Catalyit surveyed 846 independent agencies across 42 states, and the picture they produced is worth reading carefully.

Core technology adoption across the channel is strong. 94% of agencies run an AMS. 81% use e-signature tools. 75% are on VoIP. The tools are in place across most of the channel, and have been for a while.

What the report identifies is the gap between owning technology and making it produce consistent outcomes.

Catalyit's Chief Strategy Officer Angela Ford put it plainly: "The biggest insight: Most agencies no longer have a technology access problem. They have an operational execution problem."

Only 29% of agencies use a CRM. Only 18% use data analytics tools. Only 8% have deployed any customer-facing automation.

The agencies gaining ground are building connected systems around what they already own, not adding to the stack.

The E&O exposure hiding in the data

The cybersecurity numbers inside the Catalyit report carry a specific weight for independent agencies.

74% have multi-factor authentication.
88% run automatic virus scanning.
Solid baseline coverage.

Further into the data, only 49% use encrypted email when handling personally identifiable information, and only 27% have outsourced any portion of cybersecurity management.

For an agency carrying sensitive client data across a commercial book, the space between a security tool and an actual security posture is where exposure accumulates quietly, well before a claim arrives to make it visible.

The same dynamic runs through the cyber insurance gap.

Somewhere between 80 and 90% of a typical commercial book carries no cyber coverage. 43% of cyberattacks in 2025 targeted small businesses. The average SMB cyber claim ran $79,000.

Every unquoted account in a commercial book is a documented gap in the coverage conversation, and if a client gets hit and the agency never raised it, that silence has consequences.

A working cyber practice closes that gap systematically, account by account, with every offer documented.

Book A Cyber Practice Audit

What Reid and Matt showed Catalyit’s audience

On June 2, Reid Wellock and Matt Hightower joined the Catalyit Live Demo Lounge and showed a live working cyber practice from the inside.

The session covered how a cyber practice actually runs, not as a concept but as an operational system inside an agency.

When accounts raise their hand, the agency’s producers step in with cyber expert support behind them.

Every account ends in a quote or a documented declination.
No gaps in the record.
The clients get the conversation their business deserves.
The producers get the credit.
The agency’s E&O stays clean.

The whole practice is live in 30 days.

The businesses getting covered through this system, across industries from construction and manufacturing to dental and financial services to car dealerships and legal firms, never need to know the infrastructure behind it.

From their seat, their agent is on top of it. That’s the outcome the system is built to produce.

Watch the full demo here.

The report

The Catalyit State of Tech Report is free and worth reading. Download it here.

Let’s Lead, With Cyber

Book A Cyber Practice Audit

Subscribe now

Share Risk and Reward

The math has stopped being polite. The FBI’s IC3 just closed the books on 2025 with $20.9 billion in reported cyber losses, a 26% jump in a single year and a new record across more than a million complaints. On the other side of the ledger, Gallagher Re's 2026 Cyber Insurance Market Outlook forecasts global cyber insurance gross written premium at roughly $19.6 billion this year.

Reported losses now outrun the world’s insured premium base by several billion dollars, and that is before counting the trillions in broader cybercrime damage no one bothers to file.

That is the terrain.

The Cyber Protection Gap, the measurable distance between what cybercrime costs businesses and what insurance actually covers, is no longer a slide in a deck. It is the working condition of the commercial book sitting on every independent agency principal’s desk.

On Tuesday, June 2 from 2:00 to 3:00 PM ET, UKON CEO Matt Hightower will step into the Catalyit Live Demo Lounge to walk principals, producers, and operations leaders through what it takes to close that gap inside a real agency. The session is free for Catalyit Basic and Full Access Agency Subscribers.

Why Cyber Stalls Even in Healthy Agencies

The reason cyber keeps slipping to the bottom of the stack is not willpower. It is workflow. Traditional commercial workflows were built for lines with predictable intake, stable forms, and once-a-year renewals. Cyber has none of those properties. It moves fast, the questions are technical, the carriers are picky, and the renewal cadence is unforgiving.

Three frictions show up in almost every agency UKON works with:

• Technical complexity that slows intake to a crawl

• Misaligned incentives between producers, account managers, and service teams

• Renewal friction that pushes the line to the bottom of the queue, every quarter

These are the conditions that quietly turn cyber from opportunity into avoidance. Most commercial books capture under 20% of their cyber exposure today. The uncovered share sits squarely with the small and mid-sized businesses agents serve every day, which is also where the average ransomware event now runs into the millions in total cost.

Three Risks Hiding Inside One Coverage Line

For the agency, the gap is not a single risk. It is three risks layered on top of one another:

• A product gap that leaves clients exposed when an incident hits

• An E&O exposure when no documented declination sits in the file

• A retention risk when a competitor brings the conversation first

None of those resolve themselves with another lunch-and-learn. They resolve with infrastructure.

What Matt Will Walk Through Live

The hour is built around the Cyber Practice Leadership framework, which is the operating system UKON uses to turn cyber from a side conversation into a repeatable line. Live, Matt Hightower will show:

• The three-tier execution model, so every account in the book moves toward a quote or a documented declination

• AI-supervised intake and submission workflows, the kind that handle the technical heavy lifting without adding a $200,000 specialist to the payroll

• The first 30 to 90 days of activation, with specific tactics agencies can deploy against uncovered exposure across renewing accounts

“Most agencies do not have a cyber problem. They have a distribution problem,” said Hightower. “The demand is there. The carriers are there. The piece that has been missing is the operating system between them, and that is what we will show on the platform.”

What You’ll Learn

• Why the Cyber Protection Gap exists and how distribution infrastructure creates the bottleneck

• The three reasons cyber stalls in most agencies: technical complexity, misaligned incentives, and renewal friction

• UKON’s tiered execution model that moves every account toward a quote or documented declination

• How AI-supervised workflows handle intake and submissions without hiring specialists

• Tactics you can deploy in the first 30 to 90 days to activate uncovered exposure across your book

Demo Prep

A few minutes of prep make this session land harder. Before logging in:

• Review your cyber penetration rate, the percentage of your commercial book with cyber coverage in place

• Identify three to five priority accounts renewing inside the next 60 to 90 days that do not yet carry cyber

• Reflect on your current workflow, whether it is reactive or systematic, and who actually owns it

Event Details

• Event: UKON Live Demo, Catalyit Demo Lounge

• Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2026

• Time: 2:00 to 3:00 PM ET

• Format: Remote, hosted inside the Catalyit Live Demo Lounge

• Cost: Free for Catalyit Basic and Full Access Agency Subscribers

• Speaker: Matt Hightower, CEO, UKON

• Register: Catalyit Live Demo Lounge: UKON

• Solution Provider Profile: UKON on Catalyit

• All attendees will also receive a complimentary Cyber Practice Audit, a structured book analysis that surfaces uncovered exposure and uncaptured revenue

Let’s lead, with cyber.

Let's Talk Cyber

Read On:

Cyber risk transfer used to be a single purchase. Buy a policy, read the limits, file it away. That assumption no longer holds, as Steven Schwartz, co-founder and general partner at FireTower Risk Solutions, put it in a recent Forbes piece by Heather Wishart-Smith.

“Carriers priced for losses that they can model — extortion, business interruption and privacy notifications,” Schwartz said. “The losses that actually hurt companies, though, were outside that model.”

The Forbes argument is that cyber risk transfer has fractured into overlapping policies, that D&O and cyber interact in complicated ways, that claims get contested on response rather than incident. For boards of large enterprises, this is a governance wake-up call.

The argument is correct. But there is a floor beneath it where the same fragmentation is playing out through an entirely different mechanism, and that floor is where most American businesses actually live.

What the Floor Below Looks Like

Only 17% of US small businesses carry cyber insurance. In the UK, the comparable figure is 62%. The American contractor, the regional manufacturer, the medical billing shop with twelve employees, is largely on their own. The data says most of them have nothing.

The question is why.

Matt Hightower, UKON’s CEO, has spent the last two years looking at this from inside agency books.

“What we’ve realized with agencies we’ve partnered with, where they’ve allowed us to analyze their book, is more than 80% of their book doesn’t have cyber. It’s just the 20%. And of those 20%, it’s the clients who asked for it or needed it because of contracts.”

Read that again. More than 80% of commercial clients in a typical independent agency book have no cyber coverage.

Not fragmented coverage.

None.

Why the Conversation Doesn’t Happen

Agents are not withholding coverage out of negligence. Many of them have decades-long relationships with their commercial clients. They know these businesses. They care about them.

