4 Biggest Pain Points for Risk Managers and How to Address Them

Being a risk manager is far from an easy job. It feels as if risk managers have a never-ending workload, from compiling and reporting on insurance programs, mitigating risks, creating incident response plans, managing a team of risk professionals, communicating with senior leadership, dealing with renewals, and much more. In this blog, we will share a list of the biggest pain points we often hear risk managers talk about, and then we will show how new technology solutions can help risk managers alleviate these pain points.  

1. Consolidating Program Data 

One of the most burdensome parts of being a risk manager is compiling and aggregating data from their insurance programs from disparate sources. Risk managers need to be able to quickly capture data from policy binders, schedules, spreadsheets, diagrams, and partner portals so they can be prepared for renewals and/or adapt their insurance programs to organizational changes such as mergers, acquisitions, or leadership and strategic changes. To make matters worse, most of this information often is in different forms and involves unique terms, coverages, and currencies. In addition to these challenges, different parties are often using conflicting technologies that don’t integrate well with one another, making this process even more difficult.  

2. Demonstrating the Economic Value of Insurance

As the insurance buyers of the organization, it’s imperative that risk managers can demonstrate the economic value of the insurance they purchase to senior leadership and other departmental heads. However, it can be challenging to assemble all the pieces of evidence to support insurance purchasing decisions. 

Another reason this task can be a challenging one is that when executives attempt to calculate the costs of insurance, services, loss prevention, and losses, there’s usually insufficient clarity to align with the financial benefits needed to create an economic model of value delivered. The reason for this is that most enterprises’ data sources are inconsistent, incongruous, and sometimes incompatible, forcing an over-reliance on assumptions rather than facts. This can lead to poor decision-making, serious protection gaps, and potentially disastrous uninsured loss events. 

3. Reliance on Outside Parties

During a hard insurance market, a number of difficult questions about your organization’s insurance program are sure to come up in meetings with leadership, board members, division heads, and other key decision-makers. What are we spending with such and such a carrier across all lines of coverage this year? What is our total premium in a specific region of the country or some other critical jurisdiction? What is the total of my E&O claims recoveries?  

When risk managers are in these types of situations, they don’t want to be a deer caught in the headlights; however, that is the case the majority of the time. The reason that this might be the case is that risk managers don’t always have these pieces of information readily available in front of them. There are many sources risk managers need to depend on to get the data they need. And sometimes, certain policy and program data aren’t routinely tracked, and some risk managers might not know exactly where to locate the information they need.  

4. Flying Blind when Budgeting for Renewals.

Another situation where risk managers don’t want to be a deer caught in the headlights is when it’s time for renewals. Ideally, risk managers want to enter the renewal process with information on their premium and rate information and up-to-date exposure data. The renewal process can prove to be a difficult task for risk managers since all their information is often kept in silos. They may have exposure information in one place, while maintaining premiums, fees, and related data elsewhere, and accumulating current rate and market guidance in yet another place. The sources risk managers go to can’t always be considered a single source of truth either. Many risk managers aren’t fully equipped with the information they need to have a successful renewal process.  

Technology to the Rescue 

Many of the pain points we listed above stemmed from the lack of critical information being readily available and accessible. Luckily for risk managers, technology has evolved to the point where it can alleviate a lot of pain points risk professionals face.  

New technology-based applications, such as those provided by LineSlip Solutions, enable risk managers to gather, store, and organize their data for instant access and timely reporting. Risk managers can digitize their insurance policy data and store it all in one place. They can now have all the information they need at their fingertips and won’t need to rely on third parties and multiple parties to provide them with the information they need. These features and data will be important when renewals are approaching. Some of these technology solutions also offer automated reporting, which can be shared with senior leadership and other stakeholders. Knowledge is power; with new technology solutions, risk managers can have the knowledge they need to empower them when they do their job.