Property & Casualty
Q1 2025 Cyber Market Update
Q1 2025 Cyber Market Update
The Cyber market is stable but continues to produce decreases in 2025. Cyber insurers are attempting to push back on continued reduced pricing in Q1, but to date, these attempts have not been successful. New entrants to the market have contributed to ongoing competitive conditions. Incumbent markets seek to retain business with leading controls and add to their portfolios for opportunities of best-in-class risks.
Capacity
- Additional capacity from incumbent markets and new entrants has countered the pressure to increase rates, but these dynamics seem to be fading.
- A soft market for the past 2+ years has resulted in market pressure to make corrections.
- While pockets of competition remain, markets are managing limit deployment and continue to seek out best-in-class risks with strong cybersecurity posture and thorough diligence practices.
Premium
- Claims have been steady in both frequency and severity.
- 2024 exemplified how companies can sustain persistent and severe cyberattacks in the form of ransomware, malware, business email compromise and social engineering.
- Companies paying ransom demands have decreased from a high of 77% in 2020 to an all-time low of 28% in 2024. However, when ransoms are paid, the business interruption losses can be significant and the extortion payments are higher than previous averages.
- The July 2024 CrowdStrike outage brought Cyber carriers’ aggregation risk concerns into focus but ultimately had no significant impacts on carrier books.
- Large Business Interruption claims from prior years are developing adversely with substantial impacts on carrier reserves.
Retentions & Coverage Restrictions
- Retentions continue to be driven by revenue and industry.
- Waiting periods and retentions may be reduced depending on quality of controls.
- There remains some availability for the potential to increase sub-limited coverages and add enhancements.
- Pixel tracking and biometrics are a focus of underwriters. Coverage may be excluded if appropriate governance is not demonstrated by insureds.
- Wrongful collection of information and aggregation of risk continue to be top areas of underwriter concern.