How do we explain prospects' financial cyber exposure?

Identify the prospect's risk circumstances by distinguishing how a cyber incident could affect the business. Losing customer data can bring legal, reputational and compensation costs; a malware attack can interrupt operations. The Frameworks' work with Hiscox addressed the difficulty of putting a financial value on business data and cyber exposure, compared with valuing physical assets for insurance. Start an assessment with the prospect's particular concerns rather than treating cyber risk as a single, uniform problem. Include operational disruption alongside data loss: AM Best's 2025 analysis found that business-interruption claims are more expensive per claim than incident-response claims. The distinction helps explain why avoiding a ransom payment does not necessarily avoid the larger financial loss.

Combine business inputs with existing data to translate a prospect's circumstances into a personalised monetary estimate. For Hiscox, The Frameworks devised a strategy that brought existing data and user inputs together in a digital calculator of potential financial loss from a cyber attack. The calculator used a model allowing for more than a million permutations of data points, including business size, industry and existing security measures. The practical approach is to use those business characteristics within a financial model, rather than offer the same recommendation to every prospect. A model accommodating many combinations of risk factors can make the estimate relevant to businesses with different sizes, activities and security capabilities.

Return an estimate that supports insurance decisions by giving prospects an immediate view of their monetary exposure and the risks they need to consider. The Frameworks built the Hiscox Cyber Exposure Calculator to operate in real time, sharing insights to help business owners and managers make informed decisions about reputation, business disruption, customer data loss and financial exposure. Present the result as an estimate to inform risk management and insurance choices, not a guaranteed prediction of loss. The Frameworks argues that difficulty quantifying cyber exposure can leave businesses paying too much or too little for insurance. Munich Re's 2025 analysis identifies understanding both the underlying risk and the coverage components as a prerequisite for cyber insurance.