Business resilience

How well does your business understand its business interruption risks? Is uncertainty costing you money and restricting your insurance cover? Do your business recovery plans address the right risks and deal with them appropriately?

At Zurich Strategic Risk, we can help you measure and communicate business resilience by accurately modelling the risks of business interruption and assessing how your recovery plans reduce the potential effects on your business.

Our approach

There’s nothing new about the risk of business interruption - your current insurance probably covers part of it. But all too often estimates of the risks involved and the impacts they could have are superficial - best guesses based on readily available information.

A top-level view of business interruption is vital to identify and measure all the interdependencies that exist within your business. We therefore take a rigorous and measured approach to tracking profit flow and the effect of interruptions. It begins with a thorough investigation of your lines of business, sites and major suppliers in order to analyse the risks they face and the potential consequences. We then put these pieces together to create a profit flow model that gives you a complete picture - and you may well find it differs substantially from the one you currently have.

We will also take an in-depth and independent look at your business continuity plans. We’ll critically assess whether you’ve identified the right risks, and whether your contingency plans will enable your business to reduce the impact of any incident as far as possible. As well as saving money if an incident occurs, a robust recovery plan can also reduce the costs of your business continuity insurance, as it will allow you to demonstrate to your insurer that your business is well prepared to deal with problems.

Increasing resilience, reducing costs

Insurance underwriters don’t like uncertainty. If they have doubts about your business’s exposure to business interruption, they may increase your premiums and/or restrict the amount of cover available.

The business resilience information we compile for your business means you can communicate risks more clearly and accurately to your insurer, reducing uncertainty and supporting accurate pricing.

In fact taking an in-depth look at business interruption risk could actually reduce your need for insurance. As well as the general benefits that come with understanding and
managing risk better, our profit impact analysis enables you to identify resources and flexibility that you could use if a business interruption occurred.

Insuring contingent - business interruption

Many large companies find it difficult to arrange sufficient contingent business interruption insurance to cover the risks of a breakdown in their supply chain or distribution network. In many cases this is due to the difficulty in measuring the risks involved and their financial consequences.

We can help you to accurately assess your business’s exposure to this type of risk and give you the information you need to discuss the level and terms of your contingent business interruption cover with your insurer.

Typical project flow/ business resilience model screenshot

Business resilience - benefits at a glance

An in-depth look at your business’s resilience to interruption helps you to:

• buy the right insurance at the right price
• make informed decisions about risk transfer, restructuring, outsourcing and expansion
• understand the interdependencies between operations, sites and lines of business
• demonstrate that all key areas of the business are adequately covered.

Why choose Zurich Strategic Risk?

• Our technical, financial and actuarial expertise means we can blend the correct mathematical treatment of risk with ease of use and implementation
• We have extensive experience of modelling business resilience and profit dependency across a wide range of business sectors
• We focus on and quantify the crucial factors that drive the potential for business interruption losses
• We speak the languages of production and supply chain managers, management accountants and business continuity specialists, so that we can combine their expertise into a comprehensive risk analysis that underwriters can apply.