Cyber Risk Management

INTRO

On episode 10 of the InsurTech Geek Podcast, talking about Cyber Risk Management with Steven Schwartz from Cytegic.

The InsurTech Geek Podcast powered by JBKnowledge is all about technology that is transforming and disrupting the insurance world. We will be interviewing guests and doing deep dives with our own research and development team in technology that we see changing the industry. We are taking you on a journey through insurance tech, so enjoy the ride and geek out!

INTERVIEW

JAMES: Alright. Good day everybody. I hope you all are doing well. I hope you keep geeking out since last time I talk to you. It is been a great time here on the InsurTech Geek Podcast. I had some great conversations with incredible people and this week is no exception. We are talking to the vice president of strategy and insurance practice at Cytegic. Mr. Steven Schwartz. And having a great time talking about cyber of course. It is always intimidating when you talk about cyber, because there are so many unknowns and no one feels like, maybe very few people feel like they understand all the different pieces, parts, and components off cyber. It can be a very confusing space. A very risk late in space of the risk management space and so we are going to talk about cyber and what Cytegic, and Steven are doing to try and help make sense of it for everybody on this week’s episode of the InsurTech Geek Podcast episode again and I am James Benham here on InsurTech Geek. Here is the interview.

And I am here today with Steven Schwartz VP of strategy and insurance at Cytegic. Steven, thank you for joining us today. I believe you are in NYC today.

STEVEN: Correct, correct. Thank you for having me.

JAMES: How is the weather up there, is it getting cold?

STEVEN: It is not too bad today. It is not warm, it is starting to get cold for sure, but its, well like the occasional day where its 65 and then the next day it is snowing and, feels like it is about 4 degrees outside.

JAMES: Yeah.

STEVEN: We are not doing too bad today though. We had a little snow yesterday. On the rebound.

JAMES: Yeah well for a guy from northern New Jersey, who went to College in upstate New York, today is a good day.

STEVEN: Yes, very well said. very well said. I will, Albany can be a little dismal sometimes.

JAMES: Oh, my goodness. Anything around the Great Lakes in that far North. Man, that gets cold up there. I mean it is brutal, brutal! I end up going to, I speak at a lot of conferences and I end up going to Canada at least a couple of times a winter end I always question my sanity.

STEVEN: Where? Toronto? Uganda?

JAMES: Oh, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City. I remember one time I went to Auto in the middle of the winter, and I got out of the airport and they said okay, you need to only breathe through, I think it was like breath in through your mouth and not your nose because it will freeze in your nose. And it was like negative 25, I think it was negative 25. And I was like, okay, you mean like, like my, … I am going to freeze. They are like yeah, part of you will freeze. Just be careful. Can we go inside?

STEVEN: This is not where I parked my car.

JAMES: Exactly. Who are you and why am I here? So, Steven, I love talking about insurance and insurance tech and I am excited to talk about what you do and what you do at Cytegic. But before we get into that, let us just talk about you for a second. You are from northern New Jersey; you went and got an undergrad and masters up in upstate New York at Sienna and then Union. What through that path, growing up, and you were a hockey player in college, and you had to enjoy playing some hockey and, what a great physical sport right?

STEVEN: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Its, I wish I were still in hockey shape. I am almost, almost good to see if, to see how I am doing these days. But, yeah, great sport. Just very quick, very much team oriented.

JAMES: Do you have all your teeth?

STEVEN: I do, I do. You know what, everybody always asked that and until you get sort of passed the college level, we have to play with a face mask. Granted, I do not know if I would want to play without a face mask. If it is worth taking a puck to the face, I mean not now, immensely, but yeah, I always had a cage growing up, so I still have my teeth.

JAMES: Nice.

STEVEN: That said, keep eating too many sour puffs goods so my teeth may go out another way

JAMES: Some habits die hard Steven. Some habits die hard.

STEVEN: Exactly.

JAMES: So, what did you dream of growing up and then through your undergrad and your MBA, what ended up happening and how did you end up in insurance?

STEVEN: You mean you did not dream, grow up dreaming of wanted to be an insurance?

