As General Manager of Coalition in the United Kingdom, I'm honored to announce we are officially open for trading throughout the UK.

Since my time started at Coalition nearly six years ago as Head of Product — and after nearly a year in London preparing for our launch — it's thrilling to see how everything has come together to support brokers and businesses in the UK with cyber insurance.

Here’s more about why we’re bringing a new type of insurance to the birthplace of this industry, nearly 400 years later.

My origin story with cyber insurance

In 2017, I joined Coalition in its infancy. I'd known our CEO Joshua Motta from our years working together at Cloudflare. When Joshua reached out to share that his new endeavor would use insurance to solve cyber risk, and asked if I was interested, I replied, "Insurance?" (yes, the question mark was audible).

I'd been in internet media and network security companies for 20-plus years and had just started a self-chosen sabbatical. But when Joshua called, I knew this was something that couldn’t wait. 

Joshua had a (not so) secret master plan to:

• Sell a comprehensive insurance product to protect businesses from rapidly emerging digital risks

• Invest in an all-out security platform to protect all of our policyholders.

• Use our security data to build better insurance and technology products.

This vision he put forth is still true today. Digital risk is rising and prevalent. Yet, people still think technology is the only solution. You’re going in circles if you think you can solve a technology problem only with more technology.

That is where cyber insurance comes into play.

Why now is the time to launch in the UK

We all know cybersecurity is a global problem. That’s why Coalition is on a mission to be a global solution for small and midsize businesses. Launching in the UK, our first market outside North America, is a step toward achieving this vision.

As one of Coalition’s foundational employees, I’m thrilled that Coalition has scaled to 160,000+ customers and nearly 700 employees. That’s still only the beginning. We’ve demonstrated how we can help protect organizations across the US and Canada. Now, we’re bringing our product to the second-largest cyber insurance market in the world.

We’ve seen the cyber insurance market harden everywhere. But the lack of coverage is particularly notable in the UK. According to the 2022 Cyber Security Breaches Survey by the UK government, only 5% of businesses surveyed have a specific cyber security insurance policy. 

Source: UK Government 2022 Breach Survey

We see these stats and think, “the UK is in a similar place to the US when we started Coalition in 2017." It’s harder for small businesses to spend time and money on risk without help, and without the right product. We're excited to help these companies fill the gap, as we partner with brokers and offer free tools such as Coalition Control to show how digital risk measures out in £ and p. 

Also — a topic for another time — "wider insurance policies" cover less cyber every year, as insurers back away from a risk they don’t understand. Those "wider insurance policies" are not sufficient coverage for the risks these firms face. (For cyber savvy brokers, cue discussion of silent cyber.) Coalition understands these challenges, and we partner with brokers to provide the tools, information, and confidence to easily explain digital risks to their clients.

How Coalition is making a difference

Our product market fit is unique, and timely. We opened for trading and bound business on Day 1. We're already seeing a diversity of firms, including tough risks that need some guidance.

We have security analysts and risk engineers in-house who can advise brokers and their clients on how to improve. Already in our conversations with brokers, we're hearing sentiments such as, "This is the most sensible conversation I’ve had on cyber insurance in the last two years."

We’ve entered the market in a meaningful way, and know we can help brokers expand coverage to more of their clients. We're writing businesses up to £1B turnover, with limits up to £10M — and we can also scale down to fit the smallest organizations, with limits as low as £25K and programmatic ways to write business at scale, quickly. Our coverage is broad, with an appetite for nearly every industry. We write the risk based on its own merits, informed by our active risk platform.

We’re working with brokers throughout the UK. Some are already familiar with how Coalition has transformed cyber insurance with our Active Insurance approach combining active monitoring alerting with in-house incident response capabilities and claims.

The result is that our policyholders experience dramatically fewer claims as compared to the broader US market (comparing against NAIC data). As a new entrant here, though, we expect we'll have to introduce ourselves, and we'll do so throughout the country, with the same humble, listening approach we've had for the past five years elsewhere.

We hired a top-notch team of insurance industry experts bringing experience and consistency for what this new market expects, and you’re going to hear more from them soon. Plus, we have the support of leading carriers such as Allianz supporting our expansion.

Join us

Although I’ve learned more than I ever thought about insurance, I'm still learning. All of us at Coalition UK look forward to learning with you and better advising on digital risks. If you're a UK broker reading this, I invite you to become one of our first partners to get appointed with Coalition.

Cyber insurance requires a new approach, and we’re excited to partner with you to be part of the solution. Thank you for being on this mission with us to provide security for all.