Growing social engineering fraud and economic crimes that are not often covered by a company’s property and casualty (P&C) coverage have prompted Intact Financial Corporation, to develop new coverages for its commercial lines and specialty solutions customers.
Launched March 1, 2020, the new offering is designed to protect companies against losses stemming from the myriad of relatively new forms of theft and fraud affecting businesses.
Mike Kosturik, Intact’s vice president of commercial lines says more than half of Canadian companies have experienced some kind of economic crime in recent years, but many do not have insurance coverage for it. “We started to look at this issue a few years ago in our product research and development team,” he says. “We saw this as an overlooked part of the insurance policy, something the marketplace hadn’t really been addressing competitively.”
Social engineering, where a criminal pretends to be a customer or supplier to get money or property sent to them, is a growing area of concern for many companies. “Typically that is not something that is covered,” Kosturik says. “We think it’s absolutely going to be a key part of what the offer will be going forward for the businesses we protect. Many policies of course protect a customer’s inventory or stock from theft where there’s evidence of that,” but not, he says, for the growing number of economic crime threats companies face.
The new crime coverages will be available to companies as part of their overall P&C policy. For those with larger needs who deal with the company’s specialty solutions teams, the coverage can also be taken out as a standalone product. The coverages, which were previously not available to all customers, or which required endorsements, are customizable, depending on the client’s needs.
“The longstanding part of the P&C policy offering hadn’t been modernized in some time,” Kosturik says. “We’ve modernized it to include the social engineering fraud protection that we’ve added. There’s always going to be robberies and thefts. That’s traditional crime. What we’re doing here is really getting ready for the future that businesses face when they do more business online.”
