Ryan Jones, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, ThreatInformer
Cyber-risk is a unique problem for companies that need to transfer risk – and for brokers, underwriters and reinsurers trying to understand, price and manage that risk. In spite of this, the market for cyber-insurance continues to grow, with forecasts of $7.6 billion in 2023 from around $4.2 billion in 2017. As the market grows, high-profile companies, such as Marriott, Merck and Equifax, are becoming victims of cyber-attacks and claims costs are rising to hundreds of millions of dollars.
The body of cyber-claims data is much smaller than more established insurance classes. This is combined with the issue of claims data quickly going stale, as cyber-attack vectors rapidly change. As a consequence, actuaries face significant data limitations when predicting the frequency and severity of cyber-attacks.
“ThreatInformer plugs the cyber-data gap for insurance, giving brokers, underwriters, and reinsurers the data to understand and make decisions about cyber-risk”, says Ryan Jones, founder and CEO of ThreatInformer.
ThreatInformer needs just a company name and website to identify an organisation’s external IT systems and collect key risk data from them. ThreatInformer brings together tens of thousands of raw data points to create a unique picture that shows cyber-risk data for any organisation, of any size, anywhere. ThreatInformer’s data shows insurers what’s at risk, the business context, and the level of protection.
“ThreatInformer was developed to meet our clients’ needs across the cyber-insurance value chain. We help brokers to engage with their clients on cyber-risk and get the right levels of protection, as well as giving risk management advice to add further value to their role. Underwriters see the assets of a proposer and their cyber-risks pre-bind to enable confident pricing decisions using consistent, verifiable data. When working with reinsurers we’re helping to add depth outside of the traditional aggregate data points of industry, geography, and revenue to manage accumulation risk across portfolios.”
Ryan Jones, CEO of ThreatInformer, said: “Our priorities in the development of ThreatInformer’s technology were those of our customers. We found a lot of problems with existing risk management vendors in the market, with off-the-shelf solutions that provide subjective metrics, ambiguous risk scores, and black box models.
“ThreatInformer is transparent with our data, allowing our customers to customise our data to their portfolio and consume it in a way that fits how they work.”
Jones saw the need the need in the insurance industry for a scalable and reliable way to gather data while delivering cyber-assessments and incident response at KPMG for leading insurers.
Richard Wells, CTO and co-founder of ThreatInformer, has analysed cyber-threats for the UK government and designed platforms for open-source intelligence gathering and processing for decision makers.
ThreatInformer has clients among brokers, insurers and reinsurers who are using ThreatInformer’s cyber-risk data to make risk decisions throughout their insurance operations.
ThreatInformer: The data you need to make decisions on Cyber.