An Empirical Study on Enterprise Risk Management in Insurance

Abstract

Enterprise Risk Management (hereinafter referred as “ERM”) interests a wide range of professions (e.g., actuaries, corporate financial managers, underwriters, accountants, and internal auditors), however, current ERM solutions often do not cover all risks because they are motivated by the core professional ethics and principles of these professions who design and administer them. In a typical insurance company all such professions work as a group to achieve the overriding corporate objectives. Risk can be defined as factors which prevent an organization in achieving its objectives and risks affect organizations holistically. The management of risk in isolation often misses its big picture. It is argued here that a holistic management of risk is logical and is the ultimate destination of all general management activities. Moreover, risk management should not be a separate function of the business process; rather, managing downside risk and taking the opportunities from upside risk should be the key management goals. Consequently, ERM is believed as an approach to risk management, which provides a common understanding across the multidisciplinary groups of people of the organization. ERM should be proactive and its focus should be on the organizations future. Organizations often struggle to see and understand the full risk spectrum to which they are exposed and as a result they may fail to identify the most vulnerable areas of the business. The effective management of risk is truly an interdisciplinary exercise grounded on a holistic framework. Whatever name this new type of risk management is given (the literature refers to it by diverse names, such as Enterprise Risk Management, Strategic Risk Management, and Holistic Risk Management) the ultimate focus is management of all significant risks faced by the organization. Risk is an integral part of each and every action of the organization in the sense that an organization is a basket of contracts associated with risk (in terms of losses and opportunities). The idea of ERM is simple and logical, but implementation is difficult. This is because its involvement with a wide stakeholder community, which in turn involves groups from different disciplines with different beliefs and understandings. Indeed, ERM needs theories (which are the interest of academics) but a grand theory of ERM (which invariably involves an interdisciplinary concept) is far from having been achieved.