Cowbell enters UK cyber market targeting SME brokers

The provider has appointed former cyber team lead at CFC, Simon Hughes, to spearhead the UK operations targeting small and medium sized businesses.

Hughes, pictured, is aiming to work with as many brokers as possible.

Brokers are my best friends. They are people with expertise in being able to deliver the services to the clients. I don’t think it works without the broker; they are key to us.

Simon Hughes

He said: “We don’t want to work with brokers just in London, we want to work with brokers up and down the country. We want to make sure that our distribution efforts are focused everywhere.

“Brokers are my best friends. They are people with expertise in being able to deliver the services to the clients. The clients want to deal with brokers because they have got the relationships with them, they trust them. I don’t think it works without the broker; they are key to us.”

Exposures

However, Hughes stressed that brokers need to understand cyber to warn policyholders of the risks.

He added: “We will help brokers to articulate what the exposures are and what we will be protecting. It’s important that policyholders and clients know exactly what they’re purchasing.

It is not good enough to have a policy that doesn’t have a comprehensive incident response and claims function.

“There are varying degrees of what a cyber policy can look like in the UK, in terms of coverage, but also in terms of services as well. A significant proportion of the policies that you’ll be able to buy in the UK are just a policy.

“SME businesses need those extra services around it. It has to be the incident response, risk engineering and claims function as well. It is not good enough to have a policy that doesn’t have a comprehensive incident response and claims function.”

Risk pool

Cowbell has a risk pool which is an underwritten set of data that includes 30 million US businesses and seven million in the UK.

This means the provider is able to get information on turnover, employee count, what businesses do and have a rough idea of what each publicly facing internet network looks like.

Hughes concluded: “We have been able to pre-underwrite about seven million businesses already in the UK market. This will make the process easy for brokers who are less experienced with selling cyber, as we can provide quotes.”

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