Claims
Travelers Reports 57% Surge in Financial Fraud Claims as AI Reshapes Cyber Risk
By Insurance Wire Staff, . Insurance Wire.
Financial fraud and business email compromise, not ransomware, are now the dominant driver of cyber insurance claims at Travelers, according to reporting by both Claims Journal and Insurance Journal, which ran identical accounts of a NetDiligence Cyber Risk Summit held in Philadelphia. Both outlets covered the same panel; neither reported any disagreement among the speakers.
Christine Mapes, cyber managing director and counsel at Travelers, put the numbers plainly. Financial fraud and business email compromise, a type of scam where criminals impersonate a trusted contact to redirect payments, now account for about 50% of the insurer's cyber claims. Frequency of those claims rose 57% between the first half of 2025 and the first half of 2026. Severity is up about 30% since 2023.
The shift in how those attacks work is as significant as the volume. "Now what we're seeing is more IT fraud manipulation, the bank fraud manipulation, and the token theft," Mapes said. "Instead of them engaging with the victim by asking them to click on a link, they're actually getting them to turn over the keys to the kingdom voluntarily in a lot of instances."
Artificial intelligence is accelerating that shift. Blake Feldman, who leads carrier channel cyber incident response at Integreon, described the dynamic as "an arms race." AI is being built into defensive tools, but criminals are using it just as aggressively: to probe systems, assess the value of stolen data, and remove the language errors that once made phishing emails easy to spot.
"It's taken limitations that the threat actor had, [and] it's accelerated their bandwidth," Feldman said.
Sara Trokan, senior vice president of professional and cyber claims at Westfield Specialty, added that AI makes impersonation far more convincing. "We've had fraudsters who combine the social media, not just with email or text, but audio, video, email, other communications to make it a very credible scenario," she said. "We've had claims with employees where they generally believe that they were communicating with senior executives about confidential, really confidential business activity. And it ultimately led to them getting large fraudulent payments."
The proposed defense is deliberately simple. Lindsay Nickle, vice chair of the cyber team at law firm Constangy and the panel's moderator, argued that the industry needs a low-tech verification process, the kind of callback or out-of-band confirmation step that became standard practice against social engineering attacks five or six years ago. The logic is that no AI-generated voice or video can survive a phone call to a number the employee already has on file.
The practical implication for carriers, brokers and risk managers is that the threat model has shifted. Perimeter defenses and phishing filters address a problem that is no longer the primary one. The claims data from Travelers suggests that the bigger exposure now sits inside organizations, in the moment an employee decides whether to trust a payment instruction. That is a training and process problem as much as a technology one, and the Travelers figures suggest it is getting more expensive fast.
What the reporting does not establish is how Travelers' claims mix compares to the broader market, or whether other carriers are seeing similar frequency and severity trends. Those figures, if they exist, were not presented at the summit or reported by either outlet. Underwriters pricing cyber risk and brokers advising clients on coverage limits will want to watch whether the next round of industry loss data confirms the pattern Travelers described.
Source: https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2026/10/21/340848.htm
Insurance Wire provides news and information, not insurance, legal, or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific needs.