Emergence Insurance has upgraded its policy wording to expand coverage.
The flexible, innovative new wording, released on 6 April, was developed in consultation with brokers and clients.
Emergence has responded to the growing market need for more complete cyber protection by providing a solution with broader coverage and higher limits.
Jeff Gonlin, Emergence’s Head of Underwriting and Product Development, says Australian businesses deserve better protection against business interruption. It’s such a fundamental need.
Another area of concern for companies and consumers is privacy and data breaches and Emergence meets those needs in the latest policy upgrade.
New and enhanced policy features in Emergence’s fourth upgrade in as many years include:
- Preventive shutdown cover to enable smart insureds to take preventive measures before cyber events hit.
- A preventive shutdown allowance to compensate for lost earnings and increased costs, and provide independent security audits to assess threats.
- System failure cover added to contingent business interruption to protect against failure of insureds’ IT infrastructure or IT infrastructure managed by external contractors.
- Expanded cyber extortion cover to include threats against data held in insureds’ systems. (New ransomware variants go beyond locking IT networks; they first exfiltrate sensitive data, doubling the threat.)
- Privacy error protects against a major threat – human error. (Employee mistakes are a big source of unauthorised disclosure of personally identifiable information.)
- Privacy error cover includes non-electronic data.
- Identity-theft response costs have been added to expand victims’ support from notification and monitoring to helping them re-establish their identities and records.
- New identity-based theft cover compensates individuals, including employees, from direct financial losses from ID theft.
- Most businesses must comply with the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS), but many do not. Emergence covers PCI liability, but can go a step further, appointing an auditor to review PCI DSS non-compliance liability to prevent insureds copping potentially crippling fines.
Emergence’s insured cyber events now include crimeware, cyber espionage, cyber extortion, denial of service, distributed denial of service, hacking, insider and privilege misuse, privacy errors, payment card skimming, point-of-sale intrusion and web app attacks perpetrated against insureds.
Emergence’s criminal financial loss cover protects against cyber theft, socially engineered theft, identity-based theft, telephone phreaking and cryptojacking.
Brokers can quote and bind criminal financial loss limits up to $250,000 via an enhanced broker portal, and higher limits may be available on referral to Emergence underwriters. Insureds can get policy limits up to $20 million and excesses as low as $250.
The online portal allows brokers to quote and bind for businesses with turnovers up to $75 million. Higher turnovers are underwritten manually.
“Cyber crime is huge. It’s well organised and a sophisticated industry, and every business is vulnerable. Business owners need to be smart about how they operate – the decisions they make before they get attacked are vital. For cyber insurance, Emergence is the smart choice,” Jeff said.
A key point of difference with Emergence is instant access to a response team of experts who understand the importance of immediately mitigating potential threats to insureds’ businesses.
Australian-based incident response and claims-handling teams are available 24/7/365 to minimise threats and support policyholders when cyber events occur.
Emergence is an award-winning underwriting agency, exclusively focused on providing flexible, innovative cyber insurance solutions to help protect Australian businesses.
Emergence was judged the 2019 Insurance Business magazine Underwriting Agency of the Year and a finalist in the same category at the 2019 ANZIIF-Asia Insurance Review awards.
To access the broker portal to obtain Emergence cyber quotations for your clients, email info@emergenceinsurance.com.au.