Since its founding in 2016, Kovrr's goal has been to enable re/insurers to predict and price cyber risk.

This has been a difficult challenge, mainly because cyber risk can be found lurking in almost all types of insurance policy. There are many catastrophic scenarios where a cyber event triggers significant pay-out for business interruption or property damage, for example, where the policy did not envisage such a loss. Getting a handle on these "silent" coverages is a major activity for the industry.

Kovrr's offering allows re/insurance professionals to calculate potential cyber losses via the use of exclusive data sources, artificial intelligence-based risk modelling and advanced monitoring capabilities.
Yakir Golan, Kovrr's chief executive officer and co-founder, explains clients and regulators were the driving forces behind the development.

"Regulators are pushing full throttle, including the Prudential Regulation Authority and the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority. But it's also the clients.

"The insurers and reinsurers have a great deal of exposure around silent cyber and they need to come up with a solution."

The firm says it has "revolutionised" how re/insurers asses silent cyber risk exposure building a probabilistic model and event catalogue to quantify the risk.

The offering was put into practice in 2019 as the firm partnered with a reinsurer carrier in Asia with a focus on large speciality risks. Golan explained working with the client was helpful for Kovrr as it gained "very constructive feedback".

Kovrr said its solution has allowed its client to have "quantitative visibility" of the cyber risks in their portfolio for the first time.

Golan added models like Kovrr's will become more mature in the future, and the big players in the industry will align on what they can model.

"We will see more precise data and more precise coverage in products and policy wording" said Golan.