But cyber is a different kind of conversation than the ones they were trained to have. The applications run to eighty questions about multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection, patch cycles, network segmentation.

An agent who is not fluent in those concepts is not going to walk a client through an attestation that could later be used to deny a claim. So the conversation doesn’t happen. The renewal comes and goes. The client never asks, because 64% of small businesses are not even familiar with what cyber insurance covers.

UKON recently worked with a contractor in South Dakota, the kind of client an independent agency has carried for years. The agent’s read was that this client did not need cyber.

UKON asked one question: does the client do anything online?

The agent said yes, they send invoices. The client balked at a thousand-dollar premium. Two weeks later, they bought an excavator on Facebook Marketplace. The listing was fraudulent. The reimbursement came in around eighty thousand dollars on a thousand-dollar policy.

That story is not exceptional. It is what happens when the expertise gap closes, even once.

“It’s giving the tools to the agent and giving them the expertise in order to go out and get their clients cyber insurance,” Matt said. “And that’s not going to be solved overnight with more educational materials or more webinars. It’s going to be solved by experts coming in, and technology and a process coming in to help them do it.”

When the Policy Does Get Placed

Now overlay the Forbes fragmentation argument on top of this absence problem.

When the conversation does happen at the small business level, and a policy does get placed, the dynamics Wishart-Smith describes for boards apply with equal force to a plumbing company in Ohio. Approximately one in three cyber insurance claims are being denied, per TruPoint’s April 2026 reporting. Industry data cited by Fitch puts the denial rate above 40%.

The reasons map precisely to the problems Matt sees in agencies that never built a proper cyber practice. MFA was not enforced across all systems. The application was answered without the agent fully understanding what was being attested to. The incident response plan existed on paper and nowhere else. The documentation was not there when the carrier came looking for it.

The fragmentation Forbes describes as a board governance challenge arrives at the small business level as a denied claim, six months after a ransomware event, when the business is already fighting for survival. Roughly 60% of breached small businesses close permanently within six months.

The Agent Is the Board

Cyber risk transfer requires active governance, not annual procurement. Schwartz puts it precisely when he says acquiring insurance is the easy part. Ensuring it actually works under pressure is the governance challenge. That is exactly right for a Fortune 500 company with a general counsel and a CISO and a risk committee. And it is exactly the job an independent agent is supposed to be performing for a small commercial client, whether they know it or not.

The agent for a regional contractor or a local healthcare practice is the entire governance layer. They have the relationship, the renewal cadence, the trust, and the visibility into the business that no board subcommittee will ever have.

The infrastructure the Forbes piece calls for at the enterprise level, the coverage mapping, the evidence readiness, the alignment between policy conditions and actual security posture, that is what a cyber-fluent agent is supposed to provide. It is the conversation at renewal. The honest read on whether the answers on the application reflect what is actually in place at the client’s shop. The follow-up call before the policy binds to confirm MFA is running on every system the attestation says it is.

Most independent agents cannot provide that yet. Not because they don’t want to. They don’t have the operational infrastructure. They cannot afford to hire a dedicated cyber specialist at two hundred thousand a year. They are running an agency, managing a book, handling renewals. Cyber is one line among many, and without the right support it is the line most likely to get deprioritized until something goes wrong.

This is where a Cyber Practice Audit enters the picture. The audit does for an agency what the Forbes piece argues boards must do for themselves. It maps the current state. It identifies the gaps. It surfaces the clients most exposed. It tells an agency owner how much of their commercial book has no cyber coverage, which segments carry the most concentrated risk, and what a structured renewal process needs to include to hold up when a claim comes in. It is not a sales pitch. It is a mirror.

The Wishart-Smith piece is worth reading in full. The argument it makes for boards is sound. That lesson is coming for small businesses through their agents, whether agents are ready to deliver it or not. The ones who are ready will be the ones who took the step to understand what is actually in their book, built the practice infrastructure, and stopped waiting for clients to ask first.

If it is a conversation worth having at the board level, it is a conversation worth having at the agency level. Find our what your book looks like today.

Let’s lead, with cyber.

Let's Talk Cyber

Read On:

The line that formed after Matt Hightower’s session at Accelerate 2026 in Las Vegas last week told you everything you needed to know about where this industry is right now.

Not the polite kind of line that dissolves into compliments on the way to happy hour. This one formed because agents had questions their clients were already asking them, and they did not have answers yet.

Matt had just spent fifty minutes on stage alongside JP Pritchard of IIABA and Casey Buchta of Brown & Brown, walking a full room through a session called “Cybersecurity Essentials for Agencies: The Must-Haves that Matter Most.” When it ended, agents stood in the hallway with notebooks out, asking about AI adoption, asking what cyber coverage actually needs to look like in 2026, asking how serious the threat really is to clients they have been serving for years.

The conference theme was “Powering Your Possible in the AI Era.” What the hallway revealed was that agents already understood the possible. What they needed was the map.

The numbers the panel shared with the room explained why. The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report documented an 89% year-over-year increase in AI-enabled cyber attacks. The average time between an attacker’s initial access and lateral movement inside a network fell to 29 minutes, 65% faster than the prior year. The fastest observed breakout in the entire dataset was 27 seconds. That number landed in the room the way certain numbers do when they make something abstract feel immediate: 27 seconds from breach to movement, in a world where most organizations measure their detection windows in days.

The financial picture matched the speed. The IBM 2025 Cost of Data Breach report puts the global average cost at $4.44 million. In the United States, that average rises to $10.22 million.

Phishing accounts for roughly 60% of all incidents and the vast majority are now AI-generated, meaning the volume of convincing, targeted, well-written lures arriving in employee inboxes is scaling faster than any training program was designed to absorb. American companies lost more than $200 million to deepfake fraud in just the first quarter of 2025, according to Resemble AI. The cost to create a convincing deepfake on the attacker’s side has collapsed to less than two dollars. Voice cloning needs 20 to 30 seconds of captured audio. And Anthropic’s Mythos model, part of what the company calls Project Glasswing, autonomously found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, which triggered emergency meetings between Treasury Secretary Bessent, Fed Chair Powell, and major Wall Street CEOs.

Read that again: The financial system’s leadership sat down because of what an AI model found in the architecture of the software the entire economy runs on. That is the context in which agents at a Las Vegas conference were trying to figure out how to have better cyber conversations with their clients.

What made the session resonate was not any single data point. It was the framing Matt brought to connect them. The two-sided AI problem, as he laid it out, is the tension every independent agency and MSP is sitting inside right now.

• Side one: how does an agency adopt AI tools safely without exposing client data? Which platforms can be trusted, how do you vet vendors, what internal policies need to exist, how do you train a team on tools that change faster than the training materials?

• Side two: how does an agency protect its clients in a world where AI is the primary weapon being used against them? How do you educate a small business owner on deepfakes and voice cloning when that owner is also managing payroll and supply chain? How do you keep the coverage conversation current when the risk profile is evolving between renewals?

The agents who lined up afterward were not asking theoretical questions. They had clients whose situations needed answers that week. The most common asks were exactly those two threads: best practices for adopting AI internally, and what cyber coverage actually needs to look like for clients facing this threat environment. Both sides of the same problem, standing in the same hallway.

Walt Rowen could have been one of those clients. Rowen is the third-generation president of Susquehanna Glass Co., a manufacturing company in Columbia, Pennsylvania founded in 1910. The company survived the Depression, two world wars, and a half-century of industrial change. When ransomware hit on a Tuesday in December during the busiest stretch of his year, an overseas threat group encrypted his financial records, inventory data, and employee files including Social Security numbers. The factory went quiet. Forty people went home. The criminals wanted a million dollars.

Rowen had done the things most of his peers skip. He had offline backups. He had a cyber insurance policy. He did not pay the ransom. He made the right calls. And recovery still cost him over $100,000 when the bills came in from forensic investigators, legal counsel, data recovery, and the IT professionals who rebuilt what the attackers broke.

In a Fortune op-ed published April 16, he called it what it is: “These costs resulting from the ransomware attack essentially became a new, unsolicited tax.” His advice: “do not think you are too small to be a target. Get a good IT partner who talks to you, not just to your servers and buy the cyber insurance. Ours costs about $3,000 a year. The attack cost over $100,000, and that was the lucky outcome.”

