Classic claims in commercial insurance

Six classic claims in commercial insurance

Which commercial insurance policies cover classic claims in businesses and companies? Business liability insurance, product liability insurance or cyber insurance? In the following we list some examples and explain which insurance cover would be suitable and what the respective commercial insurance would provide in the event of a claim.

1.Cyber Insurance- A Trojan mail destroys the operating system of the office computer

A now typical everyday threat. You open your mail correspondence. In one of the emails, you will receive an attachment that you want to check. You open the attachment and suddenly your screen goes black. All data is deleted. The corporate network is also infected. At the same time, you will receive a payment request from the hacker, i.e. if you pay the amount he has asked for, you will get your data back. In this case of damage,  cyber insurance comes into play if the module – cyber extortion – is included in the contract.

What should I do? You call your cyber insurance company’s claims hotline and discuss what steps need to be taken immediately. An IT administrator examines the damage on-site for you and whether a ransom should be paid or not. If a ransom payment is unavoidable, the insurer will pay it. If the system can be restored because you have a working backup, no ransom is paid. If you have suffered reputational damage among your customers, the insurance company will pay for the measures to minimize the damage to your image, including financing targeted PR campaigns. The insurer pays up to 250,000 euros here, provided that this tariff was also taken out in the cyber insurance. For the period in which the affected company is paralyzed by the hacker attack, the business interruption insurance pays the ongoing fixed costs until the company can work fully again, for a maximum of one year.

2. Contents insurance – A business traveler loses his laptop on a business trip

Regardless of whether you are self-employed or employed by a company, anyone who leaves their laptop somewhere during a business trip will not receive compensation from any insurance company. Contents insurance only pays if the person concerned was robbed and the laptop was violently ripped away from him. However, if customer data has been removed from the laptop left behind and is circulating on the dark web, for example, your customers will assert a claim for damages and then this is data misuse that is covered by cyber insurance. In one case, the insurance paid for damage amounting to 450,000.00 euros. The laptop was stolen from a service provider at the airport and the customer data on it was published on the dark web. The customers jointly asserted a claim for damages of 450,000 euros, which was paid by the insurance company. Even in the case of gross negligence, the insurance pays up to 80 percent of the amount of damage.

3. Liability insurance – Painting contaminates the golf course

A team of painters is renovating the rooms of a golf club. When painting, the paintbrush must be cleaned in a thinner. The painter’s colleague accidentally knocks over the bucket of thinner and the contents flow towards the golf course and seep into the golf course pond. Because the pond was used to irrigate the golf course, the entire lawn of the golf course was destroyed. 125,000.00 euros had to be paid for a new lawn, pond and irrigation of the facility. This financial expense was covered by the general liability insurance of the painting company.

4. Product liability insurance – Carpenter builds defective wooden stairs

A carpenter is commissioned to install a wooden house staircase. When the staircase was completed, the wood of the entire staircase warped and the staircase could not be used. The reason for the crooked stairs was too much moisture in the material. The carpenter commissioned had measured the wood with a moisture meter, but the meter showed an incorrect value because it was defective. In this case, the carpenter had taken out extended product liability insurance as part of his business liability insurance and the insurance company paid for the damage caused by the warped wood.

 For further information please contact our team. We are English-speaking insurance brokers and offer personal as well as online consultations.