13 June 2014 Insurance

AIRMIC: shaping the future of risk

The theme of this year’s AIRMIC conference – Shaping the Future of Risk – has been chosen as the logical next step following the body’s 50th anniversary conference last year, which inevitably had a retrospective focus.

According to John Hurrell, AIRMIC’s chief executive officer, a critical issue will be the speed of change – from changes in technology to changes in business models and the move from hard assets to soft assets, and what that means for the industry.

“We wanted to focus on the things that we felt were critical to everyone on both sides of the industry over the next 2-3 years – and the answer’s a lot,” he said.

Topics covered in the conference include cyber risks and emerging risks such as technology dependences, supply chain dependences, and brand and reputation issues arising from those the move towards virtual companies where everything is outsourced.

“It’s about what we can do as the risk industry to help those organisations in terms of either insurance or reputational risk management,” he said.

There will be a particular focus on the efficacy of the insurance contract and whether it needs to evolve to meet the needs of virtual companies.

He added that an overarching theme will be how to engage with senior decision makers, particularly boards, in terms of repositioning insurance as a strategic asset within organisations.

“Anecdotally the feedback we get through our membership is that the boards don’t understand the complexity of the insurance industry and therefore focus on price, which isn’t in anybody’s best interests,” he said.

“What we want to do is to put much more focus on value and relevance. Does the insurance product do what the boards need it to do? Is the insurance industry moving fast enough? Is it relevant to the board? These are the questions we want asked with less focus on price. We want to try and bring out those themes in the discussions that we will be having during the conference.”

He said there will be a lot of discussion around how risk managers can raise their heads above the parapet and become more strategic within their organisations, adding more value across a broarder front and bringing together other senior executives to improve the level of risk management.

“This in turn then helps the insurance industry to have a high level of confidence in what they are putting their own balance sheets,” he said.

He added that an ongoing focus for AIRMIC will be around board level impact, both for insurance and risk management.

“We are working with a number of outside bodies and with boards and boards’ decision makers where risk in particular is moving fast up their agenda,” he said. “We want to network with those bodies to ensure the maximum level of opportunity for risk managers to play a part strategically with an organisation is made possible. We want to raise the game as far as we can influence it both in insurance and risk.”

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