JAMES: I, it is funny.

STEVEN: Since I was 7 years old, I knew.

JAMES: Exactly. There are those careers though Steven that people, that children see and say I want to go do that. Police officer, firefighter, soldier, even people that want to go in build buildings, I mean construction and some people want to be artist, and singers and songwriters, and there’s a whole sleuth of careers that people as children dream of doing, and this is just not one of them, right? I mean, it is just not. And it does not mean it is not a wonderful awesome career, it is just not something you think of doing when you are a child.

STEVEN: Right.

JAMES: So, if anything, if you have that focus on you had that dream when you were a kid, what was it and what was it that let you into insurance?

STEVEN: Yeah, I will say I am a bit worried about 7-year old’s that do want to be in insurance. So, yeah, I guess growing up, at one time wanted to be an architect, which I still do love architecture, but somewhere along that it continued, and I wanted to be a hockey player, until about high school when I realized I wasn’t going to go quite all the way there. That changed. How did I get lured into the world of insurance? Well, the first job that I had, was at this company Trail Solutions, which is a unique opportunity. I didn’t necessarily appreciate it at the time, but it was a healthcare data analytics startup, doing the claims analytics, for the likes of Aetna and various blue cross plans and the head of the School of Business for management at my college, who I was close with and, the rule by my family to stay at my apartment over the summer, I had to get a job or an intern internship. So, I reached out to her and I emailed her, and she probably I think responded within a matter of 3 minutes

JAMES: Wow

STEVEN: She was just on a laptop, because yeah, I distinctly remember that, and it was like, hey yeah, I know the CEO of you know this buzzing startup. We are having a meeting next week, or an interview next week. I did not know that the CEO was her husband.

JAMES: But she definitely knew him.

STEVEN: Yeah, knew him, and it was great for the introduction and which was a truly great experience. I mean, I stayed there through grad school and ultimately the firm had a, I was employee number 20 in my junior year, and the firm had a 9-figure exit, after five years for the 180th place. So, got to be part of and to see how that tech–driven culture if you will, openness and that sort of drives the alignment an autonomy impacts an organization and in a positive way. And that is how rapidly this company grew. And without taking a cent of outside capital. That was a pretty great experience. And then from there, I had a very, what sucked me into the world of insurance, which was an interesting opportunity, was with this firm UIC, United Insurance Consultants, and UIC is if not thee, it is one of the world’s largest independent insurance consulting firms. So our clients were predominantly fortune 2,000 entities or companies paying at least $1,000,000 a year in their annual PNC premiums and they would retain us in an annual independent basis, so completely free of any commissions or financial incentives from the insurance industry, and they would retain us to manage and negotiate their insurance and risk management programs. So, in that capacity, we were managing roughly 2,000,000 in annual premium across 40 countries and as you can imagine with that do not get many Christmas cards from the broker‘s community

JAMES: Probably not, probably not!

STEVEN: Yeah, as we would come in, we would exploit their current coverage sufficiency. This manuscript policy language across each line of business, get into the actuary, a triangulation and then drive a competitive negotiation process, leveraging several brokers and insurers that compete for the business at renewal. So as a result, drove significant congress engagements and while reducing premiums, drastically, for the most part, outweighed the fees that were being paid to us, right? Because people, and where it ties to InsureTech, and as I sort of you know progressed on from there, the industry is one inherent conflict of interest. The brokers wear three hats. Representing themselves, the client, and the insurance company. Now, I don’t believe that brokers go away, at some point everybody needs their hand held, but certainly what is interesting and prevailing in the market right now, is the conversation about how do we enable the sort of a shift in the mindset from being a purely transactional player to taking more of a strategic advisory. And how can it do how can the industry do that?

JAMES: Well Steven, the broker dilemma is the same as the realtor dilemma. When you have a by side realtor, working for you, they are not incentivized to help you drive the purchase price of the house down.

STEVEN: Exactly.

