Corvus Risk Navigator: How We Supercharge Cyber Underwriters

Mike Karbassi is Chief Underwriting Officer at Corvus 

Data fuels everything we do at Corvus. It enables us to promptly respond to new threats, provide accurate quotes within minutes, and help our policyholders become safer with personalized security recommendations and rapid threat alerts. 

But the real powerhouse behind our cyber risk solutions — what brings all that data to bear — is the Corvus underwriting team. 

That’s why we’ve spent years building a digital platform to empower our cyber underwriters, replacing the traditional (and outdated) need for multiple software applications and outside third-party vendors to select and price risk. A smart insurance platform built by underwriters, for underwriters: Corvus Risk Navigator. 

Our Underwriters' Secret Sauce. Get to Know the Corvus Risk Navigator:

After working in cyber at traditional carriers, I was drawn to Corvus nearly six years ago because of the vision our founders had to harness the power of data to make informed decisions for underwriting. In prior roles, my teams never had access to the data or digital tools that could have enabled faster and more precise underwriting, and I had a sense that there had to be a better way. At Corvus, we’ve developed exactly that.   

The Risk Navigator is an all-in-one global cyber underwriting platform built from the ground up through close collaboration between Corvus’s underwriting, data science, cybersecurity, and tech teams. With it, our underwriters get real-time suggestions based on a complex matrix of data (including firmographics, threat intelligence, claims, and peer benchmarking) inserted directly into their workflow. 

With access to these real-time insights, our underwriters can make more accurate judgments about complex cybersecurity risks more efficiently; they can also spend more time on complicated accounts because simple tasks are automated. Plus, as we strive to make cyber insurance attainable for more organizations — in support of our mission to make the world a safer place — underwriters are armed with up-to-date cyber mitigation and security guidance to help brokers and their clients achieve insurability. 

The tools and insights within Risk Navigator have been instrumental in Corvus achieving an industry-leading loss ratio below 40% while simultaneously growing cyber premiums by 80% in 2022. 

How Corvus Risk Navigator Delivers for Underwriters, Brokers, and Policyholders

The complex nature of cyber risk calls for the right combination of traditional underwriting practices and modern solutions: proactive monitoring and reassessment, with the tried-and-true personal touch of a cyber industry expert to help prevent catastrophic cyber attacks.

Our technology automates some of the work, enabling our underwriters to devote their time to more complex challenges and custom policies. So, how do we make it happen?

Cyber-speed quote responsiveness

We unlock fast turnaround times on submissions, quotes, and renewals. Smart rating suggestions are also embedded in the workflow for data-informed efficiency to streamline the entire underwriting process and automate more simple tasks.

Profitable risk selection for a dynamic cyber threat landscape

Cyber incidents and threat actors change by the day. Consider high-risk VPNs, RDP, ransomware attacks, and challenges like pixel ad tracking technology. The Risk Navigator allows for underwriting standards to adjust at the same speed of cyber threats (fast!). Automated subjectivity triggers and rapid deployment of pricing — impossible in old-fashioned applications — help optimize target loss ratios and maximum exposure levels. 

Building relationships 

As I mentioned, the Risk Navigator doesn’t just make underwriting cyber insurance faster. It makes it more attainable. Thanks to real-time updates, we can provide expert guidance to brokers with detailed explanations around Corvus scores, transparent risk assessments, ensuring agreement limits/sub-limits, and subjectivities. Brokers can go to their clients with timely data and insights to support and explain our pricing, as well as security recommendations to increase insurability.

A Better Way to Address Cyber Risk

Some of these benefits are personal, too. For example, our underwriters are learning every day how to build profitable books of business in this exciting line of cyber insurance. Our underwriters routinely cite our technology and our close collaboration with cyber experts (our ratio of underwriters to cyber pros is 5:1, and they are all in-house members of the Corvus team) as critical to their professional development. 

The unique access to support from cross-functional experts spanning underwriting, claims, cybersecurity, and data science helps us all better learn to execute agile, resilient, and profitable strategies in a dynamic cyber market, with the competitive advantage of leading-edge tools.

By capturing the essence of all of this technology and presenting it to our cyber insurance underwriters, and by extension brokers and their clients, we’re taking confident strides toward a better (and smarter) approach to cyber risk.