Securing digital insurance platforms in the era of cyber threats

Cybercrime is a rapidly growing threat globally. As society increasingly depends on the digital world and technology, there is a great diversity of cybercrime, from stealing credit cards to ransomware. One of the most attractive targets for cybercriminals is financial institutions, including insurance companies, due to the high value of the information they hold, the financial gains their loss may bring, and the interconnected regulatory frameworks that make their impact hard to control. The pandemic has further favored cybercriminals having changed normal work patterns and brought many activities online without proper cyberprotection. For most companies and societies, cybersecurity is nowadays the main concern related to their digital transformation process (Almorsy et al., 2016; Fernandes et al., 2016; Conti et al., 2018).

Insurance is the only financial service that manages the risk of loss, damage, or injury to others. Its mechanisms guarantee transparency, sustain mutual trust, and guarantee the availability of needed resources. Cybersecurity insurance is a type of policy purchased by enterprises vulnerable to online attacks, that transfer the financial risks and losses of specific events to the insurer by paying a premium. Nowadays, however, the need for insurance against cybersecurity risks is being questioned. As the number and complexity of attacks have been on the rise and incidents have presented a lack of coverage many times, traditional market solutions may not be enough.

Insurtech companies are entering the traditional insurance market and promoting a new generation of insurance technologies and shifting insurance processes to the digital universe. Still in its early development stage, insurtech operates on the digital transformation also of the insurance market and its value proposition is predicated on having a technology to tackle the inefficiency of selling and servicing insurance products. The main motivation is to present an exploratory analysis of the cybersecurity challenges of digital insurance platforms based on original interviews with European insurance companies and startups (Popovič & Hocenski, 2010; Kshetri, 2017).