Ep134 Joshua Motta CEO Coalition: Building a Cyber Muscle

Today’s guest is a former Microsoft, CIA and Goldman Sachs employee who, perhaps unsurprisingly, has found his way to somewhere very close to the top of the Cyber Insurance tree in the past few years.

With a billion dollars in run-rate GWP after just five years, major VC funding, aggressive international expansion plans and now a newly-acquired US admitted carrier, Coalition and its CEO Joshua Motta have quite a story to tell.

With his deep cyber security background it was likely that Coalition was going to build something very different from incumbent insurers and indeed the firm’s offering is much more of a joined-up full service than many of its competitors.

As Joshua puts it, Coalition “owns the repair shop” and that helps an awful lot with risk engineering and loss mitigation. And so far the results have been excellent.

The grand tour of the Coalition modus operandi is really interesting but it is when the conversation spreads to more weighty industry topics that I think this podcast really takes off.

Joshua has some really strong views about how fears around systemic risk in cyber have been overblown and how to unlock the capacity that cyber will need if it is to continue its fast growth without hitting capacity constraints.

Now you may say that he would say that, but now that Coalition is funding more of its own underwriting, Joshua is clearly happy to put his money where his mouth is. Coalition is also putting some of its own modelling work out on open source to help others get comfortable with its view of risk.

I definitely recommend a listen for anyone nervous about committing capital to cyber reinsurance for fear of earth-shattering systemic risk – the counter-arguments made here are pretty convincing.

LINKS
Here is the announcement about Coalition buying Admitted lines carrier Digital Affect Insurance Company
This coincided with our podcast recording and as you will hear, it was definitely news to me. With hindsight I should have probed a lot more. Next time!

We thank our naming sponsor AdvantageGo:
https://www.advantagego.com/

We also thank this Episode’s advertising supporter Oxbow Partners
https://oxbowpartners.com/