How threat intelligence is shaping the insurance market and influencing claims

Live threat intelligence plays a pivotal role in modern risk management strategies. It continuously monitors and analyses real-time data to identify potential risks and threats.

This approach empowers organisations to proactively assess their risk landscape, promptly detecting emerging vulnerabilities or malicious activities. By integrating live intelligence into risk management processes, organisations can swiftly prioritise and implement mitigation measures based on the most current threat insights.

This dynamic capability not only enhances situational awareness but also enables agile decision-making, ensuring that security resources are allocated effectively to mitigate the highest-priority risks in real time. Consequently, organisations can strengthen their resilience against evolving threats and maintain a proactive stance in safeguarding their assets and operations.

Risk and threat intelligence provides insurers with real-time data on emerging risks and vulnerabilities that could affect policyholders. By continuously monitoring threats such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or geopolitical instability, insurers can better assess the likelihood and potential impact of these risks on insured assets and liabilities.

Similarly, accurate risk assessment leads to more precise underwriting decisions. Real-time intelligence enables insurers to adjust premiums based on current threat levels, ensuring they adequately cover potential losses while remaining competitive in the market. This proactive approach minimises the likelihood of underestimating risks and ultimately helps maintain profitability. In the event of a claim, insurers can rely on timely and accurate information to assess its validity and manage payouts efficiently.

Beyond insurance policies, insurers can offer risk mitigation services to policyholders based on live threat intelligence. This might include proactive measures such as security assessments, disaster preparedness training, or cybersecurity solutions. By helping policyholders mitigate risks, insurers reduce the frequency and severity of claims, thereby improving overall risk management outcomes.

As the frequency of geopolitical events increases, so too does the regulatory pressure for insurers to demonstrate adequate due diligence in their underwriting and claims processes. Service providers that can combine access to real-time threat alerts, enhanced security and risk data, and aggregation insights can help insurers with these compliance efforts by providing evidence of proactive risk assessment and mitigation strategies.

While applicable to many different areas of the insurance market, the maritime industry is well-placed to benefit from this combination of threat intelligence and enhanced insurance systems and operations.

With shipping giants such as Maersk expecting Houthi disruption to last until the end of this year, live threat and risk intelligence plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety of vessels and mitigating potential risks associated with maritime operations.

In the instance of a Houthi attack, the value of combining live threat and risk intelligence with the insurance market and underwriters provides operators and insurers with an enhanced capability to be aware of incidents and reduce the severity of incidents when they happen through faster information exchange in anticipation of an event occurring.

It’s also important to understand that geopolitical events do not occur in isolation, and to respond effectively in the short term and mitigate future threats, detailed historical data is also valuable. Patterns of prior events, responses to them and the resulting impacts all have a bearing on present-day operations and business continuity.

For example, historical AIS (Automatic Identification System) data is a powerful tool that allows insurers to examine patterns and trends in vessel movements, identifying high-risk areas, times, and vessel types. This analysis can then help determine factors like what time of day would be best suited to traversing specific microzones.

Anticipating this trend, Insurwave partnered with Ambrey, a global leader in maritime security risk management, to deliver an integrated, comprehensive solution for marine insurance and risk management. By combining Ambrey's extensive experience in providing operational and digital maritime security services with Insurwave’s industry-leading specialty insurance technology platform, risk managers, underwriters and exposure managers will have access to a comprehensive, global view of marine perils and risk.

“Getting relevant information to the people who need it as quickly as possible to save lives, time and money," explained Joshua Hutchinson, Managing Director of Intelligence and Risk at Ambrey in an interview with the publication Nautical Digital Online.

“Our vision is to provide the best commercially available real-time maritime domain awareness and intelligence globally. We can’t do this ourselves, so we believe in the power of partnerships. Working together across the industry ensures that any operation on our oceans is prepared and executed as securely and safely as possible.”

As part of the partnership, Insurwave’s dynamic risk zoning will use Ambrey’s Dynamic Elevated Threat Areas (DETAs), and Sentinel Alerts, which supply vessel-specific notifications triggered by users. Leveraging both market-leading technologies and data-driven insights, the combined offering aims to further advance risk management and mitigation in the maritime and insurance industries. 

For example, a newly built floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel was due to move from Singapore to Israel via the Suez Canal, presenting a high-value target to opponents of Israel.  Using the combination of Ambrey’s threat intelligence, historical event data, and live intelligence, the global maritime risk management firm was able to assess the vessel's planned route and advise on an alternative one.

Ambrey Intelligence also provided advice to the vessel on when to move through critical areas at certain times of day and delivered an integrated asset tracking and monitoring service, ensuring the FPSO reached Israel securely without any incidents. 

The convergence of live threat and risk intelligence with the insurance market holds the potential to transform the industry by enhancing risk assessment, improving claims management, enabling real-time incident response, and driving cost efficiencies. By embracing these technologies, insurers and underwriters can better anticipate risks, reduce claim frequencies and severities, and ultimately provide more value to their customers.