CoverHound launches CyberPolicy.com for SMEs 
CoverHound has launched CyberPolicy.com, a new site to provide cyber protection tools and cover, provided by Norton by Symantec and Chubb, to SMEs with 15 or fewer employees. The firm, which started out as a comparison site for consumers more than six years ago, added workers compensation, general and professional liability, business owners policy and commercial auto insurance to its platform in late September for firms with 20 or fewer employees. The firm also plans to roll out the offering to larger businesses in due course.

Two weeks after unveiling business insurance offerings like workers compensation and general liability for small businesses on its online platform, CoverHound is launching another website—CyberPolicy.com—with cyber protection tools for a similar target market.

CoverHound, an InsurTech company that has allowed customers to compare and purchase personal auto insurance online for over six years on CoverHound.com, added workers comp, GL, professional liability, BOP and commercial auto in late September, offering policies from Chubb, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway Direct, Hiscox, Progressive and Employers. Those policies are available to small businesses with 20 or fewer employees on CoverHound.com.

Initially targeting slightly smaller businesses—those with 15 employees or fewer—CyberPolicy.com went live on Oct. 5, offering cybersecurity tools and cyber insurance policies from Norton by Symantec and Chubb in one bundled sale. (Editor’s Note: The site launched back in July, but until today, it only offered educational content about cyber risks to the general public.)

The CyberPolicy site will eventually expand to cover larger businesses, CoverHound said.

“The future of cyber and small business products is underwriting the vendors that people use,” he said, explaining how it is possible to simplify the cyber insurance sales process from an underwriting standpoint and open up the possibility of binding small business cyber policies online.

From a buyer’s perspective, cyber insurance is also not an easy product to acquire—especially online, he told Carrier Management in a more recent interview late last month. “You see and hear about cyber insurance offerings, but you have to do a lot of digging and a lot of phone calls to generally make that happen.”

That’s why Moore and his team concluded: “We need to build not only a comparison engine but also an education engine around cyber.”

One piece of educational content that will soon be available is a white paper prepared for CyberPolicy from the University of Connecticut’s Goldenson Center for Actuarial Research, which reveals that:

Half of all small businesses have been the victims of cyber attacks.

60 percent of the small businesses attacked wound up closing within six months.

Only 3 percent of small businesses have cyber insurance policies in place.

“We’re really seeing there’s a huge market opportunity out there, [but] there’s a lot of education that has to happen in the process because people don’t understand cybersecurity. And they don’t understand the cyber insurance options that go with that,” Moore said.

“If we can deliver that in a digital experience, then we’ll be at the forefront of the market,” he said.

“If we can continue to innovate, we really feel that people will start buying cyber insurance more proactively than they have over the last two or three years,” he continued.

With today’s launch of the CyberPolicy.com sales engine, seven cyber insurance coverages are available from Chubb: data breach liability, identity recovery, computer attack, cyber extortion, network security liability, data breach response expenses and electronic media liability.

Moore believes that no single carrier is up to the task. Instead, “the combination of a bunch of really good carriers” could be the best way to get cybersecurity education started for small businesses, he told Carrier Management in May.

In addition, CyberPolicy.com will evolve so that customers will be able to purchase tools and policies separately down the road even though the Chubb cyber insurance coverage being made available today (for businesses with 15 or fewer employees) must be bundled to be purchased, a CoverHound representative confirmed.

As for the process, small business owners can go online and input basic business information (name, type, location, for example); answers to two additional questions about sensitive records and devices; a few yes-or-no questions about past breaches, claims and credit card payment security; and then receive a coverage recommendation within a few minutes.

While Carrier Management did not complete a test run of the site to secure any actual recommendations, CoverHound says that CyberPolicy.com provides “a curated choice of products at a cost that fits a small business budget—as little as $150 a year,” adding that the time from inputting these bits of information to purchase of the bundled product is typically less than four minutes.

“Curated choice” is a key feature of CoverHound, which Moore and his team aim to include on CyberPolicy.com as well, referring to the fact that the site narrows down a wide range of coverage options to a handful of tailored recommendations.

“We don’t want to inundate a shopper with too many choices,” he said, applying a lesson he learned earlier in his career as an executive for online lender Lending Tree. “The No. 1 thing that shoppers would say to us [at Lending Tree] was ‘thank you for narrowing down from 600 lenders to four,'” he said, noting that customers also asked for further guidance in selecting between the four.

“We think about it [cyber] that exact same way. We still want to maintain our core value proposition of being a trusted adviser for curated choice,” he said.

Chubb and American Family Ventures are among the financial backers of CoverHound, which raised over $47 million last year in two funding rounds.

Moore will be profiled in the next edition of Carrier Management magazine (along with several other InsurTech CEOs).