, through its partnership Ecosystem. That’s where things get much more interesting from an underwriter’s perspective, through the augmentation and integration of multiple data sources.

AdvantageGo has been committed to ‘best of breed’ partnerships for some time, selecting niche capabilities to expand the ecosystem, providing choice, but without simply adding duplication. In this spirit, ecosystem and workbench have come together through three cyber partnerships that create something much more than the sum of its parts: creating a past, present and future view of cyber risk, via three cutting-edge ecosystem partnerships.

Past: Zywave

Historical data might not get the pulse racing in every context, but for cyber underwriters desperate for reliable data to make up for a dearth of internal loss data, it’s crucial information in short supply.

Ecosystem partner Zywave has been a pioneer in collecting vital data on cyber-attacks. Its Cyber Risk Loss Insight database contains information about thousands of events that have caused, or could cause, major financial losses to firms.

Zywave’s cyber database includes physical loss, disruption or services, privacy violations, reputation damage, and more. Events either involve a failure of systems or a malicious act that affects those systems. This precious data help fill gaps for underwriters in dire need.

Cyber data insights offered through the Underwriting Workbench would offer point of underwriting insights, such as drivers of risk, threat identification and mitigations in place. Third party data includes identified loss experience and threat actors, company background information, as well as cyber mitigation data.

Present: Relativity6

Relativity6 provides the crucial ‘present view’ of risk, through its AI-driven confirmation of trade and industry classifications. Relativity6 instantly addresses incorrect industry classification rating data and flagging of hazardous industries.

This is particularly transformative for cyber. For cyber risks, data providers typically refer to filing information that is notoriously unreliable, and may present an incorrect basis for pricing risks. Identification of precise classification and flagging of hazards can enable a more accurate triage and rating assessment for cyber business in real-time.  

As a data feed into the Cyber Workbench, by harnessing NAICS and hazard information for pre-bind assessment, Relativity6 enables cyber underwriters to benchmark cyber scenarios, producing more accurate and up-to-date risk scoring and pricing in an instant.

Future: FortifyData

As the third and latest of these third party source of analytics into the Cyber Underwriting workbench, the partnership with FortifyData marks a first-of-its-kind integration achievement, layering ecosystem data providers to provide the forward-looking part of this past, present and future augmentation and integration tale.

FortifyData is a cyber threat analysis and mitigation tool that identifies and evaluates cyber risk exposures, producing a risk-based vulnerability view of an organisation and security ratings for underwriting purposes. Its security ratings are a best-of-breed insight for risk selection and pricing.

By integrating with the other data inputs offered through the Cyber Underwriting Workbench, this offers cyber underwriters something greater than the sum of its parts. This latest, unique integration partnership goes beyond merely digitising processes, but is the third layer in generating insights, providing a 360 degree risk view of the past, present and future for cyber underwriters.