JAMES: It is the most insane thing, and it drives me crazy. I love the real estate market and play pretty heavily in it. And it drives me nuts. That is why I handle my negotiations and I bring a broker in as a necessity, simply because it is required as part of most of these transactions. But the real estate broker, right, that is what drives me nuts. They are in insurance, you are seeing a lot of brokers respond to the huge, at least in my opinion huge uptake in insurance consultants who are doing exactly what you are talking about, by moving to fixed–fee arrangements, changing the nature of the services they provide. So, the broker, there is a lot of people in the broker community that is responding to this change in customer sentiment by changing their business model. But they as well, in a traditional Commission broker relationship, are not aligned with the incentives of their clients. Because if they help save premiums and reduce premiums, they reduce their fees.

STEVEN: Right.

JAMES: And there is a problem, right?

STEVEN: Exactly. Exactly. Some of the points we used to talk about, with the prospect, even as, on that conflict of interest, it is not to say right, oh yes, but if you were being paid a commission right, would you necessarily want the client to go with the $100,000 option or the $80,000 option? Now, we cannot answer that question. It is a subject of a question. But that is something to think about. Further, especially if that is a regional broker, and it is not a bash on the broker, I am a broker, it is just the function of the industry and how it is operated for 500 years.

JAMES: No this is a byproduct of the business model.

STEVEN: Yeah

JAMES: It does not mean these people does not have integrity, and there are not good professionals, they do not act in the best interest of their clients, it just means that their compensation is not aligned with their client’s best success. It does not mean that they do not do the best job, because I have a lot of friends who are brokers, we just do a phenomenal job.

STEVEN: Yeah.

JAMES: You know? Certainly, as a buyer of insurance, I have over 200 employees. I buy a lot of insurance. As a buyer, I had to change brokers a couple of times because I had some brokers that did not want to work for their commission and by demonstrating that they were not aligned with my interests. And I moved to ones who were, right? So, I mean, it is like any industry, there is a lot of industries with the buyer’s agent gets a commission and as a general rule of thumb, I believe in the buyer’s agent in any type of business transaction being a fixed fee buyer’s agent. Because that way their success is aligned with the clients and that knows they want more work from that client in the future. They are going to get bite the same way did I save money or not so there are we are going to work hard to save money for the client.

STEVEN: Right.

JAMES: So anyway, it seems like a little sidetrack, I am sorry if I took a stand–down that tangent, but it is an interesting point of contention in the insurance business.

STEVEN: Yeah, it is you know. People, at the end of the day, people always forget why we have insurance. And also, the fact that without insurance, the world stops. We are not, in any of the buildings that we are right now, have insurance. We are not, engaging and working with one another, constructing any of these, any of the buildings, insurance is that one industry that truly touches all others. I just find it very unique. And none of us learn about insurance at college, and sort of, is that necessary evil? But right now, it is a very exciting time within the world of insurance. I think so, and I am sure you have James.

JAMES: You know why I think it is exciting Steven? Is that insurance companies are transforming their clients now. They are saying hey, let us help you reduce your cost of risk, and let us help you reduce your operational losses. And so, because the insurance company is, so, the carrier, who carries the risk, is so heavily incentivized, to you have a financially healthy stable company, that has low losses, they by proxy become the ultimate advisor and consultant and enabler of new technology because it benefits them so much in their loss ratio.

STEVEN: Oh absolutely

JAMES: It is amazing

STEVEN: Yeah, a lot of the work that we do within the industry is, is to drive that different engagement, right, on the advisory side. To try to A-understand more about our customers but help them mitigate the risk as it is to your point. Beneficial for our balance sheets are capital solvency ratios, and at the end of the day too, some so many clients are looking for that advice, right and they do not turn your way necessarily. Especially in the world of cyber, you know. Cyber is security, cyber risk management. They do not know where to go. And they are looking for advice, willing to pay for it. And the opportunity for the insurance industry to be that pillar and or, that body that their clients look to for advice and where to go. And how to move forward in this complex sort of operating environment. There is a huge opportunity that I think balancing there, managing their balance sheet in terms of the revenue opportunity for them is also quite large.

JAMES: So, talk with me about the founding of Cytegic. You joined this year, who founded it, and why and what is it doing today?

