Insurance for SME businesses

Howden presents a structured, comprehensive offering to protect SMEs against everyday risks of modern business, helping you steer the ship confidently, without worrying about what’s around the corner. 

The Howden SME suite: three key insurances in one cost-effective bundle

Working in a globalised business community brings an increased threat of litigation. To safeguard your business’ future prosperity, it is crucial to take control of your risk management. 

1. Professional indemnity / Errors and Ommissions (E&O)

If you provide advice or a service some of kind, every client is a potential lawsuit.   

Professional indemnity insurance (PI) is there for you to cover the cost of fallout from errors and omissions – essentially, when you make a mistake, miscalculate or miss something altogether.  

As well as this, good professional indemnity cover will include:

• Lost documents (in various formats)
• Accidentally sharing/publicising confidential information about clients
• Saying or writing something which is considered defamatory
• Unintentional use of third party intellectual property
• Dishonest acts by your employees

2. Directors' & Officers' cover: protect your family from your business 

Any allegation made by a third party against a director or officer, no matter how frivolous, needs to be vigorously defended in order to protect your reputation. 

D&O insurance is there to pay for costs relating to mounting a defence, and any damages or settlements relating to claims arising from;

• Employment practices liability claims
• Failure to comply with regulations
• Disgruntled shareholders
• Misrepresentation of company assets
• Misuse of company funds

Shared culpability is how the legal system views directors and officers of an organisation - even non-executive directors can be held liable for the actions of other directors. Which means you could end up fighting a court battle over something your colleague did, even if you didn’t know.

3. Cyber insurance: protection for the #1 threat

Cyber is one of the least understood insurance policies on the market. In fact, many people cite their main reason not for buying as they don’t understand it. That’s because it is fundamentally different to more traditional policies. 

For example, if you buy property insurance and a flood happens, you sort out the damage yourself, pick up the bill and hope that the insurance company will pay you back eventually. That is, it works on a reimbursement basis. 

Cyber insurance is different. When the hack happens, we mobilise all the relevant expertise you need to get the problem sorted fast. That means IT trouble-shooters, breach forensics, specialist lawyers and media handlers.

Cyber policies offer cover for: 

• Emergency incident response
• Loss of income
• Costs of extortion
• Costs of restoring your data
• Legal defence fees and damages.

We lay on the specific talent you need to get you out of problems caused by:

• Malware 
• Denial of service (DDOS)
• Operational error
• Employee sabotage
• Data loss/ unauthorised access
• Electronic media content 
• Breach of local or foreign privacy law e.g. GDPR This list is not exhaustive, for full further details, please drop us a line.

Key reasons cyber cover is essential for businesses large and small 

1. Everyone makes mistakes, even smart people can do irrational things when it comes to protecting an organisation’s data.
2. Cybercriminals are always finding new ways to trick your employees into helping them (sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not) 
3. Rogue employees – a large proportion of hacks and breaches are committed by disgruntled members of staff.