Cyber Risk Quantification
Every CISO can tell you what their controls are. Almost none can tell you what their residual risk costs. Boards and CFOs are making investment decisions — budgets, insurance, M&A — with heat maps instead of numbers. Üsta closes that gap.
The Problem
Only 21% of executives allocate their cyber budgets based on their organisation's highest risks. The remaining 79% are guessing.
Cyber is the only material business risk that cannot be expressed in financial terms. Credit risk, market risk, operational risk: all have financial models. Cyber has heat maps. Every other risk at the board table gets a number. Cyber gets a colour.
CISOs are expected to speak the language of financial risk at the board table, but they arrive with patch compliance rates and phishing simulation scores. When the CFO asks "are we spending the right amount on security?" there is no analytical basis for the answer.
Boards are now legally accountable for cyber risk: to regulators, auditors, and increasingly shareholders. But the tools available are frameworks designed for IT teams, not financial decision-makers. The sophistication of the accountability has outpaced the measurement.
Every budget cycle, a CISO asks for millions in security spend with no quantified answer to "what does that buy us in risk reduction?" The number gets negotiated on gut feel and seniority. That is how material financial decisions get made on cyber.
Acutely felt by Series B+ and mid-market companies
Enterprise customers and investors now require quantified cyber risk documentation, not just a SOC 2. Growing companies that cannot produce financial-level risk outputs are failing vendor assessments, losing deals, and arriving at fundraising due diligence unprepared. The same gap surfaces at insurance renewal.
The Solution
Üsta builds actuarial-grade cyber risk models: the same probabilistic, financially rigorous methodology used in insurance and credit risk, applied to cyber security.
We deliver findings in formats your finance, risk, and GRC teams can work with immediately. Outputs are designed to integrate into your existing reporting and governance workflows.
Request a Scoping CallWho It's For
Arrive at the board table with financial numbers, not operational metrics. Make a quantitative case for every rand of security spend.
For CISOsUnderstand your organisation's financial exposure to cyber risk. Make informed decisions on insurance, investment, and regulatory disclosure.
For CFOs & BoardsProduce the financial-level risk documentation that enterprise customers and investors now require. Stop losing deals to security questionnaires.
For Growth CompaniesHow It Works
30 minutes to assess fit, understand your environment, and outline what the engagement would look like.
A targeted questionnaire maps your control environment across the threat scenarios most relevant to your business.
Your posture is parameterised against Üsta's actuarial model, calibrated to the African threat environment and your sector.
Loss distributions, expected value, control ROI, and scenario breakdowns. Delivered in formats your CFO, board, and GRC teams can act on.
Why Üsta
| Conventional approach | Üsta |
|---|---|
| Framework scores (ISO, NIST, CIS) | Financial loss distributions |
| Qualitative heat maps | Actuarial probability models |
| Point-in-time assessments | A living model, recalibrated as your posture evolves |
| Generic industry benchmarks | Calibrated to your specific architecture and threat profile |
| Outputs designed for IT teams | Outputs your CFO, board, and GRC teams can use directly |
Currently piloting with a digital bank in Cape Town, and in active engagement with two of South Africa's largest telecommunications groups.
Built for Africa
Every competitor in the cyber risk quantification space is built for US Fortune 500 companies: calibrated on US threat data, assuming US regulatory frameworks, and requiring mature US-style security tooling stacks.
Üsta is built for POPIA-regulated institutions, African fintech infrastructure, and the specific threat environment of mobile-first financial services. Our actuarial model starts from where your organisation actually is, not where a US enterprise is.
No commitment. We will assess fit and explain exactly what the engagement would look like for your organisation.
Request a Scoping Call