By Mia MacGregor

Jan 30 - (The Insurer) - CFC Group has unified its global cyber and proactive teams to enhance consistency across territories, promoting James Burns to global head of cyber and Jason Hart to managing director, proactive and global security services, Cyber Risk Insurer can reveal.

Burns, who has been with CFC for 12 years, previously led the company’s cyber strategy for the last two years.

Before joining CFC, he spent four years at Zurich Insurance plc. In his newly created role, Burns will oversee CFCs global cyber strategy, underwriting, and sales teams.

Hart joined CFC as head of proactive cyber a year ago. He has more than 20 years of experience in building information security services.

Prior to CFC, he served as chief technology officer – EMEA at Rapid7 and has held senior cyber leadership roles at companies such as Trustonic, Gemalto, WhiteHat Security, and HP.

In his expanded role, Hart will now lead CFC’s proactive and security teams, including Solis, on a global scale.

“There is enormous potential in the cross-geographical expertise in these teams and creating a truly global operating model will enable greater transparency, collaboration and cross-pollination of knowledge and ideas, which we believe is critical to CFC’s continued growth,” commented Hart.

CFC's expansion is centered around "consistency and ensuring that CFC is represented the same way, regardless of where employees are located," Burns told Cyber Risk Insurer.

He emphasised that the goal of this unified cyber unit is to enhance consistency across underwriting, product distribution, communication, and engagement with brokers.

"Most importantly, we want to ensure that people feel part of one team and collaborate more closely together," Burns added.

Burns noted that the need for consistency became clear as the business grew rapidly. "We recently reached our 1,000th employee globally, and in a very short period, we established a significant onshore presence in the US, Australia, and Canada," he said.

“Given the speed of our growth, we recognised that for the next phase, we need to be completely joined up.”

Looking ahead, Burns anticipates a major year for CFC in 2025, particularly in the cyber sector.

"This will be a big year for us, focused on growth across all our lines that we will be operating in, especially cyber," Burns shared.

"We’ve seen a hard market followed by a sharp softening of rates, and market contraction in areas like the US. CFC has a key mission to support, and the entire industry should get behind it: growing the market. For us, that's all about the education of brokers," said Burns.

Burns pointed out that many brokers, especially outside the US, still don’t sell cyber coverage to their commercial clients, leaving a significant portion of businesses worldwide without cyber protection.

"For CFC, where a large part of our premium base is in cyber, the next step is to grow the market and increase our share within it," he explained.

Burns emphasised that growing the cyber market is central to CFC's overall corporate strategy.

"It's not just about the cyber team; it's something which is central to CFCs overall corporate strategy, which is why we put so much effort and spotlight on it,” he added.

In 2025, Burns highlighted several new initiatives at CFC, including educational and training programs for brokers who want to deepen their cyber expertise.

"We’ll also be launching new products and upgrading services to strengthen our incident response capabilities and proactive services that help spot events before they happen," Burns said.

"It's all about constantly improving our products and services to make them more relevant for our brokers."