CEO Chat: What differentiates Cyberwrite in the market

Amid the steady stream of data breaches, cyber extortion and cyberattacks worldwide, more than 200 cyber brokers, carriers, and security experts met in London at the 2024 Cyber Risk & Insurance Innovation Europe conference to discuss ways the industry can create a “sustainable, resilient, and affordable cyber insurance market.”

For carriers, a big issue is how to better assess a company’s cyber insurance risks so they can reduce loss ratios. Brokers who serve on the frontline advising insurance customers face the challenge of helping non-technical business leaders quickly and easily understand their potential risks and how much coverage they require at a minimum.

In this interview with conference leaders, Cyberwrite founder and CEO Nir Perry discusses these challenges and how Cyberwrite’s patented AI, simple-to-understand cyber risk reports, and transparent approach provide carriers and brokers with unmatched accuracy and insights. An edited version of the transcript follows.

Q: Can you tell us what Cyberwrite does?

Nir Perry: Cyberwrite is an insurtech. We provide technology to help the carriers to reduce their loss ratio in cyber insurance and we help the brokers to easily explain to their customers why they need cyber insurance, how much they should actually have, what kind of risks they are exposed to, and eventually sell more policies. We are active now in 36 countries and seven languages and growing. 

Q: How does Cyberwrite fit into the wider cyber insurance ecosystem?

Nir Perry: We provide underwriters with data to make an informed underwriting decision for any business in real time. We utilize the power of AI, which we have patented and have been developing for the past seven years, to give the underwriters insights that would take a person years to obtain. We deliver these insights in seconds thanks to the power of AI and provide them in easy-to-understand reports with actionable underwriting and security recommendations, as well as an economic impact assessment for the business. To provide that, we only need a company name, company website, industry, and geography. We collect information from all around the internet and the dark web, and we compare each company to about 500,000 other companies in the dedicated database. 

Based on the comparison, we can provide the insurance company with a recommendation on whether to insure this company or whether the application requires additional review. 

A slimmer version of these reports is used today by brokers worldwide to explain to businesses how they should prepare for the cyber insurance underwriting process and how they can improve their cyber security posture in general.  

Most small business owners have never seen a cyber risk report or a cyber insurance risk report, so getting a Cyberwrite report through the broker or insurance company is often the first time they’re exposed to the risks posed to their business. We are democratizing these cybersecurity reports and providing them to businesses worldwide. 

Q: What are the key issues that you see in the market?

Nir Perry:  Some of the key challenges that we see in the market relate to data. On the one hand, if you don’t have enough data, it’s very hard to make a decision. And on the other hand, if you have too much, it’s sometimes just too much to digest. So, how do you make sense of data in a straightforward and automated manner to develop underwriting recommendations for underwriters or enable business owners to understand the risk? In underwriting, sometimes you have books of hundreds of thousands of companies together and you need to get the data for all of those companies quickly. This is something that we do. We provide reinsurers and carriers with large data sets of information about cyber risk on whole books of business worldwide. The capability to provide this data in a straightforward, agile manner in a matter of days enables the ongoing monitoring of books and specific risks, which is very useful. 

One of the main challenges is that many companies don’t provide actual visibility into the data, so you get sort of a black-box solution. I’ve been working for over 20 years in the cybersecurity world, and that is a problem because you have to have visibility into the data and the models. I think one of the reasons that many of the global leaders work with Cyberwrite is because of our transparency in providing them with access to understand how our model works, how we collect the data, the quality of the data, and how with the highest quality in the market. 

Q: What differentiates you from some of the other players in the market?

Nir Perry: Cyberwrite was one of the first players in the market. We started the company in early 2017, and we have grown with the cyber insurance market. 

There is no room for shortcuts in building AI models for cyber insurance or any insurance. For over eight years now, we have been iterating with our carrier and reinsurance partners, wholesalers, and brokers, learning based on the trends in cybersecurity and the information coming from the cyber insurance markets. Hundreds of thousands of companies get reports on our platform yearly. It has enabled us to build a solution that provides very informative and easy-to-understand reports and to fine-tune our algorithms to a level that hasn’t been seen before in the market where we can indicate the level of risk posed to each organization in a percentage. So when an underwriter takes a look at our platform or when a broker or the business owner takes a look at our report, they can see that this specific company currently has a risk of 0.5% or 2.3% to suffer a breach within the next first months, which is more or less compared to industry peers. And here’s all the data behind it. 

I believe that this is something that differentiates us very well, together with the transparency of the data and models and our capability to provide ongoing monitoring of the companies and the books of business. So, in case something changes throughout the life cycle of the policy, alerting the insurance company and alerting the business is also a big differentiator. We’ve been around for a long time. We work with organizations such as Hartford Steam Boiler, CRC, Markel, MAPFRE, and many more. Working in 36 countries has given us the capability to grow globally, obviously in the US and Europe, but also the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, and other territories.