We Have the Net

An article ran in the April edition of Best’s Review entitled, “Risk Managers Walk a Tightrope as COVID-19 Challenges Remain”. The summary under the title says this, “Risk managers say they’re seeing their roles evolve as the old work environment undergoes profound change.” And the article says this, in part:

In the age of COVID-19, the insurance industry and risk managers view the whole process of opening office doors—if that’s even possible—or even setting up remote laptops for millions of workers as a “tightrope” walk that’s very hard to balance.

That statement reminded up of one of our earlier blog posts: “It’s 2022. Do You Know Where Your Claims Managers Are?” In that post, we wrote this:

Many companies in industries as diverse as insurance, transportation, construction, local governments, TPAs, self-insured groups, and restaurants are wondering where their claims managers and risk managers are. They might be in the office. They might be working from home. They might be on the road. It doesn’t matter. Wherever they are, they need access to information. And they need to be able to find the information they need as efficiently as possible.

And the congruence of the Best’s Review article and our blog post reminded us of an old expression: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Common Problems

It really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. If you’re managing risks or claims, you need to be able to get the information you need when you need it. You need to be able to generate the reports you need to be able to see incidents, the claims related to every incident, the types of accidents or injuries that caused the claims to be filed, the cost of those claims, and the trends suggested by all of that information. If risk and claims managers seem to be walking a tightrope over working from home or returning to an office, can you imagine how thin the high wire would be if they were walking it without all the information and access to it?

The problems of risk and claims managers are common to everyone who works any kind of job that requires work to be done online, regardless of industry.

For the industries in which we work, we have the challenges of risk and claims information solved.

We charge extra for solving the challenges of the rest of the world.

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Cyber Liability

We recently read an article on Syncro entitled, “4 Changes You Need to Be Aware of in the Cyber Liability Insurance Industry”. This jumped off the screen and whacked us in the noggin:

Companies applying for cybersecurity liability insurance can expect to have more digital hoops to jump through before they’ll be approved … a “lack of attention to one or more aspects of basic security hygiene” was responsible for the most damaging attacks seen in 2020. Insurance carriers are mitigating their own risk by requiring more cybersecurity safeguards by those seeing [sic] coverage for cybersecurity attacks. This includes protocols such as:

  • Privilege access monitoring
  • Multi-factor authentication
  • Advanced threat protection
  • Confirmation of 3rd party security
  • And many others

Well, yeah. Those digital hoops could also be called common sense because many insurers who wrote cybersecurity liability coverages had no idea of the measures — or lack thereof — their policyholders had undertaken to ensure their environments were reasonably secure. As a result, those insurers took huge baths.

On the Job Training

There’s no real blame to be placed for any of that. It’s a new world, and we’re all feeling our way along. Given the business we’re in, however, we do believe strongly the right claim system can give all parties to cybersecurity liability risks much better understandings of their risk data, cyber and otherwise.

Cloud Claims, for example, connects claims to policies, enabling you to run reports by policy and policy period. It lets you audit every change made by anyone and the dates they’re made. It lets you run reports by user-determined filters — claim handlers, claims paid by amounts, dates, policy numbers, totals incurred, and more — all without SQL or Boolean logic — and export them to Excel. Cloud Claims also gives you dashboards that show types of cyber attack by incidents and frequency, along with the claims associated with those attacks, by time period, causes of those attacks, their costs, and more. And all of that will help you determine, by incident, specific points of entry and to determine trends, if any, in your exposures.

Yes. We all have to find our way in this new world. No. We don’t have to treat our exposures as random. Yes. We can get a better understanding of our risk data and derive better risk-management measures accordingly.

And we can start now with the tools we have now.

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