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Lloyd’s launches “first-of-its-kind” business interruption insurance policy

Wed 30 Sep 2020

Lloyd’s has launched a new “first-of-its-kind” business interruption policy for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), specifically designed to protect them against IT disruption or downtime.

Parametrix Insurance offers simple and reliable coverage by removing the traditional indemnity trigger that most insurance policies today use. Instead, the new solution uses a parametric trigger, meaning that the policy automatically pays out if a customer’s critical IT services – such as cloud, e-commerce or payment systems – are disrupted. This significantly reduces the time insurers spend assessing a loss or adjusting a claim.

The new product is led by Tokio Marine Kiln (TMK) and supported by other members of Product Innovation Facility (PIF) including RenaissanceRe. It is the first off-the-shelf parametric IT downtime policy tailored towards SMEs.

Yonatan Hatzor, Co-founder and CEO of Parametrix Insurance, said:

“Businesses have shifted to managing most of their critical IT operations by using third-party service providers, thereby increasing their vulnerability to disruption. As a result, critical technology downtime has become the fastest growing risk for businesses today, whether you are a technology company or not. On top of this, the existing claims process in the field is complicated, expensive and time consuming.

“Parametrix’s approach addresses all these issues, providing a solution that saves both time and money, while making tech insurance accessible to new business segments. We are thrilled to launch the first ‘off-the-shelf’ parametric insurance product for IT downtime. This is a great milestone for us and we are grateful to TMK, Howden and Product Innovation Facility  for helping us to develop our product and providing us with valuable insights and support along the way.”

Trevor Maynard, Lloyd’s Head of Innovation, commented:

“We know that insurance products and services have to evolve to respond to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and help our customers cover new or heightened risks that they may encounter now or in the future. That is why Product Innovation Facility and our new Lloyd’s Lab cohort are both looking at ways the industry can do this more effectively. I am delighted to see evidence of this today with the launch of Parametrix.”

Tom Hoad, Head of Innovation at Tokio Marine Kiln and Chair of the Lloyd's Product Innovation Facility, added: 

“Third party cloud service providers help our clients trade within an ever-changing world and Parametrix have done a great job in developing an insurance product that helps build resilience in this space.  We hope that the Lloyd’s Product Launchpad BETA (comprising TMK, RenaissanceRe and others), which is supporting Parametrix Insurance with underwriting capacity, continues to be an effective accelerator for other technology-driven product solutions.”

David Rees, Cyber broker at Howden explained: 

“It is very exciting to work with the Product Innovation Facility and Lloyd’s Product Launchpad BETA led by Tokio Marine Kiln on this ground-breaking project, which combines the best of Lloyd’s product innovation and capacity, as well as working with our market leading cyber capability in Howden Israel led by Shay Simkin.”

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