Reflecting on 2020: Continuing Coalition's mission to solve cyber risk

2020 was a year of much uncertainty and change. We recognize the challenges this brought to our policyholders and broker partners: significant changes to organizational and operational processes as well as a surge in cyber attacks.

We’ve emerged from 2020 as a stronger coalition at Coalition: we expanded our tools to help brokers explain technical risk and how cyber insurance keeps companies resilient, launched new cybersecurity solutions and partnerships, and expanded to new geographies. We raised new funding and doubled our team in order to accelerate our growth and support a growing customer base. Coalition wrote more new business in December 2020 than in all of 2018. Thank you!

Here are a few reflections on the past year as we look ahead to a strong 2021:

The battle with ransomware accelerated

Cyber crime has been on the rise for many years, and still, 2020 saw an unparalleled level of activity as threat actors have exploited COVID-19 and changes in company operating procedures. Ransomware attacks have been particularly damaging. We saw a 121% increase in the average ransom demand from 2018 to 2020, and attackers have become more aggressive and targeted with their techniques.

Despite this, our customers experience fewer claims

Coalition approaches cyber risk differently. Our in-house Security and Incident Response Team was able to fully contain 45% of losses for our policyholders in 2020 (meaning no out-of-pocket expense or erosion of their policy limit when claims were filed). Our policyholders have consistently experienced less than one-fourth the frequency of claims compared to the overall market due to our automated security alerts and proactive security services. We shared these insights in our first annual Cyber Claims Report, and we are regularly updating our Claims Calculator to help you understand and explain these risks.

We expanded our insurance and risk management product

In 2020, we invested in broadening our product offerings to serve our customers. Here are a few of the things we launched last year:

New security offerings:

• Acquired BinaryEdge to expand our security tools

• Enhanced our security scanning infrastructure (JARM, anyone?) and sent out tens of thousands of critical vulnerability alerts to our policyholders

• Provided Coalition’s Attack Surface Monitoring to all our policyholders

• Expanded our Coalition Incident Response (CIR) team, which provides our policyholders with instant and on-the-ground support to recover from cyber attacks

New insurance offerings:

• Expanded our insurance offering to Canada 🇨🇦

• Launched our excess cyber offering and our $0 SIR endorsement for the use of Coalition’s in-house security team. To our partners north of the border: keep an eye out for this soon!

• Upgraded our broker sales resources, including our Cyber Claims Calculator and enhanced Coalition Risk Assessment

Up-to-date education on technology, the most dynamic risk:

• What we learn from Claims and Incident Response, we turn into data-driven lessons for everyone involved in keeping companies safe. Webinar recordings are accessible via your Coalition dashboard.

• Real-world expertise applied to new regulations, such as IoT and oh-so-many privacy regulations, or new threats, like SolarWinds, or... (well, too many to list).

We remain committed to consistency

The cyber market is evolving, but above all, we remain committed to consistency: consistently great products, service, coverage. In 2021, we will expand on all fronts — stay tuned for announcements — and we will continue our mission to solve cyber risk.

Thank you for your continued partnership.