BOXX recognized as Top 10 Most Innovative Insurance Tech Companies to Watch in 2022 – CIOInsights

Since 2018, amidst booming digitalization, BOXX Insurance has landed its wheels on track with a promise to make Cyber Protection & Insurance smarter and simpler. BOXX is a specialist cyber insurance company helping the world’s small & medium businesses, and all connected households, become digitally resilient.

​Toronto-based BOXX Insurance has made its mark as the first fully-integrated cyber protection and insurance solution firm with its flagship product, Cyberboxx.

​BOXX goes beyond traditional insurance practices, combining both insurance and cyber protection. This enables households and businesses to protect against, and respond to, cyber threats with a simple and smart all-in-one solution.

​Whilst the impact of COVID has shaken many of the evolving tech trends, BOXX Insurance, with its innovative vision and expertise, has aligned itself with the current trends and thrived amid new emerging challenges of which some have been accelerated by the pandemic.

Top 5 Emerging Trends Amidst Pandemic

​“BOXX is well placed to support the number of trends in the way we live and work that are flowing through into customer needs,” says Vishal Kundi, BOXX Insurance Founder and CEO.

​BOXX views on the recent trends in the Insurance tech arena are as follows:

1. ​The future of connectivity: The rapidly accelerating digitalization of our daily lives is resulting in the mutation of the nature of risks. This makes space for smarter ways to protect ourselves from malicious actors intent on exploiting the new digital loopholes and the blind spots this creates.
2. The future of work, dramatically accelerated by the pandemic, has evolved hybrid and remote working trends as the new normal. As the freelance and gig economy continues to be more popular, there are thousands of new individuals plugging into multiple organizations as part of their work routine. These changes in working behaviors attract and increase both employee and third-party risks.
3. Data privacy requirements together with recent regulatory environment enhancements and increasing penalties are driving more focus and scrutiny by CIOs, CEOs, and their board members.
4. Malware and phishing attacks have increased at a drastic pace and are anticipated to continue to accelerate. At the same time, regulatory focus continue to sharpen the requirements of both businesses and individuals in how they look to prevent and manage events in the case of data breaches.
5. The digital future of Insurtechs’ most awaited revolution is now, as customers expect more from insurers and have limited patience for complicated, unwieldy solutions. On the contrary, the insurance industry so far has lagged behind other Financial Services in embracing digitalization to improve customer journeys, ease friction with customers and channel partners, and in leveraging and applying AI to improve efficiency and performance.

Top Leaders’ Awareness on Vulnerability and Resilience

​‘Big Business’ is extremely worried about the increasing threat and impact of a cyberattack on its business operations, the resulting reputational damage, and the potential shareholder dilution that follows.

​Unfortunately, these inevitable threats are increasingly amplified by the increasing challenges associated with the continued move to the digitalization of business models, business migration to the cloud, the increasing number of cybercrimes, and their exposure to mega cyber incidents such as WannaCry (May 2017) and SolarWinds (2020). Additionally, there is also increased regulatory action around data protection requirements.

​As a result, companies increasingly recognize the need to be cautious about the potential consequences of who they connect with digitally, and how they actively manage their third-party risk. BOXX is able to help Chief Risk Officers (CROs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) reduce this risk by giving both better visibility of the digital health of their vendors and ensuring they have the appropriate controls and resources in place to manage their cyber risk and liabilities.

​A key part of this customer defense strategy is the BOXX Digital Health Check. Through a ‘digital health’ assessment, BOXX helps customers better identify their points of cyber security weakness so they can take action to remediate them.

​BOXX uses real-time data to provide alerts when new or emerging threats appear so that can preventive action can be taken swiftly. Empowered with a dedicated team of security specialists and expert support for customers is available 24/7/365 in case of an incident. The costs of a cyber incident can escalate very quickly, especially where there is lost downtime, client notification requirements, and third-party liabilities.

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Helping Businesses Do More and Risk Less

​At BOXX, our mission is to make the digital lives of our customers safer by providing them with an all-in-one solution that combines security, incident response, and insurance protection. This is critical for smaller and medium-sized businesses who may not have the deep pockets and knowhow of larger players,” says Vishal Kundi.

​As SMEs count for 90% of employment in most countries, this not only creates more resilient businesses and consumers but more resilient economies.

​The approach is highly relevant for larger enterprises that acknowledge that their defense is only as strong as their weakest link, which in many instances is their smallest supplier.

​“With our digital health-check, we provide tools and support to customers to predict and prevent incidents. In the event of an incident, customers are supported by a dedicated team of specialists – our Hackbusters solution – of dedicated IT security specialists, risk management, legal and public relations experts, available 24/7/365 to contain the cyber incident and re-secure the network.”

​The insurance coverage from BOXX includes data and systems recovery from an attack, insider threats, cybercrime such as phishing, reputation damage, loss of business, third-party fines and penalties, and more.

The insurance element of BOXX products is a key supporting pillar for a prospective client, as the penalty of a cyber incident can escalate very quickly especially where there is lost downtime, client notification requirements, and third-party liabilities.

​A core element of the BOXX value proposition is acting as an instant response team for smaller and medium-sized customers. Whilst larger organizations have incident response plans and robust protocols in place to mitigate a cyberattack, this is often lacking for much smaller and medium-sized companies.

​“Companies today operate in real-time so being knocked offline even for a day can have crippling consequences. Recently a business client in Canada experienced a ransomware attack and called us for help. Panicked by the effect of the attack, in the midst of the triage phase, the Head of IT decided to reach out to the ransomware attackers directly to negotiate.

Our team was able to convince them that this was not the best course of action. Through our involvement, we were able to contain the breach and restore the network within the day and help the IT team ensure that the weakness that led to the attack was fixed for the future.

​Many clients have been able to successfully avoid cyber incidents by using our services to boost their security and improve their cyber risk culture with our employee training and assessment modules. 80% of attacks are caused by human error and not being on top of their security controls and our services are designed to help close this gap.”

​BOXX experience shared by Vishal Kundi.

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BOXX Stands Out as Aligned to Customer Needs

​BOXX insurance stands out for its ability to kill complexity and provide smart and simple, all-in-one cyber protection and insurance solutions for customers. The priority is to develop products that are easy to understand, simple to buy, and provide not just insurance from cyber threats, but the right combination of support and help to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.

​This ensures the right level of support and protection by helping customers predict, prevent, respond to, and recover from unpredictable cyber incidents faster and better.

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Building on Current Achievements and Expanding in the Future

​Since BOXX’s launch in Canada in 2018, it has attracted the attention and support of insurance market leaders, governments, and regulatory stakeholders.

​‘In 2018, BOXX was selected for the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Global Fintech program. In 2019, BOXX was selected by the Canadian Government for Canada’s Fintech accelerator program in the USA and Asia. In 2020, BOXX was selected by Lloyd’s of London Innovation leader program and additionally in the USA with SixThirty Cyber accelerator. In 2021 BOXX entered into a strategic partnership with Zurich Insurance to support our continued expansion. We are now focusing on rapid US expansion in addition to building on our established momentum in Canada. We have a number of partnerships in development in Europe and the Middle East, and as a partner of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, are working to expand our reach globally,” says Vishal Kundi.

​Read more about the Top 10 Most Innovative Insurance Tech Companies to Watch in 2022 here.