Marsh Ltd.

MARSH CRIMEBLOCK

Social engineering can lead good people to inadvertently do bad things.

It’s a type of fraud that is often left unaddressed by traditional crime insurance policies. As a result, Marsh Ltd. developed Marsh CrimeBlock, an enhanced commercial crime offering that provides coverage for this increasingly costly form of fraud.

“Social engineering comes in a variety of guises,” said Eleni Petros, London-based commercial crime practice leader at Marsh Ltd. and principal developer of Marsh CrimeBlock, a 2018 Business Insurance Innovation Awards winner.

Social engineering fraud can involve phishing schemes or fake emails or phone calls that result in “duping somebody into performing an action” that benefits the fraudster, she said.

“We felt that the commercial products didn’t accurately respond to the real risk clients were facing in the current environment,” as fraudsters rely on social engineering to infiltrate organizations, said Ms. Petros. She said traditional crime policies address specific categories of crime. There are a lot of restrictions around them, covering very specific named perils such as counterfeit and fraudulent alteration that don’t address social engineering risks in a way that reflects the true risks clients face, said Ms. Petros.

“If you had an event, you needed to fit it within one of the buckets,” she said. “More often than not, social engineering events did not fit into one of those buckets of cover.”

Rather than have a named peril, “we moved it to an all-risk” policy, she said.

That led to the creation of Marsh CrimeBlock. The cover triggers on direct financial loss suffered by a policyholder as a result of any fraudulent, criminal, dishonest or malicious act without making a distinction between fraud committed by an employee or a third party.

The result was a “much broader product than any traditional crime product for any commercial company,” said Ms. Petros.

She said 20 to 30 U.S.-domiciled companies have moved to the London market to access the coverage. Ms. Petros said that the limits obtained typically run from $20 million to $50 million.

She cautioned, however, that “this product is not for every client.” Marsh CrimeBlock is aimed at clients with higher retention levels, such as $200,000 to $250,000, she said.

Ms. Petros said that Marsh CrimeBlock has proved to be “really worthwhile for our U.S. clients by providing them with cover that wasn’t previously available to them.”

2018 Innovation Awards Home