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 truly representative of the underwriter’s position.
Any suggestion of Beazley “pulling back” has been strongly refuted by Paul Bantick, group chief underwriting officer at Beazley, in an article published in The Insurer.
Further, in an email to Assured Intelligence, Beazley writes: “The reference to Beazley ‘pulling back’ from cyber in the US is not accurate. Instead, Beazley remains committed to the cyber market, but is responding to unsustainable rates in the NA cyber market by maintaining underwriting discipline and rate adequacy.”
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.
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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