RISK MANAGEMENT BLOG

The risk industry and the professionals within it have changed drastically over the last few decades.

Once, risk professionals simply purchased insurance to transfer losses onto another company. Now, they are expected to monitor the risk environment, identify and predict risks, and implement proactive strategies to prevent issues from occurring or minimize their impact when they do. Top-leadership positions based on risk management, such as Chief Risk Officer (CRO), are becoming increasingly common.

With this in mind, what skills and competencies are now necessary for a risk professional to be successful? Certainly a general knowledge of the insurance industry and financial risk will no longer suffice. In addition to an understanding of many topics and environmental factors, there are necessary personality traits, such as influential, flexible, and collaborative.

Risk data includes information regarding risks, claims, incidents, losses, and mitigation strategies in an organization. While risk data is important to the success of the organization as a whole, it can sometimes be difficult to stress its importance to employees who don’t realize the impact it has on decision-making, processes, and financial savings. (If they need extra convincing, show them our blog post on 10 Reasons Risk Management Matters for All Employees!)

When staff have multiple tasks to complete, submitting data to the risk department may not take priority, which can limit the effectiveness of the organization. 

How can risk managers and other staff members overcome issues when communicating risk data? The answer is simple: with technology. Let’s tackle each of the challenges and illustrate their technology-based solution.

Practically everyone in an office environment has some understanding of Excel and similar spreadsheet programs. They revolutionized computing for finance and accounting firms and can be incredibly useful for a number of purposes.

However, as organizations become increasingly complex, spreadsheets can create more problems than they solve. For risk management in particular, organizations should consider moving to a more modern approach, such as a Risk Management Information System (RMIS). Here are some of the reasons why:

Ethical risk management is incredibly difficult, mostly because you cannot predict what an employee is thinking or control every one of their actions. However, finding ways to manage this risk is vital: one person’s choices can cost millions of dollars, close down a business forever, and do significant damage to customers.

While risk avoidance is impossible, here are a few things you can do to lessen the chance of being a part of the latest scandal.

Property managers face a wide variety of risks in their work, and a study by Deloitte found that risk management is now one of the top three concerns held by property managers.  As their portfolio grows, so does the number of property and tenant risks.

A potentially overwhelming amount of information has to be effectively managed and used. There are legal risks every step of the way, as well as the general market exposure that almost every organization has to overcome.