Vendor security reviews · Fintech & financial services
Vendor Security Review & Questionnaire Support for Insurtech Companies
For an insurtech this service runs in both directions. Inbound, we take over the B-10-style security schedules and carrier questionnaires that land on your desk, so a founder stops spending days translating engineering reality into a risk reviewer's language. Outbound, we vet the OCR, LLM API, data-enrichment and telematics vendors your platform depends on, before one of them becomes the answer nobody has to a carrier's audit question.
Reviewed by the Privacy Horizon team · Last reviewed
What you're protecting
Both sides of vendor risk at an insurtech
You are simultaneously a carrier's assessed third party and many vendors' customer. Each role has its own failure modes, and the same evidence library serves both.
Your standing as a carrier's B-10 vendor
Security-schedule answers are representations a carrier can hold you to at renewal and after an incident. Getting them accurate, consistent across carrier relationships and evidenced protects the platform from its own optimism.
Subprocessors touching applicant and claims data
OCR tools reading uploaded documents, LLM APIs summarizing claims notes, and data enrichers appending credit or property detail each hold a slice of applicant material, and vetting their posture is protecting that data by proxy.
Telematics and UBI data-sharing providers
Where driving-behaviour data comes from or flows to a third-party telematics platform, its retention, security and sharing terms need review before that relationship becomes a line item in your own carrier questionnaire.
Policy-admin and rating-engine integration partners
The vendor providing the policy administration platform or rating engine sits deep inside the data flow, and reviewing its security posture and access model matters as much as reviewing any consumer-facing tool.
Consistency between the story and the stack
Reviewers compare questionnaire answers against actual policies and tooling. Keeping all three aligned, one source of truth updated as vendors change, is what makes next year's carrier review routine instead of forensic.
Regulatory map
Why vendor scrutiny converges on insurtechs specifically
Vendor review obligations reach an insurtech from a carrier's own regulator, from privacy statutes, and from the promises written into the carrier contract itself.
B-10 makes the insurtech the assessed third party
Carrier clients must evaluate and monitor their vendors under B-10, with visibility into subcontracting arrangements, and their questionnaires and audit rights are that guideline operating exactly as intended.
PIPEDA accountability travels through your vendors
Applicant and policyholder data placed into an OCR tool or an LLM API remains your responsibility under PIPEDA, which expects you to bind and oversee those providers the way a carrier binds you.
Law 25 gates the transfer itself
Sending Québec applicant data into US-hosted subprocessors calls for an assessment before the transfer, making vendor evaluation a legal prerequisite for insurtechs with Québec exposure, not just good hygiene.
Carrier contracts promising vendor discipline downstream
Security schedules increasingly require an insurtech to hold its own subprocessors to equivalent standards, and without a flow-down clause and a review step, that promise has nothing behind it.
What goes wrong
Vendor incidents that become insurtech incidents
The sector's threat pattern is substantially a story of other people's software touching policyholder data.
Managed file transfer as the entry point
The 2023 MOVEit exploitation, which reached roughly 100,000 Nova Scotians through one government deployment, mirrors exactly the exposure a bordereau-carrying MFT vendor creates when nobody reviewed it.
An AI vendor with more appetite for data than disclosed
LLM APIs and document-AI tools differ enormously in retention and training use; assessing one before claims or applicant data flows in is the difference between adopting a capability and donating a dataset.
A telematics integration nobody vetted
A driving-behaviour data provider added quickly to ship a UBI feature can carry retention or sharing terms the platform never reviewed, discovered only when a carrier or applicant asks a pointed question.
Concentration risk inherited from a single cloud region
The OSFI-FCAC report's concentration-risk framing, illustrated by the July 2024 global outage, applies just as much to an insurtech's own reliance on one policy-admin or cloud vendor as to a carrier's reliance on the insurtech.
Our vendor security reviews for insurtech companies
What the service delivers for an insurtech
Structured evaluation on both axes: responding when a carrier reviews you, and interpreting data responsibilities when the vendors are yours.
Security-schedule and questionnaire response management
We draft answers to B-10-style carrier questionnaires from your real environment, flag questions where the honest answer needs remediation first, and keep founder review to a short pass.
A reusable evidence library
Policies, training records, test summaries and control descriptions organized once, so each new carrier relationship's review starts from substance instead of a blank spreadsheet.
