The Insurer TV highlights from Howden Re’s cyber summit 2025
Published
Read time
Howden Re’s annual Cyber Reinsurance Summit was held at Royal Ascot during the first week of May. The summit brought over more than 100 cyber specialists from over 50 carriers for a day of insight, collaboration, and forward-thinking discussions.
Additionally, Howden Re’s cyber team published its second-annual cyber report, ‘Into the Cyberverse’.
During the summit members of the Howden Re team including Harriet Gruen, Head of Threat Intelligence, Jack Sandford, Director of Cyber Reinsurance, David Flandro, Head of Industry Analysis and Strategic Advisory, and Nena Atkinson, Research Associate, Industry Analysis and Strategic Advisory each sat down with The Insurer TV for an interview.
Howden Re’s Gruen: Threat Intelligence role driving actionable cyber insights for (re)insurers
During the interview, Gruen discussed multiple topics including building a threat intelligence proposition that’s relevant for cyber insurance carriers.
“Unlike traditional cybersecurity outputs, our reports translate technical data into insights that are actionable for insurance clients,” Gruen said.
Such as Howden Re’s bi-annual Cyber Watch reports, which map threat analyses directly to industry exposure databases.
The invaluable approach to managing risk allows clients to understand how events impact their portfolios.
Learn more about what Cyber Watch has to offer.
During a panel discussion, moderated by Gruen, she explored systemic risk with the panellists by asking: “Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?”
She goes on to explain that questions like that reflect the industry’s shift in focus from large-scale events to recognising clusters of smaller, impactful incidents.
Gruen also discussed emerging threats like the exploitation of cloud environments and shifting attacker strategies, as well as the prevalence of ransomware and evolving expertise and investment in cyber threat analysis to tackle these challenges.
Howden Re’s Sandford: Into the Cyberverse report leads guiding insights at cyber summit
Sandford’s interview covered how the insights and data in Into the Cyberverse offer a fresh perspective on the evolving reinsurance market.
The report details a significant shift in the market, highlighting a move away from quota share towards a stronger focus on non-proportional catastrophe projection.
Sandford said in the future that means a lot more volatility on reinsurers’ books, and that now is the time for a more nuanced approach to modelling risk and spreading it across the market.
However, Sandford remains optimistic about the market’s future growth.
“We are still seeing growth, albeit at a slower pace,” said Sandford. “By 2025, we anticipate the insurance market to reach $15.85bn, with the reinsurance market climbing to around $5.6bn.”
Another way to drive the future is to continue to collect data that comes in from submissions and touch points in the market and make it readily available.
Howden Re’s Flandro and Atkinson: Unlocking ILS and retro potential key to cyber market growth
Flandro and Atkinson offered insights into the cyber insurance market’s growth trajectory together.
Flandro said over the last year, the market hasn’t grown quite as quickly as anticipated, however, he said unlocking more retrocession and ILS capacity could produce market expansion.
“That’s the key – to unlock more retro, more ILS and, ultimately, more reinsurance, which will help the cyber market grow,” Flandro said.
Insurer TV commented that Into the Cyberverse stands out for its comprehensive visualisation of the cyber ecosystem, capturing 70% of cyber GWP in insurance and 77% in reinsurance.
Atkinson said that she and the team hopes the report can offer a window for reinsurers and insurers to benchmark themselves against the market, something that has never been done before.
The report also analyses loss movements through fixed attrition and fully probabilistic methodologies, offering a new perspective on product efficiency.
“We’re not applying necessarily a definitive future to the cyber market,” said Atkinson, “but we do take growth assumptions and pose the hypothetical question, what could a future cyber market look like?”
Looking ahead, Flandro said it’s empirically clear that the industry needs more model certainty, above the 1-in-200 level threshold. While Atkinson added that as the market continues to expand outside of the U.S., it’s important to create a more balanced, diversified group of reinsurers taking over GWP market share.