Many property and casualty insurance companies are heavily siloed. Over time, this has resulted in cross-functional inefficiencies between and across underwriting, claims, ceded reinsurance, actuarial, and finance.

Businesses are fighting hard to withstand the effects of natural and man-made disasters and the significant disruptions both can have on supply chains, and while attempts to model the risks has run into some obstacles, a solution may be near.

Standard & Poors initiated a great deal of activity surrounding enterprise risk management (ERM) when it announced that it was going to specifically rate insurers ERM functions and that those ratings would influence insurers credit and financial-strength ratings. At the time, S&P offered specific ERM criteria from a variety of...

Strategic risk management leverages common ERM capabilities around accumulations and modeling analyses, but it extends those analyses by seeking to identify and track the "weak signals" of a developing ambiguous threat that could trigger a concentrated loss.

Another year of costly natural catastrophesincluding the worst U.S. tornado season in 50 years, massive insured losses arising from the floods in Thailand, the Japan earthquake and consequent tsunami, and further seismic activity in New Zealandis causing many insurance-industry stakeholders to wonder just how many more unexpected levels of loss...