How can technology help businesses strategically strengthen their resilience?

There’s no understating how much has changed over the last five years.

The world has experienced a series of extraordinary shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the highest global inflation rates since 1981, the largest war in Europe since 1945, and increasingly volatile climatic events.

Indeed, the world has changed, and risk is elevated.

These risks call for new and better ways to manage interconnected and accelerated risks. Good risk management also means being able to see the big picture through a strategic and holistic lens. The industry must work together to help organizations build and strengthen their resilience in the face of rising digitization, shifting demographics, geopolitical tensions, and our interconnected world.

In interacting with our clients over the last several years, we’ve learned that sustainability and environment managers can greatly benefit from better analytical models to assess future climate-related risks. We’ve also discovered that supply chain managers could use clearer oversight of hidden risks to better anticipate supply chain disruptions.

Making these improvements is easier said than done. For CEOs, CFOs, board members and risk professionals, we see three common hurdles:

Technology: A need for proper tools and models to assess, quantify and prioritize risk.
Data: A need to improve data quality and integrate the data that sits across disparate systems.
Control: A need to easily decide and control who can access insights – both inside and outside of your organization.

Collaboration is vital to bridge these gaps

At Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, we know how important it is to work with the right partner who can provide the right combination of tools, solutions and support. It’s a mix that needs to be tailored to your unique needs, not pulled off a shelf.

Risk Data & Services (RDS) is one specialized technology platform that can be leveraged to these ends. Available through VSR Insurance Solutions, LLC (an affiliate of Swiss Re), it enables you to establish a “digital twin” of your company’s assets to get a more accurate overview of physical vulnerabilities, risks, and exposures. With this virtual representation, you can create simulations based on real-world scenarios and access the insights to better understand current and future risks for your company.

The foundation of RDS stems from our understanding of how risk has become a critical element in every part of our modern environment. It helps you boost your resilience through smarter, data-driven business decisions.

It’s important that enterprises have control of their own risks, but so much of the value and innovation of technology-based solutions is in the collaboration they facilitate – be it between customer colleagues, the customer and the insurer, or internal and external risk partners. To continually optimize, we need to test and learn together. Different perspectives enable clients to collectively maximize these technologies more effectively and allow us to incorporate client feedback and ideas to continue evolving at speed.

This is something Swiss Re has recently carried out with RDS – a platform that currently has three innovative solutions available to empower companies to take control of their risks:

Property Exposure Management, which gives risk managers insights into their property portfolio exposure with a view of current risk and loss models.
The Sustainability Compass, which gives clients visibility into threats of flooding, wildfires, storms, water scarcity and other risks to their facilities and operations.
Supply Chain Resilience, which allows clients to uncover hidden vulnerabilities across their supply network, simulate potential disruptions and prepare accordingly.

Each solution is tailored to help organizations manage pressing risks. For instance, in the context of Supply Chain Resilience, recent Swiss Re Sigma data shows that digital technology and new business models have significantly increased the importance of intangible assets in economic value creation, growing fivefold over the past 20 years.

Between this increase in digital assets and supply chain interconnectedness, businesses today face heightened risks of contagion and systemic business interruption events.  Uncovering vulnerabilities, simulating disruptions, and preparing effectively has never been more important.

To respond effectively to an ever-evolving risk landscape, it’s vital that organizations of all shapes and sizes have access to key risk management technologies, solutions, and insights. By providing tools like RDS, Swiss Re enables companies to keep this philosophy alive by enabling the sharing of new knowledge and insights with others.

Visit the Swiss Re Corporate Solutions website to learn more about our Risk Data & Services solutions.