Cyber underwriting on evidence, not attestation
How independent risk scoring changes pre-bind assessment, in-force monitoring, and portfolio management.
How does cyber risk intelligence support underwriting?
Cyber liability underwriting has historically depended on the applicant describing their own controls. Proposal forms and questionnaires are self-reported, point-in-time, and impossible to verify at portfolio scale — which leaves underwriters pricing risk on assertions rather than evidence.
Cyber risk intelligence replaces the assertion with observable evidence. Xcigence assesses an applicant's external attack surface independently — internet-facing services, exposed infrastructure, cloud environments, email security posture, dark web exposure, and disclosed vulnerabilities — and returns a 300–850 score with the findings attached.
Because no cooperation is required from the applicant, the same assessment can be run pre-quote, at renewal, or across an entire in-force book without adding submission friction.
How is the 300–850 score used in cyber insurance risk scoring?
The score gives underwriting a consistent, comparable input. Risk bands can be written directly into appetite rules: automatic referral below a threshold, standard terms within a band, preferred pricing above it — applied identically across every submission rather than varying by underwriter judgment.
The evidence behind the score supports the harder conversations. When a submission scores lower than expected, the specific findings identify what would need to change, which turns a decline into a remediation-and-requote path and creates a concrete basis for subjectivities and warranties.
Because the methodology is calibrated by industry, a manufacturer and a hospital system are not held to the same numeric expectation — the score is read against the threshold appropriate to the insured's sector.
What does continuous cyber insurance monitoring change?
A policy is priced once and then exposed for twelve months. Continuous monitoring closes that gap: when an insured's score deteriorates mid-term — a newly exposed service, a critical vulnerability on a production system, credentials surfacing on the dark web — the change is visible while the policy is still live.
At portfolio level, continuous scoring reveals accumulation that individual submissions hide. Concentration in a single cloud provider, a shared managed service provider, or one widely deployed technology can be identified and quantified before a single event triggers correlated claims.
The same intelligence supports loss prevention. Alerting insureds to material exposures during the policy period reduces claim frequency and gives the carrier a demonstrable role beyond indemnity.
How does this fit existing cyber underwriting technology?
Xcigence is designed to sit alongside the underwriting workbench rather than replace it. Scores, risk bands, and underlying findings are available through the platform API, so they can be delivered into rating engines, submission triage, and portfolio management systems already in use.
For actuarial and portfolio functions, the score also connects to financial exposure modelling — the same evidence that produces the rating supports estimated exposure in monetary terms, which is what pricing and aggregate limit decisions ultimately require.
The result is a single independent measurement usable across pre-bind assessment, in-force monitoring, renewal, and accumulation analysis.