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A new report by Beazley Plc has taken a deep dive into the opportunity-rich world of digital health businesses, a majority of which, it turns out, are not adequately insured. 

The Spotlight on digital health and wellness 2022 report was based on a Beazley-commissioned survey of 300 digital health and wellness industry business leaders from the UK, the US, Canada, and Asia (Singapore and Hong Kong). The poll spanned health and wellness practitioners; software and platform providers; health-technology and life sciences technology companies; and mHealth (mobile health), telehealth, and telemedicine providers.

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Read more: Revealed – main causes of catastrophe losses in H1 2022

Danielle became the Atlantic basin’s first named hurricane of 2022 on September 2 and was swiftly followed by Earl on September 6. Neither made landfall, though Hurricane Kay brought record rain and strong winds to southern California after hitting Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, reportedly killing four, from the Pacific.

Two named storms have this week formed in the Atlantic, and experts are closely watching a tropical wave, known as Invest 98L, a couple of hundred miles east of the southern Windward Islands.

Hurricane Fiona, which the National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said on Wednesday had strengthened into a category four storm, is predicted to track over parts of Atlantic Canada over the weekend, with the Canadian government warning of “multi-provincial” impacts.

The storm could be “shaping up to be a potentially severe event” for Canada, the government warned on Wednesday morning.

It is first expected to track in the direction of Bermuda late on Thursday, with the NHC having warned that the storm will bring storm surge and large and destructive waves across the coast, and two to four inches of rainfall.

Fiona has already brought destructive winds and rains to Puerto Rico, Turks and Caicos, and the Dominican Republic, with flash flooding posing a risk to life.

US President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for Puerto Rico on Sunday, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) having confirmed on Tuesday that it was rushing hundreds of additional personnel to the territory to assist with disaster relief. The death toll in Puerto Rico could be as high as eight, Reuters has reported.

Eyes remain trained on Invest 98L, which had a 90% chance of formation over five days and 70% chance of formation over 48 hours as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the NHC, and would be known as Hermine. The wave is expected to move towards the Central Caribbean Sea later this week, according to the NHC, and meteorologists are waiting to see whether the storm enters the Gulf of Mexico.

AccuWeather meteorologists warned that US interests “from Miami to New Orleans” should be closely watching the weather system over the coming days.

Should Invest 98L intensify and hit the US, it would be the second Hermine to do so in the past decade; its namesake made landfall in 2016 as a category one storm and was the first hurricane to hit Florida since 2005’s Wilma.

Model runs indicate that the state could sustain a direct hit from a could-be Hermine, an Insurance Information Institute representative has cautioned.

US state Florida is already struggling with a homeowners’ insurance crisis, with several major carriers having exited the market and five domestic insurers having failed in recent months, and market sources have warned that a major hurricane hit to Florida this year could be catastrophic from an industry perspective.

Storm Gaston became the seventh named Atlantic storm of the season on Tuesday, though it is expected to remain over the sea.

 Read more: Aon reveals huge number of nat cat losses not insured

North America may have escaped a major storm impact so far this year, but in September alone three typhoons – Hinnamnor, Muifa, and Namnadol – have slammed into Asia, causing damage and loss of life.

Super typhoon Hinnamnor, the first storm to reach category five status in 2022 at the end of August, made landfall in South Korea in September as a category two storm. The death toll was at least 10, including seven people who died when they were trapped in an underground car park, according to BBC reporting.

Japanese officials had urged the evacuation of up to nine million people, the news publication said.

Typhoon Muifa, which made landfall in Eastern China last Wednesday, was widely reported as the strongest tropical cyclone to ever hit the populous city of Shanghai and saw 1.6 million forced to evacuate their homes.

Super typhoon Nanmadol reportedly left at least four dead and 114 injured in Japan. The typhoon first hit Kyushu on Sunday night before tracking through Honshu, leading to record rainfall and mudslide warnings. 

Last September saw 10 named Atlantic storms, of which five were hurricanes and of these two were major hurricanes, according to NOAA. The East Pacific saw just one named storm, hurricane Olaf, while the West Pacific experienced five named storms, including category five super typhoons Chantu and Mindulle.

