Article: Financial Institutions
White Paper: How Cyber Risk Assessments Transform Insurability for Financial Services Firms

Wealth managers, accountancies, payment processors, specialist lenders. If you're placing cyber insurance for financial institutions, you'll know these are some of the hardest risks in the market right now. Not because the clients are badly run. Because they sit at the top of every attacker's target list, and underwriters know it.

The instinct for most financial services clients is to lead with their compliance credentials. FCA requirements, data protection registrations, the audits they've already been through. It's a reasonable place to start, and it's rarely enough. Compliance tells an underwriter what a firm is required to do. It doesn't tell them what the firm can withstand if the worst happens and they are victim of a cyber incident.

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Infoprotect's white paper on financial institutions sets out why this gap exists and what brokers can do to close it. Financial firms hold exactly the kind of data and transactional access that makes them worth attacking. It could be client funds, personal financial information, payment rails, and third-party trust that are embedded in everything they do. Business email compromise, payment diversion fraud, and supply chain exposure through outsourced administrators are driving losses in this sector, and they're not the kinds of issues a standard compliance review is built to catch.

There's a governance question underneath the technical one, and it's the question underwriters are increasingly asking first. Is cyber risk owned at the board level, with named accountability, or does it sit with an outsourced IT provider and get mentioned once a year at renewal? A firm can have solid technical controls and still fail to demonstrate that oversight, and for underwriters assessing a financial institution, that oversight is often the deciding factor.

"We see this constantly with financial services clients" says Brad, CEO of Infoprotect. "The firm genuinely believes its security is strong, and in a lot of cases, the technical foundations are fine. What's missing is evidence. Underwriters aren't able to take a client's word for it anymore, especially in a sector this exposed, so a self-completed proposal form ends up working against the broker rather than for them."

Self-attestation has always been a soft spot in this market, and for financial institutions, it can be a genuine barrier to securing good terms. A client answering their own questionnaire understandably describes their controls in the best possible light, and underwriters have learned to price that in. The result shows up as higher premiums, tighter sub-limits on the cover that matters most, and a lower tolerance for anything that looks like a gap.

Infoprotect’s Cyber Assess risk management process is built to close that gap. It's an independent, validated assessment that covers governance maturity, human risk, incident response readiness and business continuity planning alongside the technical layer, and it produces a report that reflects the client's actual risk posture rather than their own account of it. For a financial institution, that's often the difference between a submission an underwriter must interpret and one they can simply rely on.

"Financial services clients tend to assume the underwriter will just trust the sector reputation, or the compliance paperwork," says Hazel Richardson. "In reality, that's exactly the assumption that's costing brokers good terms right now. A validated assessment gives the underwriter something concrete to price against, and that changes the conversation from the first meeting."

For brokers, bringing that kind of assessment to a financial institution renewal changes the dynamic of the whole placement. The submission carries more weight. The underwriter is working from evidence rather than filling in the blanks themselves. And the broker is the one who brought that evidence to the table, which is exactly the position you want to be in when a client's cover is under pressure.

There's a benefit for the client that outlasts the renewal, too. A Cyber Assess engagement leaves a financial institution with a clear picture of its risk posture and a prioritised plan for improvement, something it can point to when its clients or regulators ask what's being done to protect their money and data. In a sector built on trust, that's worth having regardless of what happens to premiums.

The white paper doesn't pretend that financial institutions are simple risks to place. They aren't, and the market has priced that in for good reason. What it sets out is how to present the risk in a way that makes underwriters comfortable, by going beyond compliance to the governance and human factors that determine whether a firm withstands an attack or becomes a claim.

If you have financial services clients whose renewals are becoming harder, more expensive, or more restrictive than they should be, the Infoprotect financial institutions white paper is worth 10 minutes of your time. It sets out the methodology, the broker advantage, and the outcomes a properly structured assessment can deliver.

Download the white paper and speak to Infoprotect about how Cyber Assess could improve outcomes for your most difficult financial services placements.