Mary Guzman already has helped develop a new insurance coverage once in her career.
Executive Summary
Everything that can make a company "different and better than your competition" can now be covered by insurance, according to Mary Guzman, the founder of Crown Jewel Insurance. She was referring to trade secrets, including algorithms, designs, business processes, recipes or formulas—assets that could be worth trillions. While underwriters previously pushed back on covering the assets, Crown Jewel's own secret sauce to make underwriters comfortable includes an independent valuation by outside experts.Now, she’s leading the charge of another.
In the early 2000s, when she worked as a regional practice leader at Marsh & McLennan Companies, Guzman flew across the country, teaching companies about cyber risk and why it wasn’t covered by existing insurance. It was challenging. Not as challenging, though, as her current effort: launching Crown Jewel Insurance, a company that bills itself as the world’s first trade secret insurer.
“Very few people understood cyber risk at the time,” Guzman said. “Very few people understand trade secrets. And so, to say that we’re coming in, covering something that most people didn’t even realize was an inherent risk, is a hard thing to do.”