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A representative for Bloody Bay said it would be “inappropriate” to comment on the confidential settlement figure.

“We confirm that the litigation between Besso and Bloody Bay has concluded with the parties reaching a mutually acceptable settlement, the terms of which are confidential,” said a Besso spokesperson.

In court proceedings, Bloody Bay – representing the Superclubs group of hotels – had alleged that a former Besso broker had engaged in grossing up premium and had taken “secret profits” from the group.

It had sought to recoup in the region of $10 million in the now stayed court action. Prior to its acquisition by Ardonagh, Besso had filed a counterclaim and argued the case was based on “maintenance and champerty”.

Insurance Business understands that, prior to the settlement, the Bloody Bay group had attempted to involve the regulator in a failed bid to stay Ardonagh’s acquisition of Besso until the historic matter had been further considered.

Ardonagh paid a $500 million cash consideration for Besso and BGC’s other insurance businesses, including Ed Broking, in a deal that closed in November 2021.

Charles Christopher O’Sullivan, the ex-managing director named in proceedings as having engaged in the alleged misconduct who has been nicknamed the “pirate of the Caribbean” in reports, was not immediately available for comment.

O’Sullivan was censured by a Lloyd’s tribunal in 2017 on three counts of discreditable conduct and ordered to pay council and tribunal costs totalling upwards of £120,000. Had O’Sullivan not faced an interim suspension of his Lloyd’s pass, the tribunal said he could have also faced a £135,000 fine due to the “sufficiently serious” nature of its findings.

The former managing director was also barred from doing business in the insurance marketplace and from entering the underwriting room.

The Lloyd’s enforcement tribunal found he had engaged in “deception” while at Besso, where he worked until 2011, and later at Bennett Gould & Partners where he was fired for gross misconduct in 2012.

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Since 2020, Kunzmann has been leading the mobility & assistance line of business for Allianz Partners as a CEO and board member.

Effective September 1, 2022, Kunzmann is succeeded by Laurent Floquet who has been nominated as CEO of mobility & assistance and board member of Allianz Partners.

Floquet joined the Allianz Group in 2014 as head of business development for Allianz Technology before moving to Allianz Partners in 2016 where he has since held several key roles.

Commenting on the appointments, Sirma Boshnakova, board member of Allianz SE, said: “I am happy that Tomas is taking on the CEO role at Allianz Partners. Given his experience at Allianz Partners, he’ll bring business continuity, hands-on market knowledge, and a strong track record of collaboration and implementation to the role.

“He is in a clear position to accelerate the momentum that we have achieved at Allianz Partners in delivering excellence and simplicity at scale for the benefit of our customers and I wish him the very best of luck in his new position.”

Kunzmann also commented on his appointment and said that after two years leading the mobility & assistance business, he was “proud and humbled” to step into the role of CEO and lead the business into the future. The focus of Allianz Partners will remain on boosting growth, he said, by strengthening its core activities and building new business models and ecosystem platforms.

He added: “Laurent is an experienced leader who combines an excellent track record of driving business growth in the assistance business, with strong change and transformation skills. He has been instrumental in supercharging our transformation over the last number of months and I know that he is the right leader to boost our mobility & assistance business and seize the right opportunities for the future.”

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Russell Group has joined the International Union of Marine Insurance (IUMI) as a professional partner.

According to the analytics and risk modelling company, as a professional partner, it is looking forward to broadening the IUMI debate and exchanging expertise and ideas within the marine insurance sector.

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Speaking with Insurance Business UK, Scrivens noted that he came to the insurance profession in a slightly unusual way, through a springboard diving friend, who recommended him to cover maternity in a pan-European company called Europ Assistance in Haywards Heath. 

“While there, I learned the ropes of underwriting in travel, motor breakdown and home emergency before being promoted to senior underwriter,” he said. “The head of underwriting, Fiona McDonald moved to start up the underwriting arm of ROCK Insurance, in Crawley, called OPERA Underwriting, and asked me to move and become the underwriting manager working closely with claims and assistance companies, capacity providers and clients.”