Rowen is the client who had the right agent. The data says most don’t. The Public Private Strategies Institute published results from a national survey the same week: 72% of small businesses were hit by fraud, scams, or ransomware last year. The annual toll is $131 billion. Only 24% carry cyber insurance. But among those who do, 61% say it is very effective. The coverage works when someone has the conversation.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026 reports that CEO fraud has overtaken ransomware as the top concern. Munich Re’s 2026 survey says nine out of ten C-level executives worldwide feel inadequately protected. Nine out of ten. The problem is not that business owners do not care. The problem is that three out of four never had the conversation with their agent.

The conversation itself is getting harder to have without the right infrastructure behind it.

AIG, Great American, and W.R. Berkley filed with U.S. regulators in November 2025 to exclude AI-related liabilities from certain policies.

Jason Bishara of NSI Insurance Group was direct about the shift: “Every business has insurance, and every business now is using AI to some extent. Are you seeing those liabilities and exclusions within these policies and an aversion to it from the carriers? The answer is yes.” Phil Karecki of Ensono framed the underwriting question that is already showing up on renewals: “It’s no longer, ‘Are you using AI?’ It’s asking, ‘Are you using governed AI? How are you governing it? How are you keeping it safe and secure?’”

CyberCube’s H1 2026 briefing described AI agents as a new “privileged execution layer” in attacks, and cybersecurity strategist William Altman named the moment: “We are in a defining moment where AI is moving from a copilot era to an autonomous agent era.”

The Global Federation of Insurance Associations puts annual economic losses from cyberattacks at approximately $950 billion. Insured losses that carriers actually pay sit at roughly $6 billion. That gap is not closing on its own. Cyber reinsurance rates fell 32% at April 1 renewals per Gallagher Re. The terms are the best they have been in years. That window will not stay open once loss ratios catch up to 27-second breakout times.

This is where it gets practical.

At Accelerate 2026, Matt and Reid Wellock were running Cyber Practice Audits that show an agency exactly where their book stands, where the gaps are, and what a structured cyber practice looks like without a $200,000 hire. Human led, AI enabled, commission aligned.

The same audit is available to any agency that wants to see the picture clearly. If you were one of the agents standing in that hallway last week, or if you are reading this wishing you had been, that conversation is the next step. For agents who want to understand what a cyber policy actually does before walking into the conversation, What Is Cyber Insurance is the starting point. For MSPs, the underwriting alignment framework lives at Cybersecurity Alignment. MSPs inside the MSPAlliance ecosystem have a dedicated path through the MSP Cyber Insurance partnership.

Seventy-two percent of small businesses paid the ransomware tax last year. Walt Rowen was one of the few who had the right calls in place, and it still cost him six figures. The agents who build the infrastructure for this conversation now, while the market is favorable and the data is fresh, are the ones whose clients stop being in the 72%.

Let’s lead, with cyber.

Let's Talk Cyber

FAQ Block

Q: What is the hidden ransomware tax on small businesses?
A: The hidden ransomware tax is the out-of-pocket cost small businesses absorb after a ransomware attack, even when they do everything right. Walt Rowen of Susquehanna Glass Co. declined to pay the ransom, had offline backups and a cyber policy, and still spent over $100,000 on forensic investigators, legal counsel, and IT recovery. That unplanned expense is what the tax looks like at ground level. Agents who use this example help clients understand why coverage alone is not the complete answer.

Q: What is the Cyber Protection Gap?
A: The Cyber Protection Gap is the measurable distance between what cybercrime costs businesses each year and what insurance actually pays in covered claims. First-order economic losses from cyberattacks approach approximately $950 billion annually, while insured losses paid by carriers sit at roughly $6 billion. That gap represents uninsured balance sheets and broken recovery plans, most of them belonging to small and mid-sized businesses. Independent agents who understand the gap can guide clients toward coverage that matches real exposure rather than assumed protection.

Q: What did agents learn about cyber risk at Accelerate 2026?
A: At NetVU’s Accelerate 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Matt Hightower’s session “Cybersecurity Essentials for Agencies: The Must-Haves that Matter Most” walked a full room through AI-driven threat data that has changed the risk profile for every client in an agency book. AI-enabled cyber attacks increased 89% year over year in 2025, average breakout time fell to 29 minutes, and deepfake fraud cost American companies over $200 million in a single quarter. Agents left with a clearer map of what their clients are facing and what a structured cyber practice can do about it.

Q: How are AI tools changing the cost of a cyber attack?
A: The economics of attack have inverted. Creating a convincing deepfake now costs less than two dollars, synthetic identity kits sell for around five dollars, and voice cloning requires as little as 20 to 30 seconds of captured audio. The IBM 2025 Cost of Data Breach report puts the U.S. average cost of a breach at $10.22 million. The ratio of attack cost to damage cost is wider than at any prior point in the industry’s history. Agents who understand this asymmetry can explain to clients why the question is not whether to carry coverage but how much.

Q: Why are AI exclusions appearing in cyber and E&O insurance policies?
A: Major carriers including AIG, Great American, and W.R. Berkley filed with U.S. regulators in November 2025 to exclude liabilities tied to AI tools from certain policies. As businesses adopt AI across operations, underwriters are distinguishing between governed, audited deployments and ungoverned ones. The question on renewal applications has shifted from whether a business uses AI to how it governs and secures that use. Agents can help clients understand where current policies address AI exposure and where new gaps may have opened since the last renewal.

Q: How many small businesses carry cyber insurance, and does it work?
A: According to a December 2025 Morning Consult survey of 506 small business owners conducted for the Public Private Strategies Institute, only 24% of small businesses carry cyber insurance. Among those who do, 61% say it is very effective. The protection gap is not a product failure. It is a distribution gap. Three in four small businesses are making decisions about technology risk without a guided conversation about coverage. That conversation is the one independent agents are positioned to have.

Q: What is the soft market window for cyber insurance in 2026?
A: Cyber reinsurance rates fell approximately 32% at April 1, 2026 renewals, according to Gallagher Re, and capacity is broadly available. Buyers currently have access to better terms than they have seen since the market last hardened. Industry analysts expect conditions to tighten as AI-driven attacks compress timelines and loss ratios reflect the evolving exposure. Agents who help clients move during favorable conditions position those clients ahead of the next round of market adjustment.

Q: How can an independent agency build a cyber practice without a full cybersecurity team?
A: A structured Cyber Practice Operating System embeds underwriting discipline, risk assessment workflows, and renewal processes into an agency’s existing operations without requiring dedicated cybersecurity staff. The infrastructure handles the complexity of cyber’s risk profile while keeping the agent in the consultative role their clients already trust. At Accelerate 2026, the most common question agents brought to Matt Hightower after the session was exactly this: how do we build the infrastructure for this conversation at agency scale, without $200,000 in headcount?

Read On:

We still hear it from agents regularly.

“Our clients just aren’t asking about cyber.”

“Nobody on our book is interested.”

Then, a call comes six weeks after the renewal. A cyber incident happened. The client calls their carrier. The BOP does not cover it. The GL does not cover it. There was no standalone cyber policy in place because nobody brought it up at renewal.

Then comes the question no agency wants to hear: “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

Fortunately, when one of our clients got hit recently, the business had cyber coverage in place. That $15,000 gone through a jot form? Covered. The claim was filed, the response was funded, and the client kept their doors open.

The agents who say their clients are not asking about cyber are usually right. Clients rarely ask. They assume the coverage they already have handles it, or they assume they are too small to be a target, or they have simply never been asked the question themselves. That is not a demand problem. That is a conversation that has not happened yet.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

Business email compromise is not an emerging threat. It is a mature, well-documented category of loss that the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has tracked for a decade.

In 2024 alone, BEC attacks generated $2.77 billion in reported losses across more than 21,000 incidents, making it the second costliest cybercrime category behind investment fraud. Over the past ten years, BEC losses reported to the FBI have surpassed $17 billion.

These are not exotic, headline-grabbing attacks. They are quiet, targeted, and devastatingly effective against the exact client profile that sits in most independent agency books: small and mid-sized businesses with limited IT resources, minimal security training, and no dedicated cybersecurity staff.

Most of them are uninsured for the risk. According to an analysis published by the American Academy of Actuaries, only 10 to 20 percent of small and mid-market enterprises currently purchase cyber insurance. Among mid-market companies with up to a billion dollars in revenue, adoption still hovers between 40 and 50 percent.

The majority of commercial accounts on your book are crossing into exposed territory without knowing it.

The Call You Don’t Want To Receive

Your client, a regional distributor with forty employees, wires $207,000 to what they believe is a verified vendor account. It is not. A business email compromise attack redirected the payment to an overseas account that emptied within hours.

