Airmic Q&A: Tom Richardson, Zurich

As Zurich’s head of customer relationships, Richardson works with large multinationals buy insurance through the London Market with Zurich providing insurance solutions to 80% of the FