Overcoming risk blind spots for a real estate firm

The challenge

A large Australian firm in the real estate industry was focused mainly on its financial and treasury risks, due in part to its lack of an enterprise risk management (ERM) framework. This low ERM maturity level created blind spots in certain areas and the potential for risk control failures.

The solution

Marsh’s Advisory team undertook a comprehensive review using our Risk Focus Process to assess and categorize the organization’s major risks based on potential severity, evaluate the effectiveness of the existing risk management strategy and practices, identify gaps in insurance coverage, and support improvement of the insurance program based on identified risks.

The Risk Focus Process involved five key steps:

1. Due diligence and data collection to understand the company’s risks based on insurance data and develop key objectives.
2. Context-setting interviews with key personnel to identify critical risks and pain points, review existing risk management processes, and establish risk evaluation criteria.
3. Facilitated workshops with the company leadership team and others to review risk categories and create scenarios to evaluate the risks and assess the effectiveness of existing controls.
4. Analysis and report development as part of an insurability analysis.
5. Recommendations presented to key client leaders and stakeholders, including a review of key findings and next steps.

The results

The company gained a better understanding of its insurance program and its identified risks, and clarity on where to focus risk management investment. For example, the review resulted in 19 new risks being added to the firm’s risk register, of which 17 were not covered under its existing insurance program.