Meaningful and mutually beneficial partnerships play a crucial role in enabling any business to prosper, and the world of cyber insurance is no different. In what is an increasingly competitive market segment, coming together to find ways of doing things in a new way has never been more important.
Cyber specialist NAS Insurance is one firm to reap the benefits of such a partnership. It was back in 2014 when Kiln, the specialist insurance and reinsurance underwriting business of the Tokio Marine group, purchased a 49% share in NAS. Since then, NAS has gone from strength to strength.
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“Having the financial strength of a giant corporate insurance conglomerate behind us is what gives us the ability to write the breadth of coverage that we do,” says Jeremy Barnett, senior vice president of marketing at NAS Insurance. “The fuel for our growth comes from the resources provided by that giant financial backer. Having access to that amount of capital allows us to write a lot more coverage and policies at higher limits.”
Kiln views NAS as the innovation engine for its group, Barnett explains. NAS has a reputation for being a nimble, proactive insurer, and Kiln looks to NAS to develop new ideas and be at the leading edge of US product development and product distribution.
“Ultimately, it’s a partnership that benefits our policyholders because they get state-of-the-art products,” Barnett says. “The partnership with Kiln gives us access to capital that wants to be put into innovative insurance products.”
The combination of Kiln’s influence and financial clout and NAS’s specialty knowledge is yielding good results and leading to the development of an array of new products.
“Kiln sees us as the specialty arm, so we are constantly updating, innovating and pushing the envelope on new coverages,” Barnett says. “They want us to come to them with new ideas, and we do all of that in collaboration with their underwriting and claims folks; we’re pretty tightly integrated.”
