The Two Risk Books of an Omnichannel Business

Businesses that trade online and in person sit in a strange place when it comes to insurance.

Though it’s one business, they don’t have one insured risk. They have two, and these risks share little in common.

One risk relates to the in-person side of the business, like the property, public liability, and employers’ liability. The other side is the digital side of the business, like data protection, payment threats, and so forth. Neither is small, either; the ABI recorded £6.1 billion in property claims in 2025 alone.

The split itself is manageable and something many companies have to navigate. Where it gets a bit odd, however, is where they meet in the middle.

What Sits in Each Book

The physical programme is one that most business owners are aware of. It contains the building and contents, glass, stock, public access, staff on site, and loss of profit if the doors close.

The digital programme, however, is a lot different. It’s newer and priced differently. It includes first-party costs after an incident, interruption from system downtime, liability for a data breach, and the risk that an outage at a supplier stops trade.

Digital liabilities are more common nowadays. The government’s latest breaches survey found 43% of UK businesses identified a breach or attack in the last year.

Neither book is unusual on its own. Where it becomes a bit unusual, though, is how they are underwritten in reference to each other.

Where the Books Overlap

There are three key examples that are worth detailing about where the books overlap. Firstly, a supplier outage can halt trading in both channels. The claim is a cyber event, but the loss shows up in gross profit in venues. That’s an argument that nobody wants to talk about at the claim stage.

Then there’s a data breach. It could happen in a venue, but the impact could be online. Whether the property or cyber policy responds to this claim depends on how it’s worded.

Alongside this, an incident on premises where the evidence lies on a digital system, like CCTV or access logs, falls under both policies. This makes it difficult to know which policy to claim on for the highest likelihood of success.

A Worked Example

Take an operator running bingo clubs across the country alongside an online bingo platform with 75/80/90-ball bingo, for example.
On the physical side, they need to insure their floor space, public access, and staff, and on the other, they need to insure their customer data, payment infrastructure, and platform availability. A single membership number connects both of them together, so someone registered in person sits in a database of people who registered online.

The insurable exposure is not two businesses sharing one brand. It is that one customer has a record with a physical location and digital route attached to it, and that gap in the middle is where confusion starts.

What Brokers Should Be Asking

Three questions cover most of it, and they don’t take longer than a phone call.
Which policy is responsible for what events, and what events hit both policies?
What are the BI definitions that may be consistent between both policy types?

Where does customer information enter the business?

These questions alone will surface most of the gaps, and the answers will reveal what business owners expect.