Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) fosters a proactive approach, safeguarding your organization from complex risks and improving long-term stability and success. We use a structured approach to identify and evaluate critical risks across all areas of organizational exposure. Strong enterprise risk governance that's aligned with your strategic goals increases your operational resilience and provides your organization with a competitive edge.
What can you achieve with enterprise risk management?
ERM improves the stability and long-term profitability of your organization. It targets your most critical strategic risks, determines their likelihood and potential severity, and enables you to make more informed decisions.
A robust enterprise risk management framework allows you to:
- Align risk strategy with organizational strategy and objective setting
- Set meaningful impact scales with explicit connection to financial and strategic priorities
- Define appetite overall and by risk type (higher appetite for risks with upside potential)
- Define success for risk decisions.
- Comprehensive strategic risk assessments to identify, prioritize and articulate and qualitatively assess enterprise risks
- Focused risk assessments for business units, geographies, product lines, etc.
- Horizon scanning, research, competitor and industry analysis
- Diagnostic assessments using WTW proprietary models
- Quantitative risk assessment in terms of impact to profitability, cost of loss, and correlations with other risks
- Risk reporting structures, policies and committee charters
- Best practices for effective risk governance and strong risk culture, including education materials and communication plans
- Tools for executive and board-level reporting
- Identification of mitigation and transfer options
- Decision support for mitigation strategies contemplating cost, resource requirement, risk reduction benefit, and other benefits or efficiencies. This decision support can by by-risk or quantitatively assessed as a portfolio.
- SMART goal planning for risk actions including definition of target end-state, timelines, and communication tools
- Dashboards to track and monitor the risk profile
- Development of Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) using data available to you today and planning for metrics you could use in the future
- Set criteria for when action is needed, and how much risk reduction is necessary
- Table top exercises, simulations or “war games” for crises such as geopolitical risks, cyber incidents, etc.
Which enterprise risks are driving ERM frameworks today?
More traditional risk management styles — where individual business-unit leaders manage risks within their functions — can work for risks that can be segregated. ERM frameworks recognize how risks can trigger, connect and amplify each other. Enterprise risk management views risks not as the business may like them to be — routine, predictable and constrained in their consequences — but how they really are.
Modern ERM approaches can provide answers to today’s most urgent enterprise risk questions, which can have long-lasting implications for your organizational resilience, such as:
- Do you have the right tools and methods to define risk? And do you have the most appropriate action plans to respond?
- Can you demonstrate to senior leaders, board of directors, investors and shareholders that your risk management approach optimally supports your strategic goals?
- In a warming world with fast-moving climate and ESG regulation, how can you identify and mitigate the most critical ESG risks including physical and transitional climate risks?
- As supply chains become increasingly complex and vulnerable to climate and geopolitical uncertainty, how can you transform supply chain exposures into competitive advantage?
- Are you sure your people and rewards strategy can hire, retain and engage tomorrow’s talent?
- Are you prioritizing the fast-changing emerging risks such as generative AI risks highly enough and using enterprise risk best practices to address the challenges faced?
What sets WTW apart
An analytical mindset
Our enterprise risk consulting professionals are multidisciplined. We focus on understanding the factors that influence your risks and the best way to govern them based on our deep industry expertise and powerful, proprietary data and analytics.
We recognize your enterprise risk framework must align with your organization’s unique financial objectives. Our analytical ERM approach audits your critical risks. We tailor solutions specific to your industry by quantifying enterprise risk, determining the financial impact, evaluating the financial benefit of mitigation tactics (including insurance) or other mitigation tactics across your portfolio. The result is efficient and effective risk strategies.
A complete view of the risk ecosystem
As an integral part of WTW, a leading provider of professional risk management services, we have a truly 360-degree view of an organization’s risks.
We cover the entire risk value chain, from risk identification to risk transfer (whether traditional or alternative). We have the necessary expertise to offer you solutions tailored to your challenges.
WTW Enterprise Risk Management Solutions also draws on our risk analytics tools and global network of experts as well as specialists in people, risk and capital, with several related capabilities.
To unlock smarter ways to manage your enterprise risk, contact our ERM experts.
