INVENT 2024 Finalist Profile: ITUS Secure Technologies
Founders name: Dr Clare Ryan and Paul Daly
What is your background?
Clare has a background in information management and data protection and previously worked in Science outreach at both Ulster and Queen's. Paul has been working in the IT sector for almost 20years support SMEs with their cybersecurity and digital transformation needs. He holds an MSc in Cybersecurity.
What problem are you solving?
Our ideal customer is cyber insurance providers that offer products to the SME sector. Cyber insurance providers have high loss ratios with low profitability. This is largely due to paying out higher value claims, in high frequency within the SME sector. While cyber risk is an evolving risk, and there is limited historical data available for underwriters to utilise when pricing, a significant number of claims are correlated with mis-disclosure and under disclosure of risk when policies are written. ITUS Protect address this issue, providing high quality, immutable data which can be used to quantify cyber risk before policies are written enabling underwriters to generate fairer priced polices reflect of risk and improving loss ratios (and profitability) for the insurer. The SME also benefits from a technology solution to help manage threats and vulnerabilities within their networks, helping reduce the likelihood of a success cyber incident (and resulting claim) as well.
Who and where are your potential customers?
The end-users of our product are small and medium sized businesses. Our product has been specifically tailored to meet the needs of non-technical business owners, with complex security outputs simplified and prioritised to help identify key areas for action. In the future, we see insurance providers giving access to ITUS Protect to SMEs ' free of charge' when they avail of their cyber insurance policy, providing those SMEs with the tools and expertise they need to help prevent a cyber incident from occurring.
What do you think is the potential for your business?
Our mission is to help every small business get access to the cyber insurance they need to protect their business. We're aiming to be the cyber risk monitoring solution of choice from the SME sector. We believe that we have developed a highly scalable solution to a global problem.
Where do you hope to be 5 years from now?
The Global cyber insurance marketplace is currently worth $14B and growing at a rate of 24% CAGR. In 5 years time, we're seeking to hold a growing market share within the SME risk rating sector, with a strong customer base in UK, Ireland, Europe and US. To achieve this, we will have grown our team significantly across R&D, tech development, sales and customer success, with growth funded through additional equity investment.
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