STEVEN: Absolutely. So, the company was founded in 2012, the founder’s name and CEO are Alan Kaplan and was founded in trying to solve the very highly challenging task off quantifying cyber risk. Putting a dollar sign next to what, what cyber risk means. whether it is at the individual entity level, the business unit within an enterprise, or the world of insurance, at the portfolio level, right? And it is something that cyber risk quantification is something that I am sure you will see over the next year, increasingly becoming a key and core pillar, within, cyber risk management. But there’s a, because of big complexities, in quantifying it, there have been limited advancements, if you will, in the industry. Both in insurance and within more traditional enterprises industries and Cytegic has revolutionized the world of cyber risk quantification has taken for US patterns in about 25 plus man–years of R & D to bring a process down that traditionally took four weeks to a matter of hours or minutes, depending on the size and degree of granularity.

JAMES: How? Tell us how it works.

STEVEN: So, when I say we are quantifying cyber risk, if we take a step back for a second, there is a lot of solutions out there that will tell you my cyber risk is a 2.5 out of 5, or 3 out of 5, but I have no idea what that means to my business. I do not, what is the score without context? But, if you tell me I am a 3 out of 5, and next to it that my business is facing a potential financial loss or impact of $1, 500 000, now I understand, what it does means to my business and sort of, it helps to bridge that communication gap between, those at the technical level and executives at the board level. And making business decisions. To really bring that process down to something that is done in real–time and is scalable whether you are the 2-person coffee-shop or multinational bank, there are several components that we need to analyze. So, one of which, one where we just think about how we define cyber risk and how we quantify it right? We need to identify all of the assets within a business, and we think of digital and tangible assets, intellectual property, your availability to customers and vendors. A lot of assets that people would not traditionally think about, right your employee database, and then what how do we assign a value right?

What the value of my employee database, you know a lot of people would not no way to beginning that process. And then we have a set of controls, right? Protecting every one of those assets. And those controls are fighting on off a set of adversaries. A variety of different thread attackers, who were using a variety of different thread methods to try to achieve a specific objective and that is to compromise your confidentiality your integrity, or the availability of your data. To bring that prices process down we have to analyze the global thread landscape, who are those bad actors, and what are they doing? And do that in real–time and moreover, those bad actors do not all speak English with a Brooklyn accent like in men in black. But they are often speaking other languages like Russian, Korean, Chinese, so out of the box, we are analyzing that global thread landscape in 11 different languages. In places I have heard Russian, Chinese, Farsi, Arabic, Korean, European languages, you name it. Holding out what is relevant for that particular organization, right, because you have a fundamentally different set of attackers, with different motives for that multinational bank vs that two-person coffee shop. So that is on the right-hand right? If you think of two hands to clap here So, analyzing the global thread landscape in 11 different languages, looking forward in some capacity.

JAMES: Does that mean like you are going onto a tour, you are going onto like and you are crawling sites and looking for people talking about attacks on these entities?

STEVEN: Yes, exactly. So, we scrubbing, analyzing thousands of open source databases, the illustrious dark club.

JAMES: Wait and, hold on, hold on. Steven, we got to explain the dark web to people, because people say dark and they do not have a clue what it is. So, this is what is called an alternative Internet that is largely numerical instead of typing in a URL you type in an IP address in an obscure port and you use a specific type of browser, right?

STEVEN: Yeah

JAMES: It operates over the same lines as the Internet but on different, different, we call in tech “-“ we call it a port, right? So, HTTP is a report 80, secures are usually a port 43. Dark web operates on a completely different port so its IP addresses with port names, so you have to know what you are targeting, and you typically use a different type of web browser to access dark websites. So, you are crawling these sites, looking for mentions and discussions around attacks?

STEVEN: Exactly. So, we have an anthology of roughly 30,000 phrases that we are ultimately scrubbing and analyzing the open–source web and beyond for, and also ingesting and data from different vendor partners like Bio catch, where is a lot of great broaden identity data. And what we are doing is we are identifying patterns and quantifying the intensity of each premutation right a specific kind of attacker, financial hacker, a political activist a nation–state that is using a specific attack method so whether it is malware, ransomware, you know email and social engineering, right, and quantifying that intensity of what is going on in the world today, and against specific geographies, business…specific geographies, business segments, business sizes. To identify that relevant web landscape once we have an organization profile.

