How about having your private IT technician on hand, 24 hours a day? It would be able to help you avoid viruses, save your data encrypted by ransomware, could even help your teenage victim of sextortion. These are a bit like the promises of an insurance product that is emerging in Quebec, cyber risk insurance for individuals.
“The question today is not whether, one day, I will be hacked. When is that? » Like all her colleagues interviewed by La Presse, Maryse Rivard is enthusiastic about the usefulness of cyber risk insurance for individuals. Vice-president at Synex Assurance and broker at Synex/Deslauriers, she has been president of the Regroupement des cabinets de courtage d’assurance du Québec (RCCAQ) since November 2022.
An example of what this coverage can provide? Mila Araujo, practice head of personal cyber insurance, North America, at broker NFP, a subsidiary of Aon which opened an office in Montreal, cites the case of one of her clients who was the victim of SIM card hijacking – “SIM swap”, in the jargon.
“Her phone stopped working one night, and she went to her store the next day,” she says. “In the meantime, bad actors had taken over her bank account, and were able to use two-factor authentication because they controlled her phone number, and they withdrew $50,000. Because the fraudsters had all the access, and there was social engineering involved, the bank concluded that the transaction was legitimate […] Cyber insurance covers that.”
At the Insurance Bureau of Canada, Mahan Azemi is one of the pioneers of this brand new product, on which he wrote a first article last March. This senior policy advisor sees it as an intervention tool “before, during and after” cybercrime. “Individuals, like businesses, are very vulnerable in this regard. Your insurance can help you understand your risk, help you improve, give you access to resources.”
The statistics prove these three experts right. On average, every day in 2023, 115 Canadians were victims of fraud, the overwhelming majority of which were committed using technological tools. Financial losses were estimated that year by the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center at $569 million.
There are cyber risk insurance policies for businesses. Their popularity has exploded in Canada in recent years, going from 5,143 policies taken out at the start of 2019 in Canada to 174,805 at the end of 2022. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions has no longer compiled this precise statistic since the latter date.
But products for individuals are still very rare: in Quebec, the president of the RCCAQ, Maryse Rivard, estimates that she saw them appear on her radar screen barely two years ago. She is also one of the handful of people in Quebec to have cyber risk insurance for individuals – statistics are almost non-existent on this subject.
Because this product is still difficult to access in Quebec. The insurers most present on the market do not offer it. Desjardins, specifies its spokesperson Jean-Benoit Turcotti, does not have specific cyber risk insurance for individuals, rather a range of measures grouped under “Desjardins Protection”. This, however, we learned on Friday, will no longer include free membership to the Equifax monitoring service, offered at Desjardins’ expense for five years after the massive data theft, and which is expiring.
Brokerage firm NFP, for example, created and launched one of the few standalone personal cyber risk insurance policies, DigitalShield, in March 2021 for US$99 per year. “We have it everywhere in North America, except in Quebec and New York: we are finalizing our offer on that,” specifies Ms. Ajaurno.
“But we have options, people can contact us,” she adds, a little mysteriously.
BFL Canada brokers explain that specialized insurers have been offering it in Quebec and Canada for a year, but “not the insurance companies that the average person knows.” “It’s not having much success at the moment,” spokesperson Walid Khayate explains by email.
According to Maryse Rivard, four firms offer it in Quebec, but only as an addition to a so-called “high-end” home insurance policy. Intact Prestige, Aviva’s Ovation, Chubb and the latest entrant, Onyx, offer these riders at widely varying costs, with the standard being around $100 per year for coverage between $50,000 and $100,000, with IT service agreements with specialized firms.
Chubb, for example, has offered this additional coverage in Quebec integrated into its Masterpiece home insurance “since 2018,” the firm indicated by email to La Presse. Premiums range from $127 to $577.
This rarity for a product much more present outside Quebec, Ms. Rivard associates it with the new provisions of the Charter of the French language with law 96, adopted in May 2022 and which in certain cases forces the translation of fonts. ‘insurance. “When we come up with very niche products, sometimes we have customers who cannot find insurance,” she says. If we cannot find the product in French, or the product in French has less coverage, the only loser is the consumer. »