They pick up the phone, you answer, then comes the question: “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

That question is where E&O exposure begins. Not in a courtroom. Not in a demand letter. In a phone call from a client who trusted you to help them see what was coming, and who now believes you did not.

E&O claims rooted in failure to advise or failure to offer appropriate coverage are well established in case law. When a client suffers an uninsured cyber loss and can point to a long-standing relationship with their agent, the question carries legal weight.

Book A Cyber Practice Audit

What Carriers Now Expect From Your Clients

The ground has shifted on the underwriting side as well, and agencies that haven’t updated their renewal process may not realize how much.

Carriers issuing or renewing cyber policies in 2026 are requiring documented controls that go well beyond a checkbox questionnaire. Multi-factor authentication must be enforced, not just available, across remote access, email, and privileged accounts. Endpoint detection and response tools have replaced traditional antivirus as a baseline expectation. Insurers want to see tested backup strategies, written incident response plans, and evidence of routine employee security training.

This means that even when an agency does bring cyber into the renewal conversation, the client may not be ready to qualify. And that reality creates another layer of value for the agency willing to guide the process: helping clients understand not just why they need cyber coverage, but what they need to have in place before a carrier will write it.

A System, Not A Solo Effort

This is where most agencies stall.

The challenge is not awareness. Most principals know cyber matters. The challenge is building a repeatable practice that brings cyber into every renewal, equips producers with the right questions, and gives clients a clear path from exposed to covered.

That kind of practice does not require a solo cyber hero on staff. It requires a system, a cyber practice operating system that rides alongside your existing book and turns what used to be an afterthought into a structured, recurring workflow.

Risk assessment at the front end. Tech E&O review where it applies. Carrier-ready documentation. Renewal discipline that treats cyber the same way your agency already treats property and casualty.

A Separate Set of Stakes for MSPs

Independent agencies serving managed service providers are navigating a different set of structural exposures, and the standard commercial cyber framework does not map cleanly onto how MSPs actually operate.

Sixty-five percent of MSP policies reviewed contain material coverage gaps or structural misalignment, from aggregation traps that trigger multiple deductibles in a single multi-client event to automation blind spots where agentic AI actions fall outside traditional policy language entirely.

That is why UKON partnered with MSPAlliance to build a Cyber and Tech E&O Insurance Program designed around how managed service providers actually operate.

Learn About the Program

The program integrates MSP Verify, the gold standard for validating operational maturity, directly into the underwriting process so that the controls and certifications MSPs already maintain translate into better coverage alignment and reduced premiums.

It is the first program in the market to include explicit agentic AI endorsements, covering machine learning models, autonomous agents, and similar systems without relying on broad or implied language that leaves gray areas for carriers to dispute at claims time.

The Next Step is a Compass Check

If you are not sure where cyber sits in your current renewal workflow, or how exposed your book might be, a Cyber Practice Audit is the right place to start. It is a structured engagement designed to map the gaps in your current process and identify the fastest path to a systematic cyber conversation at every renewal.

The question your client asked in that opening scenario is already being asked in agencies across the country. The only variable is whether it catches you off guard or whether you have already built the answer.

Submit A Risk

For your clients

If you have commercial accounts that need to understand why this conversation matters, UKON's guide Cyber Insurance for Small Business is written for business owners, not agents. Forward it, embed it in your renewal outreach, or print it. It is yours to use.

Read On:

👉 How to Sell Cyber Insurance
👉 A Web Form. A Bot. $15,000 Gone Before Anyone Noticed.
👉 Cyber Insurance For Small Businesses

The numbers behind the Cyber Protection Gap have gotten large enough to require a moment of genuine consideration before anyone moves past them.

According to research published by the Global Federation of Insurance Associations, first-order economic losses from cyber attacks total approximately $950 billion annually. Total insured losses at the time of the study: roughly $60 billion. That ratio runs somewhere between 15:1 and 90:1 depending on which methodology you use. Munich Re, whose reinsurance research team tracks this as closely as anyone, put covered cyber risk as low as 1 percent of total exposure in a 2025 briefing. Swiss Re, examining the SME segment specifically, found cyber insurance take-up rates between 10 and 25 percent for small to mid-sized businesses globally.

Nature has its own way of illustrating this. Look at the image above: land and rock carved not by sudden catastrophe but by a river working patiently, year after year, wearing the earth away until two sides stood separated by an abyss. That is precisely what is happening with the Cyber Protection Gap. On the left, economic losses climb: $10 trillion annually and rising. On the right, insured losses follow their own upward path: $15 billion per year. And in the middle, the river keeps flowing, the chasm keeps widening, and the distance between what businesses lose and what insurance covers grows deeper with every passing year.

None of those figures describe an awareness problem. They describe a distribution problem. That distinction matters enormously for how independent agencies think about their role right now.

What the Research Actually Shows

The standard assumption about why small and mid-sized businesses go without cyber coverage is that they do not understand the risk or cannot afford the premium. That assumption is largely wrong, and several serious research efforts have now said so directly.

Munich Re’s 2026 Cyber Risk and Insurance Survey found that nine out of ten C-level executives worldwide consider their companies inadequately protected against cyber risks. These are not business owners who have been told everything is fine. They are worried. They know the exposure is real. The coverage gap persists not because decision-makers are dismissive of the risk but because many of them lack a trusted point of contact who can guide them through coverage decisions.

The Actuaries Institute of Australia’s November 2024 dialogue paper on the widening SME protection gap reached a similar conclusion. SMEs often believe incorrectly that they are too small to be a primary target, or that cybersecurity is too complicated to navigate without dedicated staff. The paper found only 10 to 25 percent of SMEs carry dedicated cyber insurance. The remainder carry the risk themselves, usually without any formal plan for what happens when an incident occurs.

The Swiss Re research team, in a September 2025 analysis of the SME cyber market, framed the distribution problem precisely. The agents and brokers who serve small and mid-sized businesses, which includes the vast majority of independent commercial agencies, frequently lack the confidence and the infrastructure to lead the cyber conversation with those clients consistently. That observation is the one that should land hardest for agency leadership.

What the Gap Looks Like Inside a Commercial Book

The research measures aggregate market statistics. Agency principals manage books of business with real accounts and real revenue consequences.

In a typical independent commercial agency serving small and mid-sized businesses, more than 80 percent of commercial accounts carry no cyber coverage. At an average premium of $3,500 per account, a book of 1,000 commercial clients represents roughly $2.8 million in uncaptured cyber premium sitting in relationships your producers already own. The Cyber Protection Gap is not an abstract industry statistic for that agency. It is a revenue gap inside the existing client base.

The obstacle to capturing that revenue is not client reluctance. The obstacle is that most agencies have not built the operating infrastructure to run and sell cyber as a disciplined, repeatable line of business. Every submission feels bespoke. Producers avoid the conversation because they are not confident in it. Renewals become new underwriting events because the intake process was never standardized. The agency knows cyber is important. No one owns it day to day.

What Closing the Gap Requires

Multiple bodies of research have converged on the same answer. Closing the Cyber Protection Gap for small and mid-sized businesses requires equipping distribution with the expertise, tools, and confidence to have the cyber conversation at every renewal, with every commercial client, consistently. The GFIA report identified broker and agent confidence as a core driver of coverage penetration. Swiss Re identified equipping agents with training, tools, and clear communication materials as one of five fundamental growth levers. Munich Re pointed to simpler, better-aligned products and more accessible distribution as the path forward.

The research does not describe a problem that will solve itself at its current pace. Cybercrime costs exceed $10 trillion annually. The global cyber insurance market writes approximately $15 billion in premium. That ratio is not narrowing on its own. The agencies that build the infrastructure to deliver cyber consistently across their commercial book will capture a disproportionate share of the opportunity the gap represents.

UKON’s Cyber Practice Leadership model exists to close the distribution gap inside the independent agency channel. We embed underwriting discipline, structured workflows, and specialist depth directly into agency operations so cyber becomes a managed, repeatable capability rather than a reactive placement. Commission-aligned. No upfront cost. Operational in three weeks.

Book A Cyber Practice Audit

Submit A Risk

For your clients

If you have commercial accounts that need to understand why this conversation matters, UKON's guide Cyber Insurance for Small Business is written for business owners, not agents. Forward it, embed it in your renewal outreach, or print it. It is yours to use.

