Business News

XL Catlin announced a new insurance policy to help mid-size companies in the US respond and recover from such incidents.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) estimates that nearly 2 million American workers are victims of workplace violence each year, with still more cases going unreported. According to OSHA, workplace violence is the second leading cause of work-site deaths in the US.

With liability limits up to $25 million, XL Catlin’s Workplace Violence and Stalking Threat insurance covers expenses related to public relations counsel, psychiatric, medical or dental care, employee counseling, temporary security measures, and rehabilitation expenses, personal accident, legal liability and business interruption expenses.

The policy includes legal liability coverage to address legal expenses or lawsuits that can result from an incident. A special endorsement is also available to provide the company and its employees coverage for an “off site incident,” an act of workplace violence that may occur at a client or vendor’s facility for instance.

Location, Inc., a provider of location-based data and tools used by corporations for risk analysis, introduced a new risk index to help insurers address one of the biggest challenges in insurance today: structure fire losses due to human negligence.

Every year structure fires cause billions of dollars in insurance losses. In 2014 alone, U.S. fire departments responded to 494,000 structure fires (one every 64 seconds), resulting in approximately $9.8 billion in property damage.

Insurers often associate structure fires with catastrophic events, such as wildfires or infrastructure failures (e.g. heating system faults). In order to gain a better understanding into these low frequency events insurers often factor in credit scores or public fire protection capabilities.

While the data sources above may provide some additional insights into structure fires, they do not fully address behavior-related incidents, such as arson or accidents involving cooking, improper appliance use, smoking, chimney, electrical, and other negligence- and property maintenance-related incidents.

FIRE RISK Index allows underwriters and agents to factor in human negligence when assessing structure fire risk. Based on millions of policy years of fire loss data and over 20 proprietary geospatial models, the index generates an easy to read risk score from 1 (lowest risk) to 10 (highest risk) for any address in the United States.

To highlight the capabilities of FIRE RISK, Location, Inc. is offering a free fire risk analysis on up to 25,000 policies for a limited time. To sign up for your free analysis, visit http://www.locationinc.com/fire-risk-trial or contact Paul Ptashnick at paulp@locationinc.com

RMS is debuting a new cyber modeling system, according to a formal announcement of the release made on Feb. 2, that it developed in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre of Risk Studies, and also with support from Amlin Plc., Aon Benfield, AXIS Capital, Barbican Insurance Group, Canopius Managing Agents Ltd. and SJNK Inc., RenaissanceRe Holdings, Talbot Underwriting and XL Catlin.

The RMS Cyber Accumulation Management System includes a new software system, framework for cyber exposure reporting and a series of cyber catastrophe scenarios for loss modeling.

In a related matter, the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies, working with RMS, also released a new cyber-related report that zeroes in on concepts to help quantify accumulation risk to help firms reveal their portfolio’s loss potential.

The report notes five common cyber loss processes that can trigger the use of cyber insurance: the systemic release of confidential customer records, denial-of-service attack, cloud service provider failure, cyber attacks that compromise financial transactions and cyber extortion.

IDT911 announced significant enhancements to its DataRiskStages data breach mitigation and remediation service to better support insurers and their commercial policyholders. The platform has been enriched with three new features: Ins.breachresponse.com to help avoid and manage a breach, CyberClaims911 for more efficient claims handling and new analytics for more accurate cyber underwriting.

For commercial policyholders, breachresponse.com from DataRiskStages offers comprehensive pre-breach risk awareness education and post-breach remediation guidance. Users have access to data protection tips and education guides, breach scenarios, easy-to-use risk calculators, timely and current information security content, planning guides and templates and information regarding risk regulation and compliance. Additionally, the platform provides commercial customers with intuitive post-breach response guidance designed to quickly connect an organization experiencing a breach with IDT911’s data breach response team and resolution advisors.

CyberClaims911 focuses solely on cyber claims processing to provide strong management over losses and reduce operating expenses. The product provides handling claims for all aspects of cyber coverage – from first to third party coverages, including incident response, business or network interruption, liability exposures and more. The service is designed for carriers just entering the cyber insurance space or looking to reduce claims, handling costs and inefficiencies.

Advanced analytics and reporting aggregates anonymized cyber and data breach data to help make informed underwriting and pricing decisions. As the database grows, IDT911 will supply insurers with aggregated reports and analysis directly relating to the data they contributed, as well as information from the larger pool of aggregated data collected for industry-wide comparisons and information.

To learn more about DataRiskStages, visit www.IDT911.com/DataRiskStages.