Active Insurance: A year in review
Insurance plays a crucial role in protecting the progress of economies and societies, making the world safer and fairer. With this in mind, we founded Coalition in 2017 with a not-so-secret master plan to build a new kind of insurance company that keeps organizations secure in the digital age. All organizations, even small ones, have digital assets to protect from new threats such as ransomware, phishing, social engineering, technology failures, privacy violations, and more.
New risks call for a new form of insurance
To protect organizations in the digital age, Coalition has pioneered a new form of insurance called Active Insurance. Unlike traditional insurance, Active Insurance brings together three essential capabilities:
Real-time risk assessment
Ongoing monitoring and protection, and
Rapid response to provide support before, during, and after an incident occurs.
1. Active Risk Assessment
Our risk management platform, Coalition Control, continuously collects data on billions of internet-connected devices and tens of millions of organizations, using AI and machine learning models to assess our customers' technology and attack surfaces dynamically. Combined with our proprietary claims data, we can accurately predict an organization's risk of loss. This past year's results speak for themselves: organizations in the "high" predicted risk grouping experienced 3.0x the frequency of incidents and 3.6x the loss costs as organizations in the "low" predicted risk grouping.
When organizations make risky technological decisions that would otherwise disqualify them from coverage, we can offer coverage contingent upon correcting high-risk issues (and we offer assistance to fix identified issues to prospective policyholders at no cost). Alternatively, we increase the price for "medium" and "high" risks to stabilize our loss ratio across each bracket. Unlike traditional insurance policies, Active Insurance incentivizes organizations to make better decisions, improving their risk posture and reducing insurance costs.
2. Active Protection
To keep our policyholders safe, we're constantly scanning and monitoring their digital assets and sending personalized alerts when we detect critical issues, such as new vulnerabilities, active malware infections, lookalike domain registrations, and more. We make all this information and on-demand scanning available in Coalition Control, our risk management platform.
In 2022, we sent over 43,000 notifications of critical vulnerabilities to our policyholders, with self-service resolution methods and on-demand access to our security support team to help fix them. Through these efforts, we lowered the number of our policyholders with critical vulnerabilities from 17% to 9.7% throughout 2022 — a 43% reduction!
We track the impact of risk in two ways: overall incidents reported by our policyholders which we call incident frequency, and specific incidents that incur a gross loss, or claims frequency. This allows us to track how our claims frequency compares with the overall market, as well how many of our customers are impacted by incidents. The benefits of Active vs. traditional insurance are clear: our policyholders reported claims at a 65% lower frequency than the industry average.
3. Active Response
Even if you are less likely to experience a cyber incident with Coalition, there's still no silver bullet with cyber risk — when tragedy strikes, we are ready to respond. In 2022 we responded to thousands of incidents across all industries and company sizes and a wide range of threats, including ransomware, data breaches, intellectual property theft, complex crypto thefts, and application vulnerabilities.
Our in-house claims and incident response teams are available 24/7/365, with an average response time of less than 5 minutes. Importantly, all incident response and forensic services are available to policyholders at no cost.
The Active Insurance Difference
The difference is clear: if you purchase Active Insurance from Coalition, you are less likely to experience a cyber incident than if you bought cyber insurance from a traditional insurance carrier. And, if you were to experience an incident, you have all of Coalition's Active Response capabilities available to recover quickly.
Thank you to our partners and policyholders for bringing us one step closer to a safer digital economy in 2022. Stay tuned for several new active capabilities and service offerings in 2023!
- Joshua
