CyberCube: Impact 25 2020 profile
March 11, 2020
This is a summary of the profile which first appeared in the Oxbow Partners InsurTech Impact 25: 2020.
CyberCube is a cyber risk analytics company exclusively serving the (re)insurance industry.
The company began life as an R&D project within Symantec, a Fortune 500 cybersecurity company, before launching as an independent venture in 2018. It raised $35m via a Series B fundraise last year to enrich its data and analytics platform and build its footprint amongst regional and national clients. It already has partnerships with many global players including Aon, Chubb, CNA, Guy Carpenter, Hiscox and Munich Re.
Cybercube’s SaaS platform has been developed using terabytes of enterprise, security and historical loss data including proprietary “inside-the-firewall” data acquired via its exclusive partnership with Symantec.
CyberCube’s three products deliver risk assessment solutions to insurers, reinsurers and brokers:
- Account Manager supports individual risk underwriting
- Broking Manager generates insights for cyber risk transfer
- Portfolio Manager provides forward-looking catastrophe modelling and portfolio management
CyberCube’s team of data scientists, cyber security and intelligence experts, underwriters and actuaries enables the company to keep pace with this dynamically changing risk. Its ability to interrogate and convert cyber-related data into actionable information for the (re)insurance industry was recognised by the World Economic Forum in 2019 when it named CyberCube as a global “Technology Pioneer”. The WEF ranks cyberattacks as one of the top 10 global risks on both likelihood and impact axes.
“Cyber insurance is a key focus of our innovation strategy. Leveraging the capabilities of CyberCube will help our underwriting and risk modelling teams to better quantify cyber risk and understand potential cyber accumulation scenarios.”
Stefan Golling, Chief Underwriter, Munich Re
Company in action
CyberCube’s risk assessment products empower its partner to understand cyber risk exposures from multiple perspectives;
Insurance Brokers: Power advisory services to purchase insurance, estimate potential financial losses from cyberattacks and provide comprehensive reports
Insurers and Reinsurers: Power advisory services to purchase insurance, estimate potential financial losses from cyberattacks and provide comprehensive reports. Underwrite individual risks, model catastrophe scenarios and assess portfolio-level exposures to enhance decision making.
Case Study
Client situation: Hiscox has been investing in its in-house cyber expertise and capabilities to understand and describe its accumulation risk; however, it has found it challenging to size and calibrate its exposure as there have been few catastrophe
market-wide losses.
Solution: Hiscox announced in January 2020 that it had chosen to partner with CyberCube to access its data, modelling tools and subject matter experts. It will use ‘Portfolio Manager’ to enable it to stress-test its book of global commercial insurance business against cyber-related catastrophe events such as cloud outages and ransomware attacks.
Results: The value from this partnership is expected to strengthen Hiscox’s regular accumulation risk management and exposure measurement activities.
The Oxbow Partners View
CyberCube is one of two cyber companies selected in this year’s report. We chose this company because of its rapid traction since being founded only in 2018, signing up dozens of insurer and broker partners including several global brands. Most (re)insurers see the cyber market as a major new business opportunity, but their enthusiasm to write this business is tempered by their lack of insight, including ‘silent cyber’ already inherent in their portfolio.
This is an area where many market players will be looking externally for support and CyberCube has a good chance of becoming an established solution in this area. Working with third parties with specialist capabilities and insights is likely to become more common as insurers are unable to maintain the wide range of technical skills and technologies that the ‘digital decade’ requires in-house. This will require them to rethink how underwriting teams are structured to balance external insights with internal views of risk.