JAMES: Yeah, and its man what the different world we live in from cybersecurity then 20 years ago

STEVEN: It is crazy.

JAMES: These are now multibillion-dollar organizations that are defrauding millions of individuals. 10% of our construction client base, we have pretty heavy operations in construction. 10%, of all suffered a cybersecurity attack last year, you know in the last 12 months that had a material impact on their operations. A full 10%. Back when I was a teenager, hackers and authors of viruses Trojans, Trojan horses that get installed in networks were largely doing it just to get notoriety, fame, or to mess with people. There are bored. Now they have a very distinct profit motivation. These are large institutions and what disturbing outside the United States because you know inside the United States as a corporation, you do not expectation the federal government is either going to help you defending cyber-attacks as they don’t have a web reporting form to announce that it happened to you.

I mean it is pathetic. It is pathetic what the FBI does to help private companies because I had my clients try to go through the process and they just got nowhere and largely just because it is too many instants are happening all the time and they are undermanned on resources. But we all have an expectation that our government in the United States is going to help us defend much less launch attacks against our competitors, but that is not the case in foreign countries. There are many foreign entities where a company in that country would have the government‘s assistance to, the nation–state involvement in corporate cyber theft and cyber-attacks, schemes. Because they are taking a cut of the action like this is the stop at a sci-fi movie seriously.

STEVEN: It is wild, it is wild. When you see an exact example, as a Chinese Telco with backing from an agency, that is just sitting on a corporate network of British telecom companies, you know and is analyzing their log files, to identify what were the root causes of those different problem areas for this specific project that this Telco is working on, this Telco company is working on, so that we can develop our product with without those anomalies without those blemishes and it’s crazy how much resources is behind us, the gap you know I think the statistics are saying that 2021 is going to cost us six trillion dollars in cybercrime. The cybercrime industry. That is bigger than the global drug industry, right? The six trillion dollars yet, our global cybersecurity spending is going to be around 120-125 billion dollars. That is a huge economic incapability gap between the attack landscape and where we going to be with respect to protecting our businesses ourselves right against sort of exponentially growing cyber thread landscaping.

JAMES: Yeah, it is quite incredible and the level of confusion on what we were supposed to do in the area of insurance around cyber is just, unfortunately, getting worst not better. Because the threat landscape keeps expanding right?

STEVEN: Exactly.

JAMES: The number of threads, the number of threads, the frequency of threats, and then the number of tools. These poor CISO’s, basically if you are a CISO, chief information security officer, for those who do not what CISO stands for, basically if you have a bridge you are fired.

STEVEN: Yeah, they are in the hot seat right now.

JAMES: Yeah, you feel bad for them but at the same time, they know the game when they step into it. If you are a CISO and you have a breach, you are probably going to have to tend your resignation, because the board is probably going to demand it. This is a challenging time; it is a challenging job. So, imagine you end up working with quite a few CISO’s.

STEVEN: Yeah, so, quite a few CICO’s and a lot of the work that we are doing right now, is within the insurance industry. And working with some of the leading cyber insurers, for instance, cyber insurance is the fastest–growing line of business. But then, within the insurance market, I think last year globally was 4 ½ billion in premium, by 2020 it was 7 ½ and a half billion in premium projected upwards 20 billion by 2022-2024–ish. So rapidly growing and it is an interesting landscape because it is sort of being this arms race from market share, at least in the US. So, you have a lot of carriers who have been pushing out more and more coverage at cheaper and cheaper premiums, collecting less and less data from their insurers, right? So, carriers who will underwrite a given risk on four data points on the size of the company, their revenue, how many records they have, if they have had a breach in the last five years which is limited when you are trying to understand a company and manage the most dynamic interconnected risk in the world. All risk is a kind of cyber risk these days tied to some cyber or digital dimension.