While at OPERA, Scrivens was responsible for travel and travel insolvency and auditing both claims and assistance companies, ensuring the profitability of the portfolio and being the point of expertise for the clients. From there, he said, he made the move to sunny Gibraltar where he worked as a claim analyst for Skyfire Insurance in motor insurance before returning to the UK and his underwriting roots with a role at UK General in Leeds. 

“At UK General I was responsible for a variety of products ranging from travel, wedding and event to motor ancillary, cycle and gadget insurance while managing a team of underwriters,” he said. “I finally decided it was time to move to new challenges and was offered a position I could not refuse at Acasta.”

Now as underwriting management at Acasta Europe, Scrivens leads the team in establishing the design, price setting and implementation of new and existing products, while monitoring its portfolio of products, to ensure that it achieves targets, and managing a team of underwriters to help them develop and grow. This will also include reporting to the board, he said, and building strong relationships with the current capacity provider, existing clients and potential new business partners.

Read more: Top tips on how to be an effective problem-solver

There are several pressing areas of focus for Scrivens and his team in the latter half of 2022 but top of the agenda is ensuring good relationships with Acasta Europe’s existing partners while maintaining a profitable portfolio of business. As with any such business, he said, the team is keen to have a diverse portfolio so will be ensuring that it is diverse enough in the future to weather any potential storms.

“The main topic of conversation at the moment is inflation and the cost-of-living crisis,” he noted, commenting on the market conditions driving Acasta Europe’s strategic objectives. “We need to ensure that we are going to be profitable in the coming years as we price now for the next three to five years. 

“Inflation has a massive impact on this as we need to ensure that we are profitable, while also being customer-centric and ensuring that claims can be paid in the future while continuing to provide products that are affordable. There’s no point in having a product that is either out of kilter with the market or unaffordable.”

Acasta Europe works closely with its broker partners, he said, as it recognises that brokers are a key element to its ongoing success. As part of the group’s commitment to them, the team works closely with its brokers to be sure that their needs are met, and to ensure they are kept educated and informed about the business and the decisions it makes. 

“This also works both ways,” he said, “and it is important to our team to understand not only our customer needs but also our clients’ needs.”

Looking to the year ahead, Scrivens highlighted that Acasta Europe’s overall ambition is to have a profitable, diverse portfolio, as well as growth within its team and growth within its portfolio. What the company should have, he said, is a close relationship with its business partners, with a portfolio of existing and new clients who understand their market and the issues of customers, capacity providers and claims partners. 

“Our plan includes expanding current lines, such as GAP and warranty, to include electric vehicles, and developing our offering of wedding insurance to provide further levels of cover for different budgets and events,” he said. “We are also looking into brand new lines such as travel and gadget, and have also recently launched a cycle insurance scheme which we aim to develop and grow.

“As a bespoke underwriter, and having a close relationship with our capacity provider, we are able to look at a wide range of prospective businesses.”

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That’s not to confuse an expert with a specialist – to my mind they remain separate beasts despite the extensive overlap between them. To be an expert is not necessarily to possess the ability to drill deep into any one subject matter but rather to be on hand with explanations, evaluations and – where possible – answers to the questions of those you have imbibed with confidence in your capabilities. 

The critical need for expertise and the role of experts in providing insight has only become clearer in recent months, against the backdrop of a wider society in which so many once theoretical questions around pandemics, cyberattacks and war have become so concrete.

It is those same individuals who have translated their appetite for providing the right resolutions into accessible solutions for their clients and partners who are leading the charge of directing the future of the insurance profession at this time. The CFC Summit 2022 – the first of its kind to be held in the UK – was a particular standout in championing the role of the expert.

Authorities on everything from cyber insurance, to the NFT marketplace, to the burgeoning role of healthcare tech came together to share their expertise with brokers, underwriters and the broader insurance distribution chain. The result was a delight to see. Between the engagement from the audience, the poise and conviction of the speakers, and the enthusiasm for the in-person setting – the willingness of the profession to engage with the future of insurance appears self-evident.

