Capsicum Re announces collaboration with AIR
Capsicum Re is collaborating with catastrophe modelling firm AIR Worldwide as part of a joint effort to enhance the insurance industry’s modelling of “silent” cyber incidents.
As a part of the collaboration, Capsicum Re has also adopted AIR’s cyber risk modelling and analytics platform, ARC, which includes a wide range of cyber scenarios and models to help deliver sophisticated insights to its insurance portfolios.
The two firms will identify which non-cyber lines of business and industries are more likely to be exposed to silent cyber-related losses. According to AIR, the result of this collaboration is expected to yield the availability of models that simulate the impact of incidents that could cause silent cyber-related losses. AIR continually collects data on cyber risk to inform its cyber risk models, and the addition of Capsicum Re’s expertise is expected to result in models that provide unique insights for identifying and evaluating silent cyber exposures.
Silent cyber exposure could exist in some insurance policies when cyber-related risks are not specifically included or excluded in the policy wording. As a result, it’s possible the insurance industry could face higher-than-expected loss ratios when cyber incidents occur if certain cyber-related exposures are not necessarily accounted for during the underwriting process.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding cyber risks, and these could result in losses for property, professional, marine, and other non-cyber lines of business,” said Scott Stransky, assistant vice president and director of emerging risks modelling at AIR. “The models we’re developing in collaboration with Capsicum Re can help the insurance industry assess and quantify silent cyber risks appropriately.”
“Given the rapidly evolving nature of cyber risk, it’s likely that insurance policy wordings will be challenged to keep up, and some forms of silent cyber exposures could always exist,” said Ian Newman, global head of cyber at Capsicum Re. “Our goal is to better advise insurers and reinsurers about the nature of cyber risk and help the industry develop innovative risk-transfer solutions that truly reflect the underlying risk exposure. We’re excited to work with AIR to improve our industry’s ability to understand and manage silent cyber risks.”
Justyna Pikinska, actuary at Capsicum Re, said, “Silent cyber is an area of growing concern, and the market is actively researching different ways to quantify it. It’s widely discussed by the actuarial community, and we see a significant uptick in requests for specialised models to be developed—both deterministic and stochastic. We have a great opportunity with AIR to develop a reliable probabilistic model to assess the volatility around the mean and quantify the probability of extreme cyber events.”