So, a lot of the work that we are doing right now is working with carriers and reinsurers as the operating system for where, for their underwriters and then exposure analyst displacing their traditional paper-based applications that is, 3 to 4 pages, and has a checkbox yes or no. Do you have a firewall and a variety of other questions? Except none of that information is validated. We have not had a validation mechanism that understands if what if somebody has told us on this application that is true, right? It is one thing to ask how much you like your firewall. It is another to know if it is configured properly. So, a glaring issue within the industry and beyond that, there is a huge lack of standardization both in the underwriting requirements and in the coverage forms. Do underwriters get these applications and weather is their own, or from another carrier that they are just quoting on this opportunity. It is a huge manual tedious process that is involved to analyze that application. Do your own right up and transcribe it and put some data entry into some standardized form that the underwriting team is using and whatnot.

And then do some peripheral analysis so it is a long tedious process for the carriers, and they are not getting the transparency and the clarity that they need into the risk that ultimately to support the capacity that is required right? But ultimately get the reinsurance capacity and insurance linked securities to the capital markets. We need transparency and the industry has been lacking in terms of getting that, but starting to wake up in my opinion as markets are starting to harden and starting to demand more of their insurance in terms of that data entry right, so providing a tool that can sort of displace the traditional paper–based application, and add value to the insurer by telling them how much, what is the real risk that they are facing in terms of dollars and within that, we automate a prioritized remediation plan, so we are ultimately translating everything back to 51 security controls.

And if we can identify based on the results of the application or the input of that client‘s application right, whether it is 12 questions with an SMB, 30 questions for the mid-market company or 500 questions as UI uses our platform to do a deep enterprise assessment. If we can identify from that, what are those top three controls that the client should invest in and prioritize to reduce their risk? We started to drive a fundamentally different insurance conversation. And it becomes a conversation around how we optimize our spent, right, because between risk management and risk transfer. And right, if we, if I have a cyber risk of three out of five in a financial impact of $1,000,000. But if I were to invest in employee awareness and training, security policies, and patch management, it is going to reduce my risk and my financial impact from a million to 500,000. Maybe I want to invest in a few dollars in those controls and then transfer my risk and procure cyber insurance at a reduced rate. And have some clarity as to the decisions that I am making as an organization.

JAMES: Yeah, that is huge. Huge. And brings clarity to a very muddy situation. The challenge to, in cyber is just the pace at which the entire market is shifting, because as countermeasures are deployed, those who are attacking and trying to get information are getting information, are getting far more sophisticated, and so, it is definitively an arms race that does not look like it is going to slow down anytime soon. It looks like it is going to accelerate. And so, tools like this are critical for risk. What are you excited about and what is next? What does the future look like for insurance take and Cytegic?

STEVEN: Yeah, it is a very interesting question. I think I will just step back for a second. Before I was at Cytegic, for the year prior, I was at this firm CEO Quest and had the opportunity, working with a variety of insurance, InsureTech VC’s, Metro funds or the CBC’s of different insurance companies, work with them and advising their portfolio member CEO’s and sort of accelerated there. Their company grew as they were trying to traverse across the insurance value chain. And it was a very, very interesting experience and still today, and I am pretty immersed broadly in the world of InsureTech outside, sort of the cyber focus. I my opinion I think every industry has the word tech after it now, InsureTech, the best one I saw recently was Data–Tech, which I thought was a little rush.

JAMES: That is a little repetitive do not you think?

STEVEN: Yeah like Data-Data? Aren’t we pushing it here a bit, guys?

JAMES: There is no limit to the mind of a marketer. Do not ever forget that.

STEVEN: No, there is not. I think InsureTech as an industry is starting to mature. Which is good. When it started, 3–4 years ago, I do remember seeing a lot of micro solutions that were not addressing macro problems. I think we were getting a lot of brilliant engineers, who were creating, products I could never dream of, but we did not understand the insurance system industry right, and it is one of the most complex industries in the world. Behind the scenes. So, without an understanding of the nuances and especially the cultural nuances of the industry, trying to sell technology within it, is not an easy ball game and often questioned why I do it. I think we are starting to see InsureTech as a whole mature, in those solutions, a lot of the noise weed out if you will, curious as to what your thoughts or perspectives on the matter, on the InsureTech market is in your opinion.

