Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Node International CEO Neil Gurnhill (Part 1)

We haven’t really covered Cyber Insurance thus far. Well, here we go…

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and to the company.

Neil Gurnhill: I’m the Founder and CEO of Node International. It’s a company that has now been in existence for a little over two years. We’ve grown the business to over $5 million in revenue.

We are an underwriting agency. We operate in the digital risk insurance space. We have offices in Nottingham, London and in America. Our first location was in Michigan, Detroit. Our second location is in North Carolina. We’re continuing to expand.

Our principal model is, we have taken a sector which is the digital cyber insurance sector. Instead of coming at it from an insurance background, we’ve approached it from a digital risk background.

We fundamentally operate around three core pillars which are insurance, prevention, and detection. We have a lot of industry and InfoSec partners as well as people in our team. We have an internal division of cyber security analysts that do monitoring, scanning, and breach credential awareness for our insured.

We are really a digital risk cyber insurance company that currently serves North America and the UK. We are looking to expand throughout Europe and Asia.

Sramana Mitra: What are the kinds of customers that you do this for?

Neil Gurnhill: The clients and the customers that most approached us were companies who were consumer-facing and they operated in an area that was regulated. Example would be people who are PCI-regulated or if they’re in the financial sector.

These industries, wherever there was a large amount of packeted data, would lead the company to have an easy to perceive digital exposure. Since we’ve moved from being an unregulated environment to a fairly stringently regulated sector, it means that more companies are aware that it can happen and things can go wrong.

Also they’re looking to offset that risk either at small enterprise levels through means outside of security provisioning. They’re looking for insurance. That’s where we step in. Initially, it’s in the consumer privacy space, but it’s very quickly moved into other areas now.

Sramana Mitra: Let me understand the cyber insurance business. You are a classic insurance company in that these customers pay you a monthly premium and are insured for a certain amount of money. Is that the model?

Neil Gurnhill: Predominantly yes. We conduct our business via brokers. Our brokers will approach us and say that they’ve got a client. They would like for us to engage with their client about trying to offset their digital risk.

Effectively, all of the principles of insurance are the same. Normally, it’s a 12-month period. They pay a premium. There’s a deductible in the event of a problem. The framework for the insurance hasn’t changed. It’s more to do with what we insure and how we insure.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Node International CEO Neil Gurnhill
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