One of the key issues for many corporate customers over the years has been how to visualise their risks and quantify how risk improvements will positively affect their insurance programme. By Mervyn Rea, Head of RE customer management, APAC Zurich Financial Services

Historically, it has been left to risk engineers to conduct site assessments, produce pages of reports, and determine what risk improvements would create the greatest overall improvement to their risk grading. Now risk managers have an alternative.

For many customers in Asia, risk engineering and risk assessments have not been seen as a key tool in the risk manager’s toolkit. This is beginning to change and is being driven by the need to improve risk quality. To help with this transition, risk managers need new tools to help make sense of the huge amount of data that can come out of site surveys, along with an easy way to present the risk-improvement strategy to the board.

One of the tools that Zurich has developed to help risk managers with this analysis is the riskfeatures.com website. The aim of this website is to bring Zurich’s Risk Engineer’s risk grading to life, and  help the customer prepare for the site visit. The challenge was to provide risk engineers with a way of presenting complex   information resulting from risk assessments to customers in a format that would be user-friendly and easy to understand. Customers can view this information even after the risk engineer has left, allowing them to set priorities for their risk-improvement projects.

The key objective was to create a mobile workspace that used key elements of Zurich Risk Engineering’s risk-grading methodology and converted them into a visual representation. The ‘What If? Risk Grading App’ makes risk assessment easier to understand and provides customers with insights for a better understanding of theirexisting risks and optimisation of risk-improvement budgets. It is an easy to use, highly innovative and helpful tool for our customers.

The free app has an intuitive interface, with each assessment criterion graded via a visual linear tool. Overall risk profile summaries, automatically generated based on the documented assessment, reveal the impact of risk improvement actions on the grading score, and help customers prioritise risk improvement and maximise return on investment. The app helps deepen customer and business partner understanding of risk, while demonstrating a continued commitment to technology and the user experience. Through this tool, risk managers will gain more understanding of the risks they face and how risk-improvement actions can infl uence their overall grading score. The app brings together the Risk Engineer’s Grading for the site, and uses pop-up links from the riskfeatures.com website to provide clearer illustration of how each factor was graded, and what can be done to improve it.

Risk managers are required to monitor their risk grading over time, determine the impact on their grading given certain risk improvements, and conduct scenario analysis to help prioritise investment decisions. Coupling this approach with shared best practice, and the additional information linked in from the riskfeatures.com website, clarifies the benefits of a risk-engineering programme.

Mervyn Rea is senior risk engineer and head of RE customer management, APAC
Zurich Financial Services Australia