1. Let’s talk about the Cyber Insurance opportunity – the global cyber insurance market is projected to grow from $7.8 billion in 2020 to $20.4 billion by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate of 21.2%. With your recent funding round now in place, where are you focusing most of your attention?

Corvus’s recent Series C investment round, led by Insight Partners, and funding extension from FinTLV and Aquiline Technology Growth will primarily be used to continue scaling Corvus’s business, increase our share of the market, and enter new commercial lines. While we expect to grow our Cyber Insurance business even faster than the CAGR listed, we see opportunities to create smart insurance products leveraging unique data sources and AI-driven insights across multiple commercial insurance lines. We also plan to continue adding to our headcount, and focus on enhancing and growing our data science and technology teams.

  1. We are seeing an increasing number of security breaches & cyber attacks, consistently evolving in sophistication. How can small to medium businesses effectively respond, when perhaps they do not have the adequate technical and internal knowledge to do so?

It’s important for SMBs to do a few key things. First is to know where your essential data is. If you don’t know where data is located, how can you expect to properly protect it? Additionally, enable security features in the tools you already have, like multi-factor authentication. SMBs should also keep up with the patches that are put out by vendors like Microsoft, Intel and Apple. If a vulnerability is not being actively exploited at the time of the announcement, it is only a matter of time before a threat actor puts out a “proof of concept.” Lastly, from an insurance standpoint, SMBs should expect more from their cyber insurer. Corvus does more than just “risk transfer.” For example, we created an in-house scan that looks for vulnerabilities in our policyholders’ web facing IT infrastructure. We then provide a report of our findings and help policyholders throughout the policy period with critical vulnerability alerts.

  1. What are some of the biggest challenges that you see companies facing currently regarding cyber & making sure they are adequately protected?

There are a couple of challenges that we’re seeing — one, like I mentioned earlier, is really ensuring that companies know and understand where their data lives. With so many varying endpoints and multi-cloud environments, it’s tough for security leaders to sometimes get a grasp on where the data is that needs to be protected, which leaves them vulnerable to attack. The second is keeping up with general cyber hygiene (patch management, strong passwords, MFA, etc). That’s where having a proactive insurance partner can prove invaluable to mitigate issues down the road. Corvus can efficiently scan an organization’s IT systems, find the weak spots and shore up defenses.

  1. There has been a lot of talk over the past year about NFTs, digital currency etc. When we think about the move towards protecting not only physical, but digital assets, what does that mean for companies who not only have to secure customer data, but now need to be cognizant of their own digital assets?

It’s important for every company to understand what they have in terms of digital assets and invest properly to protect them. New digital assets such as NFTs and digital currencies likely require different cybersecurity solutions which highlights how important it is for a company to be constantly evolving and improving their cybersecurity program.

  1. Legacy insurers failing to meet today’s cybersecurity demands – what do you see as the biggest challenger legacy insurers? Agility? Legacy software/platforms?

The insurance industry is ripe for disruption as conventional insurers have been unable to manage cutting-edge innovation, partly due to being slow to adoption. That’s where there’s huge value from InsurTech companies such as Corvus, which can help propel the insurance industry forward. One of the main ways to accomplish this is through the use of multiple and larger data sets, including from novel sources. The InsurTech industry has the benefit of having a data-first mentality from its start, and the AI tools to help streamline, execute and make sense of it all. Large incumbents may have plenty of data but if they cannot quickly access or use the data, the data is less helpful. Traditional approaches and legacy systems slow down or hinder data-driven decision-making, compared to InsurTechs that can better inform underwriting decisions to ultimately benefit brokers and policyholders.

  1. The proliferation and availability of data is obviously driving a lot of change across the insurance space – where are you seeing data science perhaps having the biggest impact and greatest disruption within the insurance space?

Having a data science-centric approach to underwriting insurance policies can better inform all the key decisions that benefit brokers, policyholders and underwriters. We are seeing big impacts across the value chain. The overall user experience is just better when you leverage data. Brokers have more value-add content to share with their clients, policyholders are getting useful loss prevention recommendations and underwriters can more accurately and quickly assess the risk.

  1. How can AI & ML be leveraged to keep up with the ever evolving cyber landscape?

InsurTechs, like Corvus, are harnessing the power of AI to make commercial insurance smarter by finding new and unique sources of data to predict and prevent claims. AI drives tools and predictive models that break down the complex world of cyber risk and ensures brokers and policyholders are empowered with actionable insights from automated analyses.

AI is helping policyholders handle modern-day problems that traditional insurers historically struggle to keep up with. Using AI-powered tools fueled by robust data, cyber insurance policyholders can more easily understand their holistic cyber risk and how they can improve their overall security posture.

  1. Much of the conversation has been around technology, AI, ML, automation – where do you see people fitting into the puzzle? Is there an opportunity here to create cyber experts and trusted advisors who are able to offer advice and support for the more unique situations and challenges?

Humans play a critical role, for sure. The technologies should be instead viewed as ways to assist and streamline so people can better execute their jobs. That’s why Corvus provides the best of both worlds. We understand that our policyholders want the human expertise of their brokers, but also want the tech (e.g., 24/7 availability and resources), benchmarking info and ease to process buying. Our tools are meant to help brokers better understand and solve complex issues and make a safer world for our policyholders.