At-Bay Cyber Insurance

Marco  Di Maggio; David  Lane

Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2019

At-Bay Cyber Insurance

Abstract

At-Bay was a cyber insurance startup that offered companies coverage against a wide array of cyber risks—exposure to which the firm was able to quickly assess and price on the basis of technical expertise that traditional insurance carriers lacked. In mid-2019, At-Bay was working to build underwriting revenue ahead of a Series B round of venture funding that the company hoped to receive by year’s end. This required not only scaling its underwriting capacity and convincing insurance brokers to include the startup among the carriers they quoted to their corporate clients, but also ensuring that At-Bay avoided the temptation to grow revenues by taking on riskier clients than it might otherwise prefer.

Keywords: Business Startups; Disruptive Innovation; Risk Management; Product Marketing; Distribution Channels; Information Technology; Salesforce Management; Insurance Industry;

Language: English

Format: Print

23 pages

Educators

Citation:

Di Maggio, Marco, and David Lane. "At-Bay Cyber Insurance." Harvard Business School Case 220-005, July 2019.

The start-up BlueVine Capital Inc. (BlueVine) used data and technology to help finance small businesses via factoring and lines of credit. The case explains the small business financing market in mid-2010s, how CEO Eyal Lifshitz identified the opportunity for BlueVine, and how he built the company through its first five years of operations. Through the case, Lifshitz and his team discover insights about their small business customers that inspire them to change their product portfolio. In December 2018, Lifshitz must decide which new products to launch next.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

The Value of Intermediation in the Stock Market

Marco Di Maggio, Mark Egan and Francesco Franzoni

Brokers continue to play a critical role in intermediating institutional stock market transactions. More than half of all institutional investor order flow is still executed by high-touch (non-electronic) brokers. Despite the continued importance of brokers, we have limited information on what drives investors' choices among them. We develop and estimate an empirical model of broker choice that allows us to quantitatively examine each investors' responsiveness to execution costs and access to research and order flow information. Studying over 300 million institutional trades, we find that investor demand is relatively inelastic with respect to commissions and that investors are willing to pay a premium for access to top research analysts and order-flow information. There is substantial heterogeneity across investors. Relative to other investors, hedge funds tend to be more price insensitive, place less value on sell-side research, and place more value on order-flow information. Furthermore, using trader-level data, we find that investors are more likely to trade with traders who are located physically closer and are less likely to trade with traders that have misbehaved in the past. Lastly, we use our empirical model to investigate the unbundling of equity research and execution services related to the MiFID II regulations. While under-reporting for the average firm is relatively small (4%), we find that the bundling of execution and research allows some institutional investors to under-report management fees by up to 15%.

Keywords: financial intermediation; Institutional investors; research analysts; Financial Institutions; Investment; Financial Services Industry;

Citation:

Di Maggio, Marco, Mark Egan, and Francesco Franzoni. "The Value of Intermediation in the Stock Market." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-016, August 2019. View Details

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Aperture Investors is a startup investment firm that seeks to disrupt the asset management industry through competitive differentiation by charging investors primarily when its portfolio managers outperform the marketplace. Headed by Wall Street veteran Peter Kraus and backed with substantial and patient seed capital, Aperture seeks to attract both star portfolio managers and assets from mutual funds and hedge funds. Kraus believes that his innovative business model addresses the current dysfunctional fee and incentive structures in the industry, which have led to long-term market underperformance, and that Aperture will address the reasons that are motivating investors to shift to cheaper, passively-managed index and exchange-traded funds.

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At-Bay Cyber Insurance

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