Corvus’ Tadikonda: Cyber industry must respond quicker to threat actors

The dynamism of cyber threat actors has highlighted the increasing requirement for the insurance industry to respond quickly to new information coming in, Lori Bailey and Madhu Tadikonda of Corvus have said on the latest episode of Close Quarter.

Tadikonda, who joined Corvus as president last month, stated that communication needs to improve in order for policyholders to be better protected. 

“The cyber industry has been around for more than a decade but in some ways was managed like traditional insurance, which was policyholders, brokers, carriers interacting once a year around renewal,” he said. “What has become very evident is the dynamism of threat actors and the requirement to respond quickly to new information coming in.”

He added: “Information continuity and creating a better rhythm of communicating across the chain I think is what is going to help protect industries and our policyholders.”

Corvus in September launched what is thought to be a first-of-its-kind platform that allows its program carriers and reinsurers to review premiums, policy numbers or limits at risk in real time along with a number of other metrics to quantify risk aggregations.

The platform allows users to see crucial insurance metrics, aggregate exposure data, ransomware scores and information regarding emerging threats.

Risk capital partners can then take instant action by capping premium or limiting quotes for segments identified through the platform’s tools.

“Not only are we able to assess the aggregation risk of any given portfolio but then risk capital partners are then able to take action on that and actually set some alerts and also use some real-time threat intelligence that is happening on the portfolio,” explained Bailey, who is chief insurance officer at Corvus. 

She added: “The key is this is done in real time. There is real-time visibility into the platform and into the portfolio with the ability to take action on it if necessary.”

Bailey, who joined Corvus from Zurich in June, noted that ransomware losses have continued to dominate the cyber market this year. 

“Although from our own data we have seen a slight downtick in frequency, we have continued to see the severity go up,” she said.

Tadikonda was last month appointed Corvus’ first president. The executive previously served as AIG’s commercial chief underwriting officer between 2015 and 2018. 

More recently Tadikonda co-founded Archipelago Analytics, a data platform that uses AI to digitise risk for large owners of commercial property. He was also a founding executive at Bolttech, which claims to be the world’s largest insurance exchange and recently raised $210mn in Series A funding. 

Tadikonda suggested that Corvus has a fundamental respect for how insurance operates that differentiates it from some other insurtechs.

“In the insurtech world you’ve either got insurance companies that slap on a website or put together an innovation team and call themselves an insurtech or you have got tech folks who think, ‘Insurance agents are like travel agents, why do they exist?’ or ‘Why do you need reinsurance capital when you have got venture capital?’ Both of those miss the point a little bit.”

He stated that the industry in general needs to do a better job at addressing emerging risk for its customers. 

“This is the make-or-break watershed moment for the industry,” he said. “Clients and customers are more and more dependent on digital assets and digital operations, and to a large extent the insurance industry has not responded to those new emerging risks.”