Subprocessor inventory and risk-tiering
Every OCR, LLM, enrichment and telematics vendor catalogued and tiered by sensitivity, with the high-tier providers assessed on security posture, data location, retention and breach terms.
Contract and DPA expectations
Clear positions on what vendor agreements must contain, breach notice, deletion on exit, subprocessor transparency, and review of the terms behind the riskiest tools in the stack.
Telematics-specific evaluation
A review pass tuned to what a driving-behaviour or UBI data provider should disclose about retention, third-party sharing and consent alignment with what applicants were actually told.
How the engagement runs
How we run vendor review for an insurtech mid-questionnaire
Step 1
Rescue the live questionnaire
We take the pending carrier security schedule, gather what exists, draft defensible answers and identify the gaps to disclose versus fix before submission.
Step 2
Build the standing library
Answers and artifacts are consolidated into a maintained evidence base mapped to the frameworks carriers keep citing.
Step 3
Sweep your own vendors
The OCR, LLM, enrichment and telematics inventory is built and tiered, the top tier assessed, and remediation or replacement decisions put to leadership.
Step 4
Institutionalize the intake
A lightweight new-vendor review step and an annual re-check keep both directions current without a standing security team.
What it costs
What determines cost for insurtech vendor review
On the inbound side, volume and variety set the effort: one recurring carrier questionnaire costs less to support than several bespoke reviews from carriers with different formats each year. On the outbound side, it's the size of your subprocessor estate and how many vendors land in the high-sensitivity tier requiring full assessment rather than a records check.
Insurtechs inside a Virtual Privacy Office retainer get much of this handled within the monthly hours, including vendor and third-party compliance guidance. As a standalone project, we price after seeing your questionnaire pipeline and vendor inventory, both of which take about an hour to assemble.
Insurtech Companies: Vendor security reviews questions, answered
Start with an inventory tiered by sensitivity, then assess the top tier on hosting jurisdiction, security attestations, retention and deletion behaviour, subprocessor transparency and breach-notification terms. The output is a decision list, keep, keep with configuration changes, contract fixes to demand at renewal, or replace, kept as a living record. When a carrier audit asks about your subprocessors, that record turns the question from a scramble into a five-minute answer.
Beyond standard vendor questions, focus on what's specific to driving-behaviour data: exactly what's collected, whether it's shared with or resold to other parties, how long it's retained after a policy ends, and whether the consent language applicants actually saw matches what the provider's terms permit. Because telematics data reads as sensitive under most privacy frameworks, the bar for this review sits higher than for a standard SaaS tool.
At minimum: confidentiality matching your own carrier obligations, restrictions on further subcontracting without notice, safeguard requirements proportional to data sensitivity, a short incident-notification window to you, deletion or return on exit, and audit rights proportionate to the vendor's size. B-10-influenced carriers increasingly ask to see these terms exist in signed agreements, not just in intentions, so the clauses need to be real before they're described in a questionnaire answer.
Before, always. AI vendors vary more than any other category on the questions that matter here, whether inputs train the model, how long prompts and documents are retained, whether enterprise tenancy actually isolates your data, and where processing happens. A brief structured assessment answers those from the vendor's own documentation and terms, then feeds both your AI-use policy and the answer you'll eventually give a carrier that asks.
That relationship sits outside your vetting authority but inside your risk profile. You can't assess a carrier-mandated policy-admin platform the way you assess your own vendors, so the control shifts to documentation and contract: record that the tool is carrier-imposed, follow the carrier's rules inside it, and ensure your own agreement doesn't leave you liable for weaknesses in a system you don't control. We help insurtechs document these arrangements so a reviewer sees deliberate handling, not a gap.
In most insurtech stacks, a small number of vendors, the ones actually touching applicant or policyholder personal information, warrant full assessment, while marketing and internal-ops tools can clear a lighter records check. The tiering exercise is what separates the two, and it's usually the single most valuable hour spent before a carrier's own vendor review lands.
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About this service
Answers & guides
- How do we prepare for a customer security questionnaire?
- How does a startup pass an enterprise vendor security review?
- How do you assess the privacy and security risk of an AI vendor?
- Building a Third-Party Vendor Risk Assessment Program That Scales
- An AI Vendor Privacy & Security Checklist for Procurement Teams
- How a Startup Passes Its First Enterprise Vendor Security Review
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