The sphere of control: Accenture 2019 Global Risk Management Study

Welcome to Accenture’s 2019 Global Risk Management Study report on insurance.

This year we explore how insurance companies are responding to emerging risks, particularly those relating to evolving regulation, cyber threats, insurance technology (InsurTech), changing customer expectations and LIBOR retirement. This report presents the findings from our 2019 Global Risk Management Study, which uncovers how 683 surveyed risk executives across the entire financial services industry, including those working for insurance, banking and capital markets businesses, are adapting to the everincreasing pace and volume of change outside the four walls of the organization.

What did we find in the survey? Let’s quickly recap before delving deeper into the insurance findings.

For a start, risk managers across financial services acknowledge that complex, interconnected new risks are emerging at a more rapid pace than ever before. Over half (58 percent) say that disruptive technology risk has greater impact on their business today than it did two years ago.

A major cause of their concern relates to the growing adoption of new technologies across the organization. Of course, these technologies hold immense potential to unleash growth and drive efficiencies, but risk functions worry about the potential for unforeseen consequences, which they are currently not capable of identifying or assessing.

Faced with an increasingly complex, but data-rich risk environment, risk functions should invest in smart technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) that have immense potential to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Indeed, survey respondents that have deployed machine learning feel much more confident that they have prepared their business for volatile future scenarios.

But while the benefits are significant, risk functions’ use of the most sophisticated technologies is currently limited. Our study findings indicate that the risk function is aware of the need to embrace these new tools, but is simply slow in making effective use of these to date.

Technology aside, an effective risk function is one that is armed with the data it needs to anticipate, assess, and ultimately mitigate emerging threats.

But today, many are not. For example, 57 percent of our study respondents expect to use marketing data to support their risk management activity in two years’ time, but only 39 percent do so today. Getting access to relevant data is one thing, but maintaining the quality and knowing how to analyze it effectively to generate useful insights remains a significant challenge. The risk managers we surveyed as part of the 2019 Global Risk Management Study realize that they fall short here, so they are urgently seeking to improve both their data-collection and analysis skills: 63 percent are urgently improving their ability to collect enterprise-wide data, and 66 percent are honing their ability to analyze it.

Download the report to discover more.