Startup - February 18, 2021

Allianz Nigeria to Launch Cyber Insurance Policy for Remote Work Risks

February 18, 2021

3 min read

As working at home raises the stakes in cybersecurity, Allianz Nigeria, a privately held insurance company, is preparing to introduce a cyber insurance policy.

Discussions are close to reaching a conclusion with regulators and the policy is likely to be available before the end of the first half of this year, says Adeolu Adewumi-Zer, CEO of Allianz Nigeria, in an interview with The Africa Report.

According to a recent study by Allianz Nigeria which surveyed 193 corporate Nigerians, cyber incidents are perceived as the second-biggest risk in 2021, second only to COVID-19. A year earlier, the fear of cyber attacks only ranked as the eighth-biggest risk.

The CEO of Allianz Nigeria, Adewumi-Zer stated that remote work due to the pandemic has raised cyber risks o the corporate agenda. She is the first female CEO of the company, who was appointed in September last year.

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Several workflows that work undertaken manually in Nigeria had to be hurriedly digitised. The new approach will account for areas such as data loss reputational risk and Cybercrime. “This is not going away when Covid ends. The world has changed”, adds Adewumi-Zer.

One effect of individuals having to operate at home is a greater dependency on cloud computing servers that are accessed over the internet. In 2020, a report by Sophos IT managers found that in the previous year, 86 per cent of respondents in Nigeria had encountered public cloud security incidents, placing it second only to India in the world. More Nigerian organizations have suffered from exposure to public cloud data than in any other country.

The Nigerian insurance sector’s complexity is also seen as an obstacle to penetration. Adewumi-Zer “hopes and expects” that the imminent prospect of higher insurers’ capital requirements would lead to the consolidation of the industry. In addition, she adds, this would reduce the need for domestic insurers to rely on foreign reinsurance companies.