Emergence Insurance taps NSB Cyber to deliver security offerings to policyholders

Sydney-headquartered NSB Cyber has partnered with Emergence Insurance to provide cybersecurity services to the insurance company’s policyholders.

The alliance will see businesses insured by Emergence now able to access customised, specialist services offered by NSB Cyber – including cyber resilience, cyber threat intelligence, cyber response & recovery and digital forensics eDiscovery services.

They will also be able to tap into offerings covering security operations and cyber managed services.

Troy Filipcevic, CEO of Emergence Insurance, said the alliance strengthens Emergence’s value proposition to support Australian organisations before, during and after a cyber incident, helping to reduce their cyber risk.

“Insureds have access to deeper cyber advisory, DFIR and eDiscovery capability, enhancing how we protect them across the full cyber risk lifecycle as threats continue to evolve,” he said.

Shane Bell, who co-founded NSB Cyber in July 2023 and serves as the company’s CEO, said that when he started the company, he was “really interested” in taking time to understand the role that cyber insurance plays in helping organisations build resilience.

“Through that research over the last two and a half years, we've landed on the fact that I think cyber insurance plays a really important role; not the only role, but a really important role,” he said.

“I'm definitely answering more questions from our customers [today] about whether they should contemplate cyber insurance. We always encourage them to have a conversation with their brokers about whether that's fit for purpose on their risk profile.”

That uptick of interest around cyber insurance correlates with a number of challenges Bell sees in the market at the moment, the first being the increasing speed of threat actors.

“Threats and threat actors are getting so much faster and Australia is a viable target, which means that businesses need to be paying attention,” he told techpartner.news.

“I still think there's plenty of businesses in Australia that just aren't paying attention or [are] doing the bare minimum, but not actually investing in cyber, so I think there's some improvement that collectively Australian businesses can do in that space.

“We see hundreds of incidents and they're all either leveraging malware or stolen credentials or vulnerabilities in technology; whereas you used to have a lot of time to patch them, now they don't have a lot of time.”

AI was raised by Bell as another possible area of concern, as although the technology has the ability to deliver “productivity gains and efficiencies”, it can also introduce new risk into businesses.

“Everybody wants to build large language models and [AI] agents, but much the same as when we went through this iteration of everybody building web applications because they wanted to deal with customers in that way, people are doing [AI] but they're introducing vulnerability and risk into their business and then perhaps not looking at the security aspects of it,” he stated.

Despite a “really difficult” current economic climate, Bell said that the collaboration he sees in the cyber industry to start 2026 - including that of NSB Cyber and Emergence - is cause for optimism.

“I've been in this industry for 25 or so years and this is the most collaborative I've seen it in my time, which is really nice. Lots of people collectively trying to solve problems and help client outcomes," he told techpartner.news.

NSB Cyber - whose customers span the range of micro-SMEs to mid-market and operate in such sectors as not-for-profit, finance and banking, sport, healthcare and professional services - now counts a team of 32 people across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, with a possible expansion into New Zealand in the near future.

“Australia and New Zealand operate similarly and are pretty collaborative in this space; we’re growing very quickly in two and a half years with a high growth rate, which is a lot of fun,” Bell said.

2026 will see the company launch its managed services operation centre, which will include an AI layer, as well as launching an ‘intel centre’, combining its strategic, tactical and operational intelligence in one place.

“We've been doing [cyber threat] intelligence since we started, but we'll formalise it [and] give it a name,” he told techpartner.news.

“It's providing really actionable intelligence, but also it becomes really important in defeating ransomware. We do a lot of work around attribution of threat actors and also negotiations with businesses that have found themselves compromised by ransomware that don't want to pay the ransom, but want to engage in a process that buys them some time and arms them with intelligence.”