Zurich Turkey launches first retail cyber protection insurance product

Transcript

In 2016 there were a number of huge leaks of personal data of Turkish citizens online. It’s created a massive demand for products to insure individuals and businesses from losses caused by cyber crime. Yılmaz Yıldız, CEO of Zurich Turkey, outlines the first product they’ve brought to market to address this demand. Combining anti-virus software, an active web radar that searches for criminals using customers’ data, and compensation for losses, it’s been highly successful so far. If you’re starting here, you can view the other parts of our conversation with Yılmaz Yıldız, which cover the global trends likely to affect Turkey’s economy, and the Turkish insurance sector’s potential for even stronger growth.

World Finance: In 2016, there were a number of huge leaks of personal data of Turkish citizens online. I’m with Yılmaz Yıldız, CEO of Zurich Turkey.

What are the biggest cyber-risk concerns for consumers, and how are you addressing these?

Yılmaz Yıldız: We have launched the first retail cyber protection products. And what that does in fact is, first, we have to prevent cyber attack from happening in the first place. So we provide the customer an anti-virus program; and secondly what we call a web radar.

When you register, you also input the data that you want protected. Let’s assume that you ask it to check your ID information. Once it’s input and activated, it checks the entire cyber world. And if anybody’s trying to use your ID number for any purpose, anywhere in the entire cyberspace, it will let you know.

On top of that, your passwords. If anybody steals your passwords and does a transaction, you will be compensated if you have our product. And then if your physical IDs are lost for any reason, that is covered too. Whether your identity is on your ID card or in cyberspace, it has to be protected.

So we launched that a couple of months ago, and there’s just incredible demand for it, because clearly individuals feel vulnerable. SMEs even more so. In fact, Zurich Insurance group does SME surveys each year to understand what concerns SMEs have. And 85 percent say cybersecurity is one of their top concerns.

World Finance: What security risks are SMEs seeing, specifically?

Yılmaz Yıldız: The most common one is ransomware. What it does is, you have your data stored somewhere. Ransomware basically prevents you from accessing your company information; and they ask for a ransom.

If you can prevent that through anti-virus programs, that’s a big one. So it’s first a preventative tool, and secondly it compensates you for any of the losses that will happen, within the limits.

And there are other reasons – ransomware is one, loss of data, passwords, customer data loss. So these are the things that we know now. But surely cyber attackers will be more creative, and we’ll need to be even more creative to protect our customers from such attacks.

World Finance: Yılmaz Yıldız; thank you very much.

Yılmaz Yıldız: Thank you.