Why What You Know Is Starting to Matter More Than Who You Know: A Cyber Insurance Broker’s View

Key takeaways

• Cyber insurance conversations have moved from price to controls, ransomware recovery and policy wording.
• Technical depth now builds the credibility that relationships alone used to provide.
• Nearly a third of organizations say they cannot afford to hire people with the skills they need (ISC2, 2025).
• Global cyber premium reached about USD 16.3bn in 2025 and is expected to roughly double by the end of the decade (Munich Re).
• A peer community of underwriters, claims and incident response specialists is as valuable as technical knowledge.

There’s a version of this industry where cyber insurance is still being sold by generalists who happen to have a cyber product on their shelf. Where the conversation stops at limits and retentions, and the client leaves none the wiser about what they’ve actually bought. For a long time, that was fine. The market was growing fast enough that almost everyone looked like they were doing well.

That’s changing. And the brokers and underwriters who saw it coming early are now quietly pulling ahead.