Read On:

👉 The $10 Trillion Cybercrime Gap: Why Traditional Insurance Distribution Isn’t Closing It
👉 A Web Form. A Bot. $15,000 Gone Before Anyone Noticed.
👉 UKON Joins Catalyit as Premium Solutions Provider for 14,000 agencies

In 1982, Mark Cuban was a 24-year-old software salesman in Dallas walking into businesses that had never seen a personal computer. He would sit down with the owner, explain what the machine could do, and most of the time get the same response. The owner would lean back, nod toward the front desk, and say: son, I’ve got a receptionist right there. I don’t need that.

Cuban shared this story with CNBC as a business observation, not a judgment. Those owners were not unintelligent. They were busy, they trusted what had always worked, and the problem the computer solved was not a problem they had decided to think about yet.

Some of them moved fast when they understood it. The ones who did built something that compounded over years. The ones who waited caught up eventually — to competitors who already owned the ground.

Every independent agency producer reading this has sat across from a small business owner in the last 12 months and heard a version of the same line about cyber insurance.

“I’ve got an IT guy.”

“We’re too small for that.”

“We’ve never had a problem.”

It’s the 2026 version of the receptionist still at the desk. The exposure is real. The conversation hasn’t happened yet.

You are Mark Cuban in this story. The question is whether you walk back in.

What the Threat Environment Looks Like Right Now

The case for walking back in got considerably stronger this month.

Cloudflare, which processes more than 20 percent of the world’s internet traffic, published its 2026 Threat Intelligence Report. The headline finding is worth reading slowly: the dominant intrusion method in 2026 is no longer a technical exploit. It is a login. Stolen credentials, session token hijacking, and AI-automated phishing campaigns that harvest access rather than force it.

The report documented 230 billion threats neutralized in a single day and described what it called the total industrialization of cyber threats: a threat environment where the barrier to entry has effectively disappeared and low-skill actors can now execute surgical, targeted attacks against mid-market businesses at scale.

The targets Cloudflare identified are not large enterprises with dedicated security teams. They are mid-market businesses. The kind that sit in most commercial agency books renewing general liability and property year after year while their digital exposure grows in the background.

Within days of that report, the White House released President Trump’s Cyber Strategy for America.

Days after the strategy’s distribution, an Iran-linked hacker group claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Stryker.

The Cyber Strategy for America names the targets plainly — small businesses, independent professionals, first responders — and calls explicitly for private-sector-led defense at the scale the threat demands.

Two of its six pillars speak directly to the commercial insurance market.

The first is an explicit directive for agentic AI adoption to defend against machine-speed attacks. The second rejects what the strategy calls a costly checklist model of cyber defense, calling instead for response and recovery capacity that ensures continuity of the American economy.

Read together, both reports say the same thing from different directions: the threat is real, it is accelerating, it is landing on exactly the clients in your book, and the defense infrastructure most of those clients carry is not built for the environment those reports describe.

That is the Cyber Protection Gap. And both reports confirm it is widening.

Book A Cyber Practice Audit

The Gap Is Already Inside Your Book

Cybercrime costs small and mid-sized businesses more than $10 trillion a year globally. The FBI reported over $16 billion in U.S. losses in 2024 alone.

Most of those losses hit the businesses that make up the majority of an independent agency’s commercial book: the manufacturers, the law offices, the medical practices, the regional distributors. Roughly 80 percent of the average commercial book carries no meaningful cyber coverage. The estimated uncaptured premium in a book of 1,000 accounts runs north of $2.8 million annually.

That is not a prospecting problem. The clients are already there. The carriers want to write it.

The gap is an execution problem. Cyber is genuinely hard to operationalize inside a traditional commercial lines workflow, and most agencies were not built to deliver it at scale.

Every submission becomes a scavenger hunt. Every renewal becomes a new underwriting event. Producers do what rational people do under constraint: they prioritize what closes and what moves revenue today. Cyber becomes important-but-later.

The full breakdown of what drives the gap and what it costs agencies to leave it open is here: The $10 Trillion Cybercrime Gap.

The Agencies Getting Ahead Are Not Adding Headcount

The instinct, when a market opportunity becomes this visible, is to hire for it. Build a cyber department. Bring in a specialist. Stand up a practice from scratch.

That instinct is understandable and almost always wrong, because the economics do not hold at the agency level.

A dedicated Cyber Practice Leader costs an agency $150,000 to $250,000 a year in salary alone, before benefits, before tooling, before the 12 to 18 months it takes that person to learn the book and start producing consistently.

Most independent agencies cannot absorb that bet. Most of them should not have to.

The agencies moving fastest right now are doing something different. They are adopting an AI-enabled infrastructure that puts a full cyber department inside the agency at zero upfront cost.

Human-supervised AI handles the operational layer: book analysis, coverage gap identification, submission organization, renewal prioritization. Seasoned cyber underwriters and coverage specialists handle the judgment layer: complex placements, carrier advocacy, co-selling on accounts that need an expert in the room. Producers lead the client conversation with the tools and the backing to do it confidently on every commercial renewal, not just the ones where someone happened to ask.

The Cloudflare and White House reports give that infrastructure new urgency.

A client who reads about credential-based ransomware targeting businesses in their industry and calls their agent deserves to reach someone who has already reviewed their coverage for the threat that client just read about. That preparedness is not a function of individual producer knowledge. It is a function of the system running behind the producer. The agencies building that system now will be the ones whose clients call them first when the headline lands.

UKON’s Cyber Practice Leadership model is that system. Commission-aligned, no upfront cost, operational within three weeks.

The Window Is Not Permanent

Cuban’s business owners eventually got computers. Most of them. The ones who moved when the conversation first landed with someone who understood the value built something that persisted. The ones who waited found out later that the decision had largely been made for them.

Your clients are going to read the Cloudflare report, or they are going to experience what it describes. One of those conversations is on your terms. The other is not. The agencies building a cyber practice now are in the early group. That window stays open a little while longer.

Book a Cyber Practice Audit and map what the gap looks like in your specific book. Thirty minutes. No obligation.

Let’s Lead, With Cyber.

Book A Cyber Practice Audit

Read On:

👉 Agencies Are Installing AI. Few Are Installing Oversight.
👉 From Detection to Liability: Right of Boom 2026
👉 Tech E&O Is Not Cyber Insurance. And That Gap is Dangerous.

If you sit in on enough agency meetings this year, you start to hear a familiar tone. Someone mentions a new AI tool that summarizes policies. Someone else is testing automated marketing copy. A producer wants help drafting renewal emails. The energy is real. No one wants to be the firm that missed the shift.

The 2026 ACT Tech Trends Report confirms what many principals are already seeing. A majority of agencies plan to increase their use of AI in the coming year. At the same time, more than half report having no written policy governing how AI should be used inside the organization.

That gap deserves attention.

AI is not just another software upgrade. Once it begins drafting client communications, interpreting coverage language, or organizing internal data, it becomes part of the advisory process. When that happens, its output affects client trust, E&O exposure, and how defensible your decisions look if they are ever questioned.

Read The Report

Most agencies are struggling with the structure, not the ambition.

Tools are being adopted at the team level without a clear framework set by leadership.

Different producers experiment in different ways. Data moves across platforms without consistent documentation. Decisions that once lived inside experienced judgment are now influenced by software that no one has formally evaluated.

Left unmanaged, that environment creates inconsistency: outputs vary, documentation varies, standards vary. Over time, that inconsistency becomes liability.

The agencies that will benefit most from this cycle are the ones that define simple, durable rules before adoption scales further. Clear approval standards for new tools.

Defined boundaries around what data can be entered into external systems. Explicit expectations for human review when coverage interpretation or client advice is involved. Documented cybersecurity controls before new integrations are approved.

These decisions sit with agency leadership.

Leadership shapes how the agency operates, how risk is documented, and how defensible advisory practices become over time.

The Cyber Protection Gap does not disappear when agencies adopt AI. When cyber already lacks ownership, cadence, and coordinated workflow, adding automation can simply increase the speed of inconsistency.

The gap is no longer just between MSPs, agents, and carriers. It also appears inside the agency itself, between ambition and structure. AI exposes that misalignment faster than manual processes ever did.

The ACT report also underscores a broader issue. Agencies operate in one of the most targeted sectors for cyber incidents.

As AI increases the speed and volume of data moving between systems, the importance of access control, authentication, and monitoring rises alongside it. Growth initiatives and risk management cannot be separated in this environment.

This is where UKON’s role becomes clear.