JAMES: Sure, yeah. The funding market for it, certainly as beefed up, right? And you have major venture and gross equity funds that are fueled by the insurance companies themselves because they have recognized the threat to disruption and so they are starting to fund companies that they think might disrupt their own business. So that day has a part, so they are a participant in the disruption, rather than a recipient of it. I have certainly seen that and the most interesting trend of seen, I think is, the advent of the tech company that decides to just be an insurance company. I think that’s probably like the pinnacle of tech is when you say you know what I’m not going to sell to this industry, I’m going to compete in this industry, and that is probably been the most interesting shift that I have seen as of recent. it is a pretty big uptick and in the number of companies that have decided just to compete in the insurance business and go higher experience insurance folks and raise money and carry risk.

STEVEN: Yeah. Look, if you have got data, whether it is Amazon one day, you know going to sell insurance embedded with their products, and that is a beautiful distribution at the same time too. Insurance is not a topic anybody wants to talk about so if you could sell it at the point of sale, embedded in whatever another process, it is going on and it creates a unique opportunity and brand-new risk capital. And even something we are seeing in cyber domain, this notion of business or ecosystem resilience as we all do operate in ecosystems now right, interconnected to our vendors, our clients, and suppliers, and have this you know network or vendors that spider webs into the vendors and their vendors and so forth. And we when we look at the process where we are now if you want to work with a major enterprise and certainly handle some data, you have to go through a lengthy security diligence questionnaire which is a blast as you know.

JAMES: Oh yeah, exciting! I love them. I do them for my own company.

STEVEN: Right. Everybody loves that you know. 1000 rows Excel questionnaire and on the other side managed completely separate from this, in our contract, there was a requirement for cyber insurance or something that arbitrary number. If we can reduce the friction of that entire process, into much smoother engagement, like our platform that is used for insurance is also used for major enterprises and managing their third-party vendors, and in that process in tech bringing it back to what we are just talking about. Embedding the sale of cyber insurance within that process. How companies and vendors engage, their major enterprises is A- such a unique opportunity for those enterprises, to be involved in and to manage that inherent risk from working with that ecosystem right, to push it down and onto them, while as the vendor, break only through a much simpler smoother process that creates value. I am going to understand more about my risk and immediate options procure the insurance that my contract is mandating me to, and know that is adequately aligned with my actual exposure while we just bring that back to the notion of the embedded sale, of the tech company or enterprise tacking on or putting out that risk capital, that there otherwise were partnering with or trying to sell through the covenant of insurers is a unique opportunity and whether it is brand new, fresh risk capital or partnered with some capital from the alternative markets and some past to be definitely a funny conversation and excited to see where it takes us next.

JAMES: Absolutely. That is great. Well look I appreciate your points here and thank you for taking the time to talk with us on the InsurTech Geek Podcast0 How do we all find out more information about you and your company?

STEVEN: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun. You can visit us online at Cytegic.com it is CYTEGIC.COM and or add at myself or the company on LinkedIn. My name is Steven Schwartz again. And will see you all at the events we are participating in, this week where we have the pleasure to speak at and join the EOI and insurance executive forum. So, it is a great event and high-quality attendees and participants so pretty excited to join down in Europe for that.

JAMES: Sounds great. Well look, appreciate it. Thanks for your time. Thanks for being on the show and we will speak with you soon.

STEVEN: Thanks, guys. I appreciate it and likewise. Look forward to talking to you soon.

The InsurTech Geek Podcast powered by JBKnowledge at jbknowledge.com is all about technology that is transforming and disrupting the Insurance world. I have been your Host and InsurTech Geek, James Benham at jamesbenham.com. Thanks for joining us this week. I look forward to talking with you soon.

Remember we are taking you on a journey through insurance tech so enjoy the ride and geek out. Talk to you next time!