WTW adds a cyber risk consultant to team

Willis Towers Watson has appointed Anthony Smit as a cyber risk consultant hiring from Sedgewick.

There, he was the APAC cyber product head and was responsible for triaging major cyber claims and assessing the resulting financial losses on behalf of clients and insurers.

Other roles include senior transformation manager for Woolworths and equities chief operating officer at Credit Suisse.

Smit also spent two years as a fund manager act Absolute Capital.

Earlier, he was a business development manager at Guardrisk Insurance.

During his career, Smit has coordinated incident response and helped manage over 400 cyber incidents, including ransomware, phishing, DDoS, operational shutdowns, and data breaches, and developing cyber assessment programs for organisations.

"Increasingly clients rely on WTW to help improve their understanding and management of technology risk as a whole, covering likely claim exposures, legal and regulatory challenges, and stakeholder expectations," said Australasian cyber and technology risk team leader Ben Di Marco.

Di Marco noted that obtaining effective advice is an acute challenge for companies trying to navigate the current cyber threat landscape.

"His skill set {Smit} will help WTW clients across their full journey of improving cyber risk awareness, undertaking exposure analysis, and enhancing cyber resilience through risk management and insurance. He will also have a leading role in the development of our risk and analytics service."

Data released by the Australian Cyber Security Centre shows the growing issue of cyber-related issues, with over 67,500 cybercrime reports in the 2020/21 financial year (a rise of 13 percent on the previous year) and self-reported losses by Australian businesses over $33 billion.

"This is an area of risk that has received increasing board and senior management visibility," added Di Marco.