Cyber for Plan Sponsors

Fiduciary and Cyber Liability Insurance Help You Plan For Tomorrow

05.30.2019

It’s taken catastrophes to make people realize that insurance is not just a form of gambling; it helps people and businesses endure. Fiduciary liability insurance and cyber liability insurance may seem like gambling on a fiduciary breach or cyber attack occurring, but really they’re a way to ensure that your business can endure and that your plan participants and beneficiaries can be made whole.

Insurance was seen as a form of gambling until The Great Fire of London led to the growth of fire insurance and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 led to the growth of life insurance. These weren’t forms of gambling; they were a way of protecting yourself and finding a way to recover in case of a disaster.

We’ve already had those tragedies with fiduciary liability breaches and cyber attacks. Equifax had personal information of over 100 million people breached. If a company as large as Equifax can be breached, so can yours. NASA has had a data breach. So has Amazon. It can happen to anyone.

Without fiduciary liability insurance, you as the fiduciary can be held personally responsible for a breach of your fiduciary duty. Without cyber liability insurance, you won’t be able to effectively stop and remedy a cyber attack, leaving even more people in danger and causing more damage.

Insurance isn’t a form of gambling. Insurance is a way to guard against risk. Protect yourself, your company, and your plan with fiduciary liability insurance and cyber liability insurance.

Where can you find instant fiduciary liability insurance and cyber liability insurance?

Colonial Surety includes cyber liability insurance with our ERISA fidelity bond packages with fiduciary liability insurance to best protect your company plan against a cyber attack.

Under ERISA, fiduciaries may be held personally liable for a breach of their responsibilities in the administration or handling of employee benefit plans. Under ERISA 410, the plan cannot relieve you of this responsibility with indemnification language, however, it specifically permits persons with personal liability to purchase fiduciary liability insurance. Covering yourself with fiduciary liability insurance gives you a piece of mind that you are protected.

Colonial’s cyber insurance provides a services-based solution to help plan sponsors manage data breaches successfully. These services include a dedicated team of cyber breach professionals who assist plan sponsors at every stage of incident investigation and breach response. These professionals coordinate the carefully vetted forensics experts and specialized lawyers to help plan sponsors establish what’s been compromised; assess plan sponsor responsibility; and, notify those individuals affected. In addition, these services will also coordinate credit or identity monitoring, and PR advice to help the plan sponsor safeguard its reputation. Of course, Colonial’s cyber insurance also indemnifies and defends plan sponsors from covered lawsuits or regulatory actions, the risk of which may be reduced by a well-coordinated breach response, but can never be completely eliminated.

Ongoing governance and evaluation of recordkeepers can help protect data, but the only way to fully protect against a potential cyber attack’s data breach is to purchase cyber liability insurance from Colonial Surety Company.