Risk management benchmark for 2014

The StrategicRISK team has been busy travelling to various locations across the Asia-Pacific region to host a series of roundtables with its leading risk professionals. These risk and insurance management roundtable events form the backbone of all the StrategicRISK risk reports, including this regional overview that looks at the risk landscapes of Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Just to give you a taste of these events, the StrategicRISK Japan Risk Management Roundtable held in Tokyo brought together risk and insurance professionals from some of Japan’s biggest multinational corporations. There was plenty to discuss in addition to human capital and natural catastrophe issues, with money laundering and fraud, cyber risk, economic uncertainty, threats to supply chains, product recall and reputation risk all covered in great detail. A similar event held in Ho Chi Min City had challenging economic conditions, supply chain disruptions, regulatory changes and natural catastrophes high on the agenda. The list goes on.

Furthermore, more than 150 of the region’s top corporate risk and insurance managers took part in the StrategicRISK Asia Risk Report benchmarking survey, also sponsored by Zurich, which provides risk and insurance managers with comparative data and additional material to enable them to benchmark their roles, internal risk function, risk priorities and salaries with others in the profession. The survey identifies alternative career paths into corporate risk management in the Asia-Pacific region; compares the level of experience and qualifications among risk managers; measures the scope of the risk management function across the region; and creates a salary benchmark for the region’s risk profession. It also reveals the risks that industry practitioners think are most likely to affect their business, and which of these would have the biggest financial consequences were they to occur.

The top risks from the survey are outlined in the following report, together with commentary on how they apply to the countries profiled in this report. We trust that this information will assist Asia’s risk professionals to outline to  senior executives the type of threats they should be anticipating (and hopefully side-stepping). In the end, risk professionals are meant to ask appropriate and searching questions of their businesses and to propose innovative solutions to the challenges they face.