Who offers the largest cyber capacity in Australia?

CFC Underwriting, a London headquartered firm with a strong presence in Australia, told IB it offers up to $25 million in capacity “on both primary and excess.”

After IB reached out, CFC also politely drew attention to another Emergence claim: “Emergence is the only Australian-based cyber underwriter with an inhouse, incident response and claims management team and it has the nation’s largest cyber team with more than 30 employees,” says the firm’s website.

A spokesperson from CFC said its Brisbane office employs an incident response team of more than 35 inhouse cyber specialists.

In its statement, Emergence confirmed that it renewed its binder at Lloyd’s, creating a facility enabling it to offer high levels of cover for corporates with over $250 million in revenue.

Emergence CEO and founder Troy Filipcevic said the Lloyd’s syndicates’ support for the agency’s underwriting discipline enabled it to target larger entities.

“The market recognises that cyber is all we do. With multiple syndicates providing security, we demonstrate sustainability for our Cyber Enterprise Solution policy,” he said. “This solution is efficient for brokers because they don’t need to follow markets or go to London for additional capacity. We have the underwriting expertise and capacity locally.”

Emergence offers primary and excess layers to corporates needing high-level coverage and larger cyber programs.

“Cyber risk can be covered, providing insureds implement adequate controls. Our target market is not necessarily entities with less risk, but those that understand the risk and invest in mitigation,” Filipcevic said.

Emergence’s Cyber Enterprise Solution

Emergence’s Cyber Enterprise Solution’s optional reputational harm cover protects the full policy limit, with the business interruption (BI) trigger being a net profit loss from a cyber event causing an adverse media event.

Emergence head of corporate Trent Nihill said the solution was developed because of the following factors:

increased cyber exposure;
a changing threat landscape for corporates; and
some insurers’ decision to limit ransomware coverage, impose sub-limits, and require self-insured co-insurance layers.

“Traditionally, cyber policies have a BI trigger that ties coverage to a cyber event causing either an outage or degradation of the insured’s computer system,” Nihill said. “However, that misses the major exposure of net profit loss from a cyber event that doesn’t cause an outage but impacts the insured’s reputation, for example, a privacy breach.

The Cyber Enterprise Solution policy complements Emergence’s Cyber Event Protection policy for SMEs, which has been available and consistently upgraded since the agency’s launch in 2015.

This article is a corrected update of an earlier version that claimed Emergence had the largest cyber insurance capacity in Australia