Proactive vs Reactive

Ryan Dunn: Hey everyone. I'm Ryan Dunn. I'm the director of insurance over here at Trava. And today I just wanted to go over something real quick that I believe us as agents need to be thinking about when it comes to our clients' cyber insurance renewals. Something we should be aware of is the market standard is that we go out to market and right off the bat it's met with, Hey, your client needs to fix these three things we found on the scans or it's, Hey, we have an additional supplemental that we need filled out. Back in the day, it was Kaseya. It was SolarWinds, then it was Log4J application type of questions after you've submitted them out to market. And then it was recently, it was a new Outlook, vulnerability. And so these things are going to keep on coming to us. Right. And so how do us as agents get ahead of the game on this and change the standard of the market, change the market norm and part of from a high level, part of what we need to be doing here is we need to be thinking in a more proactive type of model rather than a reactive model. And what I mean by that is in a reactive model, it's pretty much the standard marketing process that we have today. Right. We get an application from a carrier, we show that to the client. The client goes to their either internal IT staff or their external IT staff. They send an email, then they send an email back, maybe it takes two weeks. And then that email sent to the underwriter, underwriter goes, Hey, we need another supplemental filled out based off the answers you gave us and so forth. Right. So that's even before you've gone out to market. Now that you're out to market, what do you get? Well, hey, your client has these vulnerabilities that they need to fix. Well, that's not good because you're already out to market. And us agents all know that when you're out to market, your client only gets one look. These underwriters have tons and tons of clients that they have to sift through. And so especially when it gets to that 50 million and up or$ 100 million and up, this becomes very important. Or in tough industries such as manufacturing, architects, engineers, SaaS, healthcare, public entities, nonprofits, those types of industries, that type of revenue style, this is extremely important for. So you're already out to market, right? Well, what do you get? Well, your client's not prepared for the market yet. And so the underwriters trying to work with you to try to figure out how can we make this a risk that we want to underwrite? Right. And so this is not good because now you're scrambling to fix things. You're spending a lot of time that should be spent on helping other clients, finding new clients or assisting this client, understand what insurance they're buying, not what cybersecurity controls they need to implement last minute. And so now in that reactive underwriting model, we have an even more of a mess. And that is no good for your relationship between you and your client, nor for your relationship for you and your underwriter, frankly. So what does a proactive model look like? Right. With Trava you can be proactive, but there's other solutions out there. But what does a proactive model look like? A proactive model looks like you approaching a client six months ahead of time, ahead of expiration date, five months ahead of expiration date. So a month or two or three before that renewal period. Right. And so what we're trying to do here is we are running those same scans that those carriers will run once your client goes out to market. And then we're also having the insurance readiness survey filled out ahead of time so that you can approach your client with action items on what they can fix prior to going out to market. What does that do? Well, they fix it two months ahead of time before you go out to market. So you're avoiding that last minute scramble at that underwriting piece. You're going to be also putting your client in the best light possible for when you do go out to market. So now you're not ruining the chances of good coverage or the best possible pricing, or you're not ruining the chances of their insurability. And so this is very important, right? Us as agents, we want to deliver the best possible policy for our clients, especially in a hard market where pricing is going up. And what happens when pricing goes up? Clients start looking for other options. Don't let that be you, and you can avoid that by moving to a proactive approach. I hope you find this useful. If you have any questions or want to shoot me a message, I'd love to chat with you on this. I am extremely into figuring out ways that Trava can assist agencies and better prepare for this renewal process. And we're super adamant about fixing this issue. So please reach out to me if you have any other questions. I thank you for your time.