UKON was built as a Cyber Practice Operating System for independent agencies. As outlined in our corporate narrative, we embed underwriting discipline, structured workflows, portfolio visibility, and human-supervised AI-driven infrastructure inside agencies so cyber becomes a managed, repeatable capability rather than a reactive placement

The supervised element is central to that model. With UKON, AI assists with data ingestion, book segmentation, submission preparation, and coverage comparison.

Every recommendation is reviewed and monitored by experienced cyber subject matter experts before it reaches a client. The software increases speed and visibility. Our Cyber Practice Leaders maintain judgment and accountability. The agency remains in control of the advisory relationship.

UKON delivers that structure through Cyber Practice Leadership.

UKON embeds experienced cyber leaders into independent agencies and supports them with defined workflows, portfolio-level visibility, and supervised AI infrastructure.

Cyber is no longer handled opportunistically or left to individual producer preference. It is segmented across the book, tracked with discipline, reviewed at renewal with intention, and supported by subject matter experts who monitor submissions and recommendations before they reach the client.

The result is a managed cyber capability that operates with consistency, documentation, and defensible advisory standards.

In practice, that means cyber is no longer dependent on which producer remembers to bring it up. It is tracked across the book. It is segmented. It is offered consistently. Submissions follow defined workflows. Recommendations are documented. Renewal reviews follow cadence.

AI becomes useful in that environment because it operates inside guardrails that are already defined.

The ACT Report highlights where agencies are heading. UKON exists to provide the operating structure that allows agencies to move in that direction without sacrificing discipline, documentation, or defensibility.

If AI usage is increasing inside your agency and there is no written framework governing how it is applied, the priority is not another tool. It is clarity around structure.

That is the role of a Cyber Practice Operating System.

If you want to see how that structure would function inside your agency, we are ready.

Let's Talk Cyber

Read On:

👉 From Detection to Liability: Right of Boom 2026
👉 Tech E&O Is Not Cyber Insurance. And That Gap is Dangerous.
👉 When Liability Finally Speaks

For decades, the relationship between a business and its insurance agent has been stable. The advisor sat at the center of the program and coordinated the protection around it. Property, general liability, auto, umbrella. The lines were familiar. The roles were clear. Renewal followed a known pattern.

Cyber changed the architecture.

Underwriting requirements change year to year. Controls that were accepted twelve months ago are now inadequate. Applications grow more detailed. Language tightens. The business owner hears one message from their MSP about risk posture and another from a broker about insurability. The agent, who is capable and trusted, is often left trying to translate a line of coverage that did not exist 20 years ago.

Today, cyber feels like a separate universe sitting outside the normal insurance relationship. It gets shopped. It gets carved out. It gets treated like a specialty purchase that changes every year.

That behavior is an unscalable response to chaos because it treats Cyber as another line to quote rather than a discipline to manage.

Producers approach it episodically. Applications are completed reactively. Security conversations are deferred until a carrier demands clarification. MSPs are brought in midstream to validate controls they were never told would be scrutinized.

Cyber has created a dependency between insurance placement and technical security posture that did not previously exist. And yet the operating model inside most agencies hasn’t changed.

This is the Cyber Protection Gap.

The dynamic becomes clearer when you hear it from the field. In this short clip following Right of Boom, we unpack why cyber gets carved out, reshopped, misunderstood, and how bringing it back under one coordinated structure changes the outcome.

Cyber Protection is the space between the trusted relationship and the execution required to support it.

Cyber sits between agents, MSPs, and carriers without a clearly defined operating owner.

When no one is accountable for the full workflow, friction compounds. Submissions lack narrative coherence. Security controls are misunderstood or poorly documented. Coverage is placed without a shared understanding of what must be maintained for that coverage to respond.

The business owner experiences instability. The MSP is pulled into last-minute underwriting questions. The agent feels exposed. The carrier receives risk that is harder to evaluate than it should be.

No single party created this gap. The market evolved faster than the process.

Closing it requires more than access to more carriers or a new product form. It requires structure.

Cyber must be offered consistently across the book, not selectively when forced by renewal. Limits must be discussed intentionally, with a defensible rationale tied to exposure. Intake must be standardized so underwriting questions are anticipated rather than reacted to. Documentation must be disciplined so recommendations and decisions are recorded. Security posture must be aligned with insurability before submission, not negotiated after a declination.

When that structure is in place, the dynamic shifts.

The agent remains the central advisor. The relationship does not change. What changes is the infrastructure behind it. Cyber becomes a managed practice inside the agency rather than a specialty bolt-on. The MSP is engaged early, not summoned late. The carrier receives a submission that reflects both exposure and control maturity. The client understands not only what they purchased, but what they must sustain.

Each party operates inside its strength. The agent leads the relationship and owns the insurance dialogue. The MSP strengthens the client’s security posture in alignment with insurability. The carrier underwrites with greater clarity and confidence. The client experiences continuity instead of fragmentation.

Bringing cyber under one roof does not mean collapsing roles. It means coordinating them. It means acknowledging that cyber now binds insurance and security together and designing a workflow that reflects that reality.

The Cyber Protection Gap is a structural problem. And structural problems are solved with ownership, cadence, and discipline.

That is the work in front of this industry.

Let's Talk Cyber

More Cyber Frontier Trail Gear:

Right of Boom has always been a place where MSPs come to sharpen how they defend environments. This year, something more important surfaced.

Read On:

👉 Tech E&O Is Not Cyber Insurance. And That Gap is Dangerous.
👉 When Liability Finally Speaks
👉 Why Cyber Insurance Is Won or Lost Long Before An Incident Occurs

Quotes appear quickly. Applications feel light. The process is designed to move, not to pause. The message to buyers is clear: this used to be complicated, but now it is not. You can bind coverage and get back to running the business.

That confidence is misplaced.

Cyber insurance is not a product you browse. It’s a contract you live inside when something goes wrong. And when a cyber incident hits, the outcome is determined not by how fast the policy was issued, but by the exact language written into it.

The line is simple because the truth behind it is uncomfortable. Policies that look similar on the surface can behave very differently under stress. Some pay quickly. Some reimburse later. Some restrict who can help you. Some quietly cap what you thought was covered.

The difference is not visible in the quote. It is buried in the wording.

“That language matters, and the way that you are covered is contingent on how that language is laid out,” says Will Brooks, Vice President of Sales at UKON.

This is the part of cyber insurance most buyers never see until it is too late. Coverage is not defined by intent or assumption. It is defined by sentences that decide whether costs are paid, delayed, denied, or shifted back onto the business.

Let's Talk Cyber

Ransomware language is one of the clearest examples.

Some policies say they will reimburse payments rather than make them. Others cover negotiation costs without clarifying who controls the negotiator. Some require pre-approved incident response partners, leaving businesses exposed if they act quickly with the wrong firm.

In the middle of an attack, these distinctions are not technical. They are operational and financial.

Brooks explained, “So when you’re going to buy a policy, it’s important to ask certain questions and look for certain things.”

Those questions rarely come up during the sales process because speed has become the feature. Easy submissions are praised. Fast binding is rewarded. The hard questions are deferred until the incident forces them into the open.

What is often missed is what cyber insurance is supposed to do.

Protection means the policy works with the business, not against it. It means clarity during chaos. It means support that encourages better security and decisive response, not hesitation or second guessing.

This is the gap UKON was built to close.

As a cyber-only wholesaler purpose-built for agents and MSPs, UKON operates as an in-house cyber practice. The goal is not to make cyber insurance louder or faster. It is to make it understandable, defensible, and usable when it matters most.

The video below does one thing very well.

It slows the conversation down.
It examines real policy language.
It shows how small wording choices create very real consequences.

If you are responsible for advising clients, protecting revenue, or signing off on cyber coverage, this is worth your time. If watching it raises questions about your current policy or the advice you are giving, that is the point.

Watch the video. Then, if you want a second set of eyes on your coverage, book time with a UKON Cyber Risk Expert. The cost of understanding the language now is far less than the cost of discovering it later.

Cyber peace of mind is not found in the quote. It is found in the words.

Connect With a Cyber Risk Expert

Huntress Community Fireside Chat

Cyber insurance carrier vendor panels are no longer static lists. They’re evolving systems driven by claims data, regulatory pressure, and hard lessons from real incidents.

Join Will Brooks, Reid Wellock, and Travis Kroger for a 45-minute fireside chat as Huntress breaks down how carriers are rethinking vendor panels, what’s changing behind the scenes, and why alignment now matters more than ever for MSPs, security vendors, and insured organizations.

