Insurance Insights: The Cleary Insurance Blog
The Cleary Insurance blog covers insurance, risk management, and financial planning for New England businesses and individuals. Our team of licensed advisors and specialists publishes regular articles on commercial and personal coverage, employee benefits, life and financial planning, and insurance compliance. Browse recent articles below, or use the category filters to find topics relevant to your business or personal situation.
Client Spotlight
A national early education organization, Jumpstart helps at-risk children develop the language and literacy skills they need to be successful in school, setting them on a path to close the achievement gap before it is too late. Every year, thousands of preschool children benefit from this program, the only supplemental pre-K program of its kind, and enter kindergarten with the language, literacy, and social skills needed to succeed not only in school, but also in life.
Cyber Liability
Safeguarding data is an increasingly complex challenge for large and small businesses alike. Technology reaches throughout business operations, and the volume of electronically stored data grows exponentially. While these trends allow businesses to work more productively, they also result in a greater vulnerability to cyber security threats.
More than 40 states now have some level of data privacy and security breach notification laws on the books. Typically these laws require a business that has suffered a breach to notify all customers who have possibly been affected and may require credit monitoring services. The monetary and reputational costs for notification and credit monitoring are significant.
The inadvertent release of private data can take on many forms, including:
- Lost or stolen laptop containing customer names and social security numbers
- Cyber criminals who hack into your server to steal information
- Disgruntled former employees looking to vandalize stored data
- Private information mistakenly emailed to an incorrect address
- The Ponemon Institute and Symantec have jointly developed a Data Breach Risk Calculator that is an effective tool for evaluating your business exposure to a Cyber Risk loss. Cyber Risk Insurance is available through numerous carriers, with the typical product offering:
- First Party coverage: responds to notification expenses, credit monitoring, remediation expenses, extortion and theft
- Third Party coverage: responds to regulatory defense and litigation from affected individuals
Insurance is not a substitute for sound policies and procedures regarding the handling of private data, but a Cyber Risk policy can help deal with the regulatory, monetary and reputational costs of a data breach. Let us know if you have additional questions regarding these exposures. Additional information can be found at the following websites:
http://www.ponemon.org/
http://www.us-cert.gov/control_systems/
www.isalliance.org
http://publicaa.ansi.org/sites/apdl/khdoc/Financial+Management+of+Cyber+Risk.pdf
At Cleary, we will evaluate your business exposures and work with you to develop a comprehensive plan to safeguard your business. Give us a call today at 617-723-0700.
Certificates of Insurance
Commerce would ground to a halt if it weren’t for Certificates of Insurance (COI). It’s a bold statement but true. Without this document providing that an entity has insurance coverage, banks wouldn’t fund construction projects, homeowners wouldn’t remodel, goods wouldn’t be shipped and cars wouldn’t be financed. These are just a few of the nightmare scenarios that would occur if one weren’t able to provide proof of insurance.
COIs provide proof to a third party (not the named insured) of the existence of and amount of insurance issued to the named insured by their insurance carrier(s). These are most commonly requested when required by a contract between two parties; such as an owner/contractor or bank/borrower.
COIs address those types of coverage that a third party would be most interested in knowing about concerning the named insured:
- Commercial General Liability
- Automobile Liability
- Workers Compensation
- Umbrella/Excess Liability
Third parties are often interested in proof of coverage specific to a transaction and that protect the third party’s interest in that transaction, such as proof of Homeowners Insurance for a mortgagor, proof of Builders Risk insurance to a project lender, or proof of cargo insurance to a bank financing an international transaction. Additional information provided by COIs include:
- A “Remarks” section for more specific data (e.g. Description of Operations/Locations/Vehicles)
- Insurance contract dates of coverage
- Names of insurance carriers providing coverage
- Limits of liability of each policy
- Provision for notification of policy cancellation to the third party in the event the policy is to be cancelled before the expiration date shown
For more information concerning Certificates of Insurance, please call Mike Regan at Regan Cleary Insurance.
At Cleary, we will evaluate your business exposures and work with you to develop a comprehensive plan to safeguard your business . We are members of the National Association of Surety Bond Producers (NASBP), the professional organization for agents that also specialize in surety bonding. Give us a call today at 617-723-0700.