Does Cyber Insurance Cover PCI Fines or Assessments?
Sometimes—a cyber policy or endorsement may cover payment-card assessments, but those contractual charges are different from government fines and are not automatically insured.
Those charges have different sources and may fall under different policy wording. Chubb describes payment-card losses as contractual liabilities owed to payment-card industry firms and separately describes regulatory fines where insurable by law. This distinction is important: a PCI assessment is not necessarily a government fine.
Check for an express payment-card or PCI-DSS assessment endorsement and identify the covered fees, assessments, or penalties. Review the required card-network determination, sublimit, retention, consent condition, and any contractual-liability exclusion. Also examine your payment processor agreement to see who may impose the charge and how it is calculated. Ask the insurer to address the specific kind of assessment in writing; do not rely on a general statement that cyber coverage includes fines.
