Cyber Underwriting and Threat Intelligence
Opportunities and Challenges in Cyber-Insurance
Insuring against cyber-threats – including denial of service attacks, ransomware and cyber-terrorism – represents an exceptional opportunity and challenge for the insurance industry. Cyber-insurance is a fast growing market need, yet the nature of threats is becoming exponentially more complex and unpredictable.
Meanwhile, there are obstacles to cyber-insurance carriers, brokers and customers interacting as effectively as possible about coverage planning, policy underwriting, risk monitoring, and claims processing:
- Customers find cyber-insurance coverage terms hard to assess in terms of risk mitigation and economic benefit.
- The process to collect information about prospects’ business activities and technology framework is time-consuming. Agents and brokers may miss key questions, requiring additional follow-up.
- Once customers have obtained a policy, they tend not refer to it until the next renewal or a claim.
- A range of data sources – corporate and public – are available about the immediate cyber environment, but they are under-utilised. Underwriting, Claims Processing, Marketing and Distribution, Product Management and Risk Management may be working in silos when it comes to serving customers, instead of placing information in context and sharing it strategically to augment decision-making.
ELEMENT™ of Insurance - Cyber Edition
To support a cyber-insurance carrier’s growth, BlackSwan Technologies offers its software: ELEMENT™ of Insurance – Cyber Edition. It combines the latest technologies for Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Computing and Contextual Analytics into a quick to deploy business application that increases customer satisfaction and carrier profitability.
The product includes three essential components:
- A Personalized Customer Portal. The portal first presents the types of cyber-threats and coverage terms available. It’s contextual analytics engine can assimilate data and unstructured text documents from an inquirer and automatically form a deep model of the risks and potential economic impact to a business. Further, a natural language processing engine and chatbot technology respond precisely to customer questions, while guiding them to provide needed information. Customers can track their profiles and status of their cases using a visual dashboard. Also, at any time, they can monitor the cyber-threat environment in real-time and receive recommendations for actions to take or coverage to add to the policy. Recurring customer engagement deepens dramatically with this feature.
- An Agent/Broker Terminal lets these customer-facing functions fully benefit from the wealth of information available for the insurer’s information repositories as well as from public source cyber-threat information. They access a visually-rich dashboard compiling information about urgent cyber-threats, tracking their clients’ situations via a case management module, and automatically alerting them to recommendations for their customers.
- At the heart of the above modules is a Cyber-Threat Intelligence Hub, which compiles and interprets information in real-time about cyber-attacks, risks to a business, and value of insurance coverage. Data sources used include open source intelligence and industry threat databases as well as industry benchmarking, carrier-proprietary modelling and an option to incorporate machine learning. The Intelligence Hub transforms the customer/carrier relationship from an infrequent transaction to ongoing information and recommendation sharing.
How Customer Interaction Works
When compiling information about a prospective cyber policy holder for underwriting, information is automatically extracted from existing customer databases, guided chat, ingestion and interpretation of unstructured documents and a range of public sources of company insights. This is combined with open source intelligence (OSINT) and threat database details to benchmark the organization’s exposure based on factors including industry, location and installed technologies. Deep/machine learning and contextual analytics engines predict risks, evaluate the economic consequences, and display this in an insightful manner for the agents, brokers and underwriting. As illustrated below, the result is a personalized insurance package that thoroughly addresses the organization’s needs and that meets the carrier’s latest underwriting guidelines for cyber-threat protection.
The insurer’s agents and brokers interact with the customer, as well as underwriting, risk management and claims, through their own visual workspace. Information about the latest global cyber-threats that could affect the customer are displayed, integrated with case management information and customer interaction records.
Built on our Enterprise A.I. Operating System
The cyber-insurance solution is based on ELEMENT™, our Enterprise A.I. Operating System. At BlackSwan, we consider A.I. to mean “Augmentation and Acceleration of your organization’s Intelligence.” Extensible, A.I.-enabled processes can digest reams of data streaming from a variety of sources and transform them into situational awareness at your team’s fingertips.
ELEMENT™ combines an array of the most advanced AI technologies, including entity extraction, knowledge graphs, network/relationship analysis, machine learning and predictive analytics to form its contextual picture of the cyber-threat environment. Add to this: rule-based AI recommendations, chatbots with natural language processing for flexible queries and document interpretation, and big data processing and data visualization to empower staff, brokers and customers, with greater insight into alternative actions. The result is Cognitive Computing Out of the Box for rapid realization of game-changing business results.
ELEMENT™ is truly enterprise-class in terms of integration options with an insurer’s back-office systems, centralized configurability of logic, and granular access control by user-type and data element. In fact, ELEMENT™ of Insurance – Cyber Edition is a specialized version of ELEMENT™ of Insurance, which can enhance a carrier’s operations across insurance lines and all core business functions.
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