Cyber insurance has rarely been this accessible, and it won’t stay this way – so if you’ve got clients who’ve been putting off a proper cyber program review, now is genuinely the time to have that conversation.
The market is soft. According to Insurance News, capacity is strong, competition among underwriters is real, and pricing has been edging down. For SME clients who’ve historically found cyber cover expensive or hard to justify, that is changed but underwriters are also openly signaling that conditions are shifting. The tides are turning, just not yet.
What the Current Market Actually Looks Like
Favourable conditions don’t mean undiscriminating ones. Underwriters are chasing good risks – businesses with solid security controls, documented governance, and actual incident response processes. The reward for meeting that bar is access to broader coverage at competitive premiums, including for client profiles that would have struggled to get cover a couple of years ago.
Sectors under more pressure include healthcare, manufacturing, construction, transport, retail, and education. If your clients sit in those categories, the soft market still represents a better position than what’s coming – but you’ll need to do more work on risk presentations to access the best terms.
What Underwriters Actually Expect
The days of a basic questionnaire unlocking broad cover are largely over. Underwriters want to see multi-factor authentication, regular patching protocols, endpoint detection tools, staff security training, evaluated backups, and a reviewed incident response plan. Clients who can demonstrate these controls don’t just get better pricing, they get access to better terms and higher limits.
This is exactly where the broker conversation has an influence. Helping clients understand what underwriters are looking for and what to do before renewal is the difference between a client who gets the coverage their business actually needs and one who ends up with a policy full of carve-outs they didn’t know about.
The Coverage Gaps Quietly Appearing
Even in a favourable market, some insurers are restricting coverage for system failure events (as distinct from cyberattacks), supply chain interruption, and biometric privacy liability. For clients with complex technological dependencies or any collection of biometric data, even something as routine as fingerprint timekeeping – these exclusions can represent real exposure.
The threat environment isn’t improving. AI-enabled attacks and social engineering are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. The current buyer-friendly conditions are a function of recent loss experience and capital availability neither is guaranteed to hold.
Knowing when to move and how to present a risk well is exactly the kind of edge that separates good brokers from great ones. At Better Broker Network, our members have access to underwriting expertise and placement support that makes these conversations easier to have and more effective when they do. Learn more about how we support our brokers.