If you want to understand how response decisions are actually being made and how to stay in step with a market that’s tightening fast, this conversation is for you.

Register Now

Further Reading

👉 Cyber Liability Is No Longer A Side Line. It’s A Practice.
👉 A False Soft Market: What Beazley’s Headlines Really Mean For Cyber Insurance
👉 Cyber Risk Reports for smarter renewal conversations

That’s what happened when reports surfaced that Beazley was pulling back from cyber because losses had made the line “uninsurable.” Agents started asking if this was 2021 all over again. Some worried it meant another wave of sudden appetite shifts and shock non-renewals.

Then Beazley clarified its stance.

According to an update shared with brokers, Beazley’s Chief Underwriting Officer, Paul Bantick, said the firm remains committed to cyber in North America and globally, but sees current North American pricing as unsustainable and in need of adjustment to avoid another sharp correction like 2021–2022.

In other words: they are not exiting cyber; they are trying to enforce discipline.

So what’s actually going on?

Not a collapse. A correction.

Inside UKON, the reaction was less panic, more pattern recognition.

UKON’s President and COO, Reid Wellock, put it simply: “A false soft market — perception is not reality.”

That’s the real story.

Not whether one carrier is tightening. But whether agents are prepared for what comes next.

What UKON Is Seeing Behind The Scenes

Cyber is not failing. Cyber demand is failing.

Most companies still don’t really understand cyber insurance. They don’t know how much to buy, what it should cover, or why the application feels harder every year. As underwriting has become more complex, many agents have pulled back from leading with cyber. Buyers feel the friction and delay the decision.

“Underwriting has gotten so complicated that agents don’t want to take time selling cyber, and buyers don’t want to take time applying,” noted Will Brooks, Vice President of Sales at UKON.

That is the gap this moment exposes. Not “cyber is uninsurable,” but “cyber is still undersold and misunderstood.”

Kelly Butler, Head of Cyber for Marsh, framed the real issue clearly in a recent article by PYMNTS: “They’re all fighting for new business. It’s not an oversaturated market, but there’s a limited pool of buyers.”

Butler reveals the quiet truth running underneath this moment.

It’s not that only a limited number of businesses need cyber insurance — nearly all do. It’s that only a limited number understand the need well enough to buy.

That is the gap the industry keeps missing. And that is the gap agents must close.

When underwriting discipline returns — and it will — the agents who educate their clients now will win later. Those who wait will lose renewals to competitors who show up with clarity and financial framing.

Kim Duprey, a member of UKON’s account management team, highlighted the timing: “Agents should be scrambling to replace lost revenue with additional lines of insurance, and they all need cyber.”

This is not fear. This is opportunity.

And opportunity moves quickly in a market correcting itself.

Let's Talk Cyber

Why This Matters Now

Beazley’s comments about unsustainable rating and the need for course correction are a reminder of something every agent already knows: cyber is not static. When loss trends move, markets move. Specialty carriers like Chubb, AIG and others are still growing their cyber books. Multi-line carriers will respond in their own ways and on their own timelines.

For agents, the risk is simple:

• If you lean only on one carrier, you’re exposed when that appetite shifts.

• If you treat cyber as a checkbox, you’ll miss the signals that limits, retentions, and wording are drifting away from your clients’ real exposures.

• If you wait for the next correction to react, you’ll be competing against agents who already repositioned their accounts.

Where A Wholesaler Actually Earns Its Keep

This is where UKON’s role as a cyber-only wholesaler comes into focus.

Our job is not to pick sides in carrier drama. Our job is to:

• Track appetite and pricing shifts across the cyber market in real time.

• Help agents pivot when a carrier tightens, reprices, or changes terms.

• Translate security controls and loss data into credible limit and structure recommendations.

• Keep renewals on track when the market starts sending mixed messages.

When a headline hits, we don’t want agents scrambling alone. We want them calling a team that does this all day.

If a book has heavy Beazley concentration, that means reviewing options, assessing client fit with other markets, and preparing a path forward before clients read the same headline and start asking questions.

The Real Opportunity: Unlock Demand

The bigger story here is not one carrier’s investor call. It’s the imbalance between supply and demand. Capacity exists. Many carriers want to grow cyber.

The constraint is understanding: buyers don’t yet see cyber as essential as GL or property, and too many agents are still treating it as an add-on.

That is the work in front of the industry: unlock buyers by making cyber simpler to explain and easier to buy.

At UKON, we call that Cyber Peace of Mind. It’s the reason we invest in Cyber Risk Reports, Cyber Guides, and tools that let agents turn technical risk into clear financial impact.

It’s also why we stay close to shifts like Beazley’s, so agents don’t have to interpret the market alone.

Let’s Talk Cyber

If this news has you wondering how exposed your cyber book is to carrier shifts — or how to talk to clients about it without spooking them — you shouldn’t have to guess. Schedule a conversation with a UKON Cyber Risk Expert and walk through:

• How this market moment could affect your current book

• Where alternative capacity already exists

• How to position cyber with clients who are hearing the same headlines you are

→ Connect with a UKON Cyber Risk Expert today.

Further Reading

👉 Will Brooks’ LinkedIn Breakdown of the Beazley News
👉 Cyber Risk Reports for smarter renewal conversations
👉 Book time with a UKON Cyber Risk Expert

Let's Talk Cyber

That’s why UKON sent two Cyber Risk Experts — Travis Kroger and Oscar Ramirez — through the Cyber Insurance Academy’s CCIS program, one of the toughest and most respected certifications in the market.

As CIA Co-Founder Guy Simkin puts it:

“UKON’s success demonstrates what we believe: the strongest cyber insurance offerings are built on a foundation of education.”

What UKON’s Cyber Risk Experts Took Away

Travis, who obtained his CCIS certificate in May, didn’t mince words:

“The CCIS program is the real deal. I’ve taken a lot of courses, sat through endless webinars, and read enough policy forms to put a lawyer to sleep, but nothing touches the depth and clarity this delivers. It doesn’t just teach insurance. It gives you the entire cyber risk universe — the tech, the controls, the human mistakes, the landmines, and then the insurance. It feels like getting the playbook everyone else pretends to have.”

Oscar came at it from another angle — the angle of someone newer to the cyber specialty:

“They don’t just teach concepts. They tie everything to real-world scenarios. For an agent like me coming from the streets, CIA laid out the entire landscape and where it’s going. It changed the way I see the market.”

That’s the point.
Cyber isn’t paperwork.

It’s a living, shifting ecosystem — and your wholesaler needs to understand every inch of it if you’re going to protect your clients and your book.

Today: Cyber Peace of Mind

If you want to see how this training shows up in the real world, join us today at 1 PM ET.

Cyber Peace of Mind — “Building a Lasting Cyber Book”
Hosted by Will Brooks with UKON President & COO Reid Wellock.

We’ll walk through how agents can talk risk in dollars, avoid claim-killing mistakes, and build a cyber book that survives the modern market.

If you sell cyber — or want to — this session moves the needle.

Episode One: November 20

Ready to Move?

• Run a Cyber Risk Report (CRR) → Show real exposure and set smart limits.

• Book a Renewal Meeting → Align client, agent, and MSP in one call.

• Submit a Tech E&O Intake → Faster placement with better terms.

Let's Talk Cyber

🎥 Watch the Last Hotcakes Episode:

A small business. A normal morning. The hum of routers, coffee brewing, a few early emails.

Then one click, and everything stops. Screens freeze. Orders disappear. Silence.

The owner refreshes the page. Once. Twice. Nothing. By the time IT answers, the damage is done. The files are gone. The backups are locked.

And the policy that was supposed to bring relief suddenly feels like a riddle.

That’s when it lands. Cyber insurance isn’t paperwork. It’s survival.

Those moments are why Hotcakes exists: to pull back the curtain on what happens when cyber risk becomes real, and to talk about what agents and MSPs can do before that silence starts.

On this week’s Hotcakes, UKON CEO Matt Hightower joins hosts Will Brooks and Andy Runyan for a grounded, unfiltered look at the state of cyber. The stories from the field, the lessons behind the headlines, and the simple truth about what it takes to keep clients protected.

No noise.
No pretense.
Just clarity where it matters most.

Join us, Friday, November 14 at 1 p.m. ET.

Save Your Spot

CYBER PEACE OF MIND WEBINAR

Education meets execution. Cyber Peace of Mind is UKON’s new webinar series for agents and MSPs who want to sell and renew cyber with confidence.

