Allianz is passing management of all cyber insurance to San Francisco-based cybersecurity specialist Coalition under a new ten-year partnership.
Coalition will be insurance colossus Allianz’s “exclusive global partner for cyber insurance across all commercial segments” under the deal.
Coalition, which was founded in 2017, will take “primary responsibility for pricing, product development, risk mitigation, and claims management for Allianz’s standalone commercial cyber portfolio,” said Allianz this week.
Allianz is also taking an equity stake in Coalition and a seat on its board.
The strategic partnership comes less than two months after Allianz rival Zurich agreed to buy cyber-insurance specialist Beazley for £8.1 billion.
Allianz board member Chris Townsend said: “Cyber threats differ fundamentally from traditional risks, demanding a dynamic, tech-forward approach.”
The partnership “combines Allianz’s brand, market reach, and financial strength with Coalition’s unique data-driven platform for underwriting and risk management,” he added in a canned statement.
Coalition will be “supported by Allianz resources for multinational and large corporate underwriting, service delivery, and claims,” the insurer said.
Reasons for cyber-insurance protection gaps. Munich RE, 2026.
Coalition offers attack surface monitoring and runs its own honeypots to detect and respond to ongoing malicious activity – capabilities that span both more traditional cybersecurity threat intelligence with insurance.
Insurers are increasingly looking for real-time threat posture data from customers; almost akin to the telemetry a “black box” in a car driven by a learner feeds back driving behaviour to automotive insurers.
Google Cloud for example offers a “risk protection program” (RPP) that lets customers share cloud security posture data directly from their cloud environment with participating cyber insurers; others are taking similar approaches.
Coalition says its dataset “includes internet scans of 5.2 billion IP addresses” and it runs a “global network of honeypots to learn the behaviors of potential attackers and… the vulnerabilities and software they are targeting.”
The partnership comes as cyber insurance continues to evolve fast and uncertainty among prospective buyers around exclusions remains rife.
Penetration rates are increasing within the SME sector, says Gallagher Re, although earlier this year the Stryker wiperware incident raised “significant concerns regarding US contract war exclusions and nation state activity.”