There are examples all across the market of experts and expertise coming to the fore. From in-depth industry reports examining the scale of the challenges the industry faces, to leaders providing insight into pricing stabilisations, to ‘Rising Stars’ offering thoughts on what the future of insurance will look like – one and all, these experts have expertise to bring to the table, and an audience that is uniquely primed to pay attention.

I’d be hard-pressed to name an individual I’ve spoken to yet in my time within the industry who didn’t have some expertise, whether or not they recognise it for what it is. But faced with so many examples, there’s less and less excuse for insurance professionals across the ecosystem not to recognise their own influence and to find opportunities where they can lend their insights.

With so much uncertainty in the global environment right now, the die has been cast. And insurance professionals, and brokers, in particular, need to step up and be the expert their clients don’t just expect but need right now – not the person who claims to have all the answers, but rather the one who knows where to find them and will stop at nothing until they do.

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“Without awareness, the consumer will generally not consider your brand for purchase,” the firm wrote in a guide on its website. “There are rare cases – impulse buying or some lower engagement categories – where the purchase can take place without prior knowledge of the brand, but by increasing brand awareness, you’ll reduce your reliance on consumers finding you by chance – because you’ll find them.”

The company described brand awareness as “people knowing the name of or recognising your brand.” But the most crucial aspect, it added, is that “brand awareness is also about what you’re known for.”

Read more: Ranking how the UK’s top 50 insurance brands are tackling digital marketing opportunities

Why is brand awareness important in the insurance industry?

According to Qualtrics, brand awareness is generally considered as “the foundation to multiple brand equity models,” or in layman’s terms, a metric that shows how a brand’s success can be directly attributed to the consumers’ attitudes towards it.

The firm then listed several benefits brand awareness brings to businesses not just in the insurance industry, but also in all other sectors. These are:

1. It is an indicator of growth.

Brand awareness is the most common measure tracked by top-level executives because it often indicates a business’s progress.

 “As a rule, if awareness goes up, this is a sign of improvement,” Qualtrics noted, adding that improvement means “business success and reaching your goals.”

“If you know the percentage of people aware of your brand, and roughly what your market share is, you can compare and contrast these two numbers,” the firm explained. “The goal should be to turn brand awareness into brand consideration – and ultimately get more people buying from your brand, and that market share percentage will increase.”

2. It keeps the brand on top of customers’ minds.

Qualtrics pointed out how brand awareness should not be a “one-time thing” as consumers’ needs evolve constantly. Because of this, there should also be a continuous effort from brands to send the right messaging to the right people at the right time.

“This will help to keep you relevant,” the firm added. “Prove your worth to the customer, and you’ll increase loyalty too.”

3. It indicates the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Qualtrics also noted how brand awareness can be a good signifier of whether a business’s marketing initiatives are working.

“If you see an improvement in brand awareness, you know your campaigns are resonating,” the firm explained. “If brand awareness isn’t increasing, then you know they’re not effective and something needs to change.”

Read more: The world’s number one insurance brand is…

What are the most famous insurance brands in the UK?

To find out which insurance brands in the country topped the awareness category, London-based international online market research and data analytics firm YouGov gathered “millions of responses” from the British public through a survey conducted between April and June.

The poll measured two key metrics. Apart from fame, which the company defined as the percentage of respondents “who have heard of an insurance brand,” it determined popularity, indicating the portion of those surveyed “who have a positive opinion of an insurance brand.”

There were more than 60 insurance brands included in YouGov’s survey. AA – the AXA-administered car, home, and travel insurance specialist – topped the fame ratings at 98%. London-based Bupa, which offers high-quality yet affordable health and travel medical insurance, and insurance giant Aviva were tied for second, scoring 94%.

Leeds-headquartered Direct Line secured the fourth spot in the rankings with a 93% rating. The firm provides car, home, and business policies underwritten by UK Insurance. Prominent insurers RAC, AXA, and Admiral ended up in a triple tie for fifth place, all garnering a 90% fame rating. Of these brands, only RAC suffered a drop in scoring from the previous quarter.

Sainsbury’s Bank (87%), Co-operative Insurance (86%), and Prudential (85%) rounded up the top 10.

Read more: Are insurers wasting their time and money on branding?

At the other end of the spectrum were global health services firm Cigna (20%), digital insurer and Ageas subsidiary Back Me Up (18%), life insurance provider DeadHappy (17%), pay-as-you-drive car insurer By Miles (15%), and Northern Ireland brokerage firm Hughes Insurance (13%).

Here’s a list of the 20 most famous insurance brands, according to YouGov’s survey.

Rank	Insurance brand	Rating
1	AA	98%
=2	Bupa	94%
=2	Aviva	94%
4	Direct Line	93%
=5	RAC	90%
=5	AXA	90%
=5	Admiral	90%
8	Sainsbury’s Bank	87%
9	Co-operative Insurance	86%
10	Prudential	85%
11	Churchill	84%
=12	LV=	83%
=12	Zurich	83%
=14	Norwich Union	81%
=14	Green Flag	81%
16	Hastings Direct	79%
17	Saga	78%
=18	Royal London	71%
=18	More Than	71%
=20	Standard Life	68%
=20	Sheila’s Wheels	68%

Source: YouGov

What are the most popular insurance brands in the UK?

Unsurprisingly, almost all insurance brands that topped the fame ratings were also the leaders when came to popularity. AA still got the highest score at 62%, followed by RAC (55%), Bupa (52%), and Aviva (47%). Roadside assistance and recovery specialist Green Flag cracked the top five in the category, getting a rating of 45%.

Read more: Revealed: Top insurance brands for customer service

Famous insurance brands Direct Line, Prudential, AXA, Churchill, and LV= rounded up the top 10. The bottom five brands in the same category also ranked last in terms of popularity.

Here are the 20 most popular insurance brands in the country based on the survey.

Rank	Insurance brand	Rating
1	AA	62%
2	RAC	55%
3	Bupa	52%
4	Aviva	47%
5	Green Flag	45%
6	Direct Line	40%
7	Prudential	38%
8	AXA	37%
=9	Churchill	36%
=9	LV=	36%
11	Admiral	35%
12	Co-operative Insurance	34%
=13	Zurich	33%
=13	Hastings Direct	33%
15	More Than	32%
16	Age Co	31%
=17	Argos Care	30%
=17	Royal London	30%
=19	Norwich Union	29%
=19	Standard Life	29%

Source: YouGov

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Taking cyber solutions out of the realm of the theoretical and into the arena of the practical is at the heart of what Roger Francis (pictured), MD of CFC Response, and his 100-strong in-house global response team do on a day-to-day basis.

Find out more: Discover how CFC prevent cyber attacks for policyholders

Cyber threat analysis is a next-generation cyber service which looks to match the ever-evolving nature of cyber risk through proactive intervention. Touching on what such a solution looks like, Francis highlighted that the word proactive is quite often misattributed, and used to describe tabletop exercise scenarios aimed at creating muscle memory rather than pre-emptive engagement with incoming threats.

“At its core, our cyber threat analysts focus on reducing cyber risk across the CFC portfolio,” he said. “Something quite unique to the cyber line is that we can actually influence the behaviour of the risk throughout the term of the policy. If you consider the incident response side of the house, we deal with over 2,500 global incidents annually. And these have a whole load of root causes and elements which drive those claims.

Read next: CFC on the solution that’s reshaping the cybercrime battlefield

“What our cyber threat analysts do is create ‘claims intelligence’ where we correlate those risks against claims to see which ones are specific indicators of potential claims, so we can better predict them. Correspondingly, we create tools via which we can proactively scan our entire portfolio to see if any of those vulnerabilities are prevalent. This allows us to reach out to the insured and help them through the remediation process, making them a better risk in the long run as a less likely target for threat actors.”

What sets CFC’s cyber threat analysis offering apart, Francis said, is that the team actively search for precursor malware – the tools a threat actor will deploy before they encrypt an environment. CFC’s scale and global breadth enables it to engage with a broad range of resources from private sector feeds, to government feeds, to the proprietary feeds it has built itself – and to democratise threat intelligence by disseminating this information for the benefit of policyholders everywhere.

“At CFC, we are very technically-minded in terms of our approach,” he said. “And that’s not only driven from how we respond from an incident response perspective in helping organisations actually recover from an incident, but also in terms of how we look to protect our portfolio.”

There are several different stages to how this threat analysis is carried out – including scanning, identifying, building patches and notifying. What a lot of people don’t quite realise, he said, is how difficult disseminating the information amassed can be. Looking across the security industry, there are so many disparate players who each hold critical insights into cyber threats but communicating all that data in an actionable and timely manner is another matter entirely.

“The way we’ve tackled that at CFC is by building our Response mobile app, which gives us a direct link into our insureds and allows us to push out alerts to them immediately,” he said. “A good example is what happened with ProxyShell in August 2021, when we were able to build a scanner within 24 hours which identified several thousand potentially vulnerable systems and several hundred systems that had already been compromised.

“We then leveraged the app to reach out to those organisations so they could go ahead and remediate and resolve them. What started out at the beginning of the week, as thousands of vulnerabilities, we were able to remediate down to the low tens – and there will always be some organisations that you can’t reach. But we vastly changed our risk profile by identifying the threat, building the scanning tool and reaching out to the insureds, helping them remediate and making them better risks in the long run.”

Discover more: Find out more about CFC’s market-leading cyber insurance offering today

The threat analysts’ work in such moments of crisis is an example of a truly proactive solution in action, and Francis noted that brokers, in particular, have had an “overwhelmingly positive reaction” to the offering. The market has been calling out for a new-age threat intelligence solution that provides actionable insight rather than reams of inaccessible data. There are around 10,000 Common Vulnerability Scores (CVEs) out there, he said, but that doesn’t mean there are 10,000 considerations people should be worried about.

It is by correlating those scores against claims that allows you to identify the vulnerabilities which are being actively exploited as part of a threat actor’s campaign, he said. The idea is not to bombard insureds with doomsday scenarios about hypothetical threats but rather to alert them to specific vulnerabilities that have implications for them and their business.

Read more: CFC on what’s happening around cyber insurance pricing

“When we send them out an alert, it’s to say we found this specific vulnerability on this specific server or domain, here’s a set of recommendations on how to solve it and, if you have any questions, contact us,” he said. “It’s a proper, actionable service. And sometimes we have people asking why they haven’t heard from us, and our response is that it’s a very good thing!

“But I think it’s important to differentiate threat intelligence as part of the security industry, which is something that people try and package and sell, versus what we’re trying to do, which is proactively de-risk our portfolio and taking that offering one step further – by reducing the noise of 10,000 vulnerabilities down to just the handful that we know drive claims, and therefore that we want to focus on.”

It’s a solution that works for the benefit of brokers and insureds alike while safeguarding the stability and longevity of the cyber insurance market. For brokers, who have seen first-hand how CFC’s threat analysis team has prevented ransomware incidents and protected insureds’ systems, he said, threat intelligence has proven itself a real game-changer.

“The feedback from the brokers and the insureds when they realise there’s no ulterior motive to this and it’s just us purely trying to help them avoid what could be one of their worst days is incredible,” he said. “And we work largely in the SME sector where there’s a lot of business owners who have everything wound up in their businesses, and who have enough problems on their plates right now. So, it’s nice for them to know there’s someone else out there, looking over their shoulder and making sure that the worst-case scenario doesn’t happen.”

Find out more: Discover how CFC prevent cyber attacks for policyholders

Roger Francis is a security specialist with over 15 years of experience in protecting organisational assets from threats. He joined CFC in 2019 to head up CFC Response.

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In this executive insights edition of IBTV, Richard Webb, director at Manchester Underwriting Management, offers an overview of the broker E&O market, the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the benefits of direct interaction with insureds.

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