Imagination to create

You know the risks. You know the rewards. Yet, fundamentally, you know there’s something missing.

Despite the wealth of company, market and value chain data at your fingertips, drawing it all together to make informed decisions takes precious time, a laser focus and original, imaginative thinking.

Without a complete, granular insight into your entire business ecosystem – both now and into the future – you’re not only overlooking systemic threats to your company, but also missing current and emergent business opportunities.

In fact, the risk/reward relationship is fractured – and is built upon data that is hopelessly fragmented.

That’s why at Russell we’re rebalancing the risk/reward paradigm to help clients transform their business, make it resilient and built to last.

We call what we do “imagination to create”.

With our data know-how and our clients’ market experience we help them imagine a future where commercial risk in all its manifestations is minimised and new growth and development possibilities are revealed.

Business value chains are being disrupted as never before by unexpected and persistent threats.

Take the pandemic, climate change, decarbonisation and digitalisation. Due to their impact on distinct business functions, any exposure analysis of such threats on a corporate and its value chain is restricted to a short-sighted, siloed view – if you don’t have the complete picture.

Look at the exponential ways risk today flows through the value chain: it’s protean and ingeniously adaptable, like a virus – finding, probing and exploiting weaknesses in the business. In fact, these risks are connected, and the real threat to business is connected risk.

Connected risk

Connected risk is the systemic impact on commercial organisations, their partners, suppliers and clients from cumulative and cascading financial, operational and reputational fluctuations and uncertainties.

It is caused by an inherent weakness in the inter-connected architecture of today’s business-to-business relationships. These are increasingly digital and allow a single negative event to exponentially spread disruption, paralysis and wreak severe economic damage both within and between organisations.

The key drivers for connected risk are the ways in which political, environmental, supply chain, cyber and credit risks combine to cause financial, operational and reputational loss.

The only effective antidote to the threat of connected risk running rampant through your organisation is to understand and quantify the consequences and ensure that you remain resilient to them. This is where Russell can help with its connected solution which combines insight, analysis and action, to deliver a more holistic and forensic approach.

Our approach blends science and art. It’s a combination of logic and creative thinking. This allows us to craft solutions based on quantified, qualified exposure data (science) mixed with analysis (art) to help corporate risk managers see fully the business landscape in which they operate. In my next article for #ReinsuranceMonth, I will explain how the Russell approach to connected risk allows reinsurers to make better, more informed decisions.

You can also view this article in the first weekly edition of #ReinsuranceMonth, which was published on 1 September by The Insurer and is available to download for free at theinsurer.com/reinsurance-month/weekly-editions.