Each session dives into real claims, practical tools like the Cyber Guide and Cyber Risk Report, and conversations with carriers, CISOs, and security experts who know the stakes.

Episode One: November 20

UKON COMMUNITY EXPANDING

UKON is also returning to in-person education with new Cyber Risk Events across the country.

Born from its days as FifthWall Solutions, the first agent roundtables proved how powerful collaboration can be when agents and MSPs align around clarity. These new events carry that spirit forward: connecting producers with UKON’s Cyber Risk Experts to share stories, simplify coverage, and build trust.

“Agents and MSPs want to do right by their clients,” said Hightower. “Our role is to give them the clarity, tools, and community to make that possible.”

Contact a Cyber Risk Expert today to learn more.

Ready to Move?

• Run a Cyber Risk Report (CRR) → Show real exposure and set smart limits.

• Book a Renewal Meeting → Align client, agent, and MSP in one call.

• Submit a Tech E&O Intake → Faster placement with better terms.

Let's Talk Cyber

🎥 Watch the Last Hotcakes Episode:

In the most recent Hotcakes episode, Will Brooks and Andy Runyan sat down with Caden Braly of Braly Insurance to discuss a growing trend reshaping business relationships: companies are beginning to require their partners, vendors, and service providers to carry cyber insurance before they can do business together.

As ransomware claims and vendor-related outages climb into the six- and seven-figure range, the message is clear: cyber insurance isn’t just smart, it’s becoming mandatory.

Caden notes that within the next few years, most contracts will include cyber insurance as a baseline expectation for doing business. Businesses are realizing they can’t afford to risk millions in losses because a partner decided to skip coverage to save a few hundred dollars a month.

This shift mirrors findings from the latest Gallagher report, which projects continued growth in the cyber insurance sector as companies strengthen resilience and demand more robust risk management from their partners.

🎥 Watch the episode to hear why cyber coverage is becoming a universal business standard and how forward-thinking companies can stay ahead.

Ready to Move?

• Run a Cyber Risk Report (CRR) → Show real exposure and set smart limits.

• Book a Renewal Meeting → Align client, agent, and MSP in one call.

• Submit a Tech E&O Intake → Faster placement with better terms.

UKON. Cyber Peace of Mind.

🎥 Watch the Full Episode:

Catch More UKON Cyber Practice Leadership

• Upcoming:

  • Oct. 22: Resilience Redefined: A Cybersecurity Masterclass for Modern Organizations

  • Oct. 23: Beyond the Fine Print. Cyber Insurance and Compliance Made Clear

  • Nov. 5: Why MDR is Now the Gatekeeper to Cyber Insurance

• Recent:

  • From FifthWall to UKON: The Evolution of Cyber Practice Leadership

  • VIDEO: Hotcakes #3, for Agents. Three Men and a Breach with Caden Braly of Braly Insurance

  • Cyber Horror Stories: What MSPs and Agents Need To Hear Before Halloween (UKON and Cork)

  • REPORT: Gallagher projects Cyber Insurance Market to Reach $120B

Run A Free Cyber Risk Report

Become A Risk Advisor

In episode 37 of dnsUNFILTERED, host Mikey Pruitt sat down with Will Brooks, VP of Revenue at UKON, to break down what’s wrong with the industry and how to fix it.

The Problem

Everyone is guessing. Carriers want answers in one format. MSPs give them in another. Agents try to translate between both.

UKON built the bridge.

We make it possible for carriers, agents, and MSPs to work from the same playbook.

The result is faster quotes, better coverage, and less noise.

A Marketplace Built for Access

Most agents see the same handful of carriers. UKON opens the rest.
We are a cyber-only wholesaler with more than 50 carrier partners.

Agents get reach.
MSPs get a trusted insurance partner who speaks their language.
Clients get clear, fast answers.

What MSPs Can Do Today

If you manage client networks, you carry their risk. Start acting like it.

In the episode, Will outlined three moves to enhance cyber practice:

1. Use Cyber Risk Reports (CRRs) to show the real cost of downtime and exposure.

2. Require every client to carry Tech E&O and confirm it’s valid.

3. Build relationships with local agents who understand cyber.

Education wins. Every conversation about coverage is a chance to build trust.

Frameworks That Matter

Good security frameworks lead to better pricing and faster approval.
Use MFA everywhere. Maintain backups. Run EDR or MDR. Patch fast.
When MSPs prove discipline, insurers respond with confidence.

The Local Advantage

Will closed the interview with a challenge. Get involved. Join local business groups. Talk to real people. Partner with agents who care about cyber.

Cyber insurance isn’t sold through fear. It’s built through trust and action.

Take the Next Step

Run a Cyber Risk Report (CRR).
Submit a Tech E&O Intake.
Book a Renewal Meeting.

UKON gives you the tools and carrier access to move faster and win more.

UKON. Cyber Peace of Mind.

🎥 Watch the Full Episode:

Become A Risk Advisor

Get A Free Cyber Risk Report

Why It Matters

Most SMBs only recover a fraction of what attacks really cost. Limits don’t match risk, and agents still toss on token riders instead of real coverage. If you’re not quantifying exposure in dollars, you’re guessing.

The Excuses You’ll Stop

• Too small: If you have a bank account, you’re a target.

• IT handles It: IT reduces risk, insurance caps the damage. You need both.

• Too expensive: Price only matters when value isn’t quantified.

The Playbook

Pick a cyber lead in your agency or partner with someone who knows it. Use financial risk reports to set limits. Sell clarity, not coverage.

This episode gives you stories, objection-crushers, and talk tracks that win.

🎥 Watch the Full Episode:

Become A Risk Advisor

Run A Free Cyber Risk Report

UKON AT BIG I SOUTH DAKOTA

UKON has been named the official Cyber Insurance Partner of Big I South Dakota’s 2025 IIASD Convention, which will take place September 21–23 in Deadwood, South Dakota. In addition to its conference presence, UKON will sponsor the 15th hole at the Elkhorn Ridge Golf Club outing.

In last week’s UKON Leadership update, Reid Wellock, President & COO, UKON, said, “Agencies are the heartbeat of this market. Our priority is to make it easier for agencies to access capacity, expand their books, and serve clients faster.”

At the conference, UKON representatives Travis Kroger and Kim Duprey will be on-site to meet with interested agents. Attending agents will be able to receive a complimentary Cyber Risk Assessment at the UKON booth during the event.

NOT ATTENDING BIG I?

The cyber market is crowded and competitive. Clients want risk translated into dollars. Carriers want better data.

Insurance Agents need a way to cut through friction and move fast.

Not attending the Big I South Dakota convention? No problem. Download the UKON FOR AGENTS one-pager now to learn more.

Download the One-Pager

ELEVATE, THE UKON AGENCY PROGRAM

Born from FifthWall Solutions, UKON has spent years in the trenches with thousands of agents. We know what slows you down. Now, we're fixing it.

Faster quoting. Live market visibility. Custom products built with IT involvement.

UKON is the new cyber insurance marketplace built to execute.

Join ELEVATE Today

ABOUT UKON
Originally founded in 2015 as FifthWall Solutions, UKON is a cyber insurance marketplace and wholesaler built for elite partners. UKON stands apart by educating and empowering cyber practice leadership to help agencies, MSPs, and enterprises translate risk into strategy and protect clients with confidence. Vendor-agnostic, execution-focused, Cyber Peace of Mind. UKON combines insurance expertise with engineering innovation to help every business survive a cyber attack.

Become A Risk Advisor

Run A Free Cyber Risk Report

Cyber used to be the strange rider on the quote sheet.
Now it’s the first question in the room.

At FifthWall’s inaugural Agent Roundtable, one thing became clear: the agents who lead don’t just know how to sell a policy. They know how to speak risk in plain terms because they know what’s coming before their clients do.

Access UKON

UKON YouTube

FifthWall Solutions recently hosted its inaugural Agent Roundtable at the Pittsburgh Marriott North, bringing together top regional and national agents to tackle one critical challenge: rethinking cyber insurance for today’s rapidly evolving threats.

The roundtable discussions revealed four essential themes to strengthen the future of cyber insurance:

📚 Educating Clients: Simplify complex cyber insurance concepts with practical, digestible resources.

💪🏻 Building Stronger Partnerships: Go beyond product delivery—offer expert guidance and support.

⚠️ Proactively Addressing Risks: Identify and mitigate emerging threats before they escalate.

👍🏻 Empowering Agents: Provide agents with the tools they need to foster resilience and growth for clients.

UKON YouTube