Assured Reacts 08.12.2025
We read the Financial Times article on Beazley pulling back from the cyber market, but it just didn’t stack up. So we spoke to Beazley to clarify.
The Financial Times recently reported that Beazley is “pulling back from the cyber market amid rising hacks and price war.”
According to the article, insurer Beazley reported this week that cyber gross written premiums, a measure of top-line revenue, declined 8% in the nine months to September 30 to $848m. “There are more claims, and they’re more expensive,” chief underwriting officer Paul Bantick told the Financial Times. He cited a rise in ransomware and other cyber attacks, fuelled by heightened geopolitical volatility.
The Financial Times reported that despite the rise in claims and high-profile attacks on businesses, premiums for cyber insurance have been falling since early 2024 due to rising competition for a finite pool of clients and a broader flood of investment into speciality insurance. The article quoted Beazley chief executive, Adrian Cox, telling analysts on a call that Beazley was willing to continue to shrink its revenue from cyber in the US, where he said the business line had become “unprofitable”, to protect margins. He warned that cyber insurance prices could experience “extreme swings in pricing” if others continued to cut their rates.
We have a longstanding and trusted partnership with Beazley UK and we have no doubt that the narrative in the Financial Times article is not applicable to its UK business.
Any suggestion of Beazley “pulling back” references the US, where privacy claims have risen astronomically. By contrast, the UK is not in the same boat – it is not a litigious environment. The US cyber insurance market has been affected by numerous ‘wrongful collection’ claims and class action lawsuits stemming from data breaches.
Beazley wants to continue growing in the cyber space. They have reaffirmed their confidence in writing new cyber risk and haven’t restricted cover at all. In an email communication, Beazley writes: “We’re committed to cyber insurance for the long-term and protecting clients with sustainable and high-quality cyber security services and insurance is our priority. As a market leader, our appetite for cyber risk remains unchanged, but we are responding to the market conditions in North America, where the rating environment is now unsustainable, by maintaining underwriting discipline and rate adequacy.”
Beazley remains the largest underwriting and claims team in the cyber market (so it’s unsurprising that they also have the highest quantity of claims), and has no intention of withdrawing. Beazley, a FTSE-listed business, remains a fantastic counterparty, delivering a superb service in both incident response and claims management.
At Assured, we have seen a significant increase in claims over the past few months, but this is true across all insurers, so we are expecting there to be an alteration in premiums next year. That said, insurers continue to enter the cyber market, and that increase in capacity, and therefore competition in the market, should negate any significant increase.
In our opinion, the messaging in the FT article is US rhetoric. We remain incredibly optimistic about the market.
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