At a time of unprecedented cultural, political, social and environmental change, reputation has emerged as a principal intangible asset and the key driver of value for the average company. For public-facing companies in particular, the acceleration and amplification of bad news through the media demands an urgent and coordinated response as reputational damage is inflicted faster and deeper than ever before.
While business leaders recognise the importance of reputation, they may lack the ability to understand and act upon reputational data, making crises hard to plan for and respond to effectively. Additionally company boards are being held to account over their ability to mitigate the financial risks associated with reputational conduct, with higher levels of stakeholder activism and protest seen in recent years. For board executives to exhibit the satisfaction of their fiduciary duty, understanding reputational data and hedging against the financial risk of reputational crises is essential.
Whether the core motivation is protecting and enhancing balance sheet efficiency, safeguarding stakeholder value or shielding employees from harm, reputation is the intangible asset companies cannot afford to lose.
Beazley's Reputational Risk insurance offering is aimed at B2C companies. It offers insurance for loss of profits and crisis consultancy as a result of a reputational crisis. The policy is 'all-risks', which caters for a key concern for many companies - it isn't the 'known unknowns' that solely represent the balance sheet risk, but also the 'unknown unknowns'.
In addition to the insurance component, Beazley has partnered with a leader in artificial intelligence to provide each Policyholder with access to an online portal providing real-time intelligence on emerging reputational threats. The platform uses machine learning to scrape open-source data to look for reputational influences on the subject company (and its brands), providing comparative analysis directly to the Policyholder with no human element in the way of the insights they need quickly.
The Reputational Risk insurance product provides the two elements required for company boards to show how seriously they take the threat of reputational damage; a straight-forward indemnity mechanism that supports profitability, and reputational signals intelligence available 24/7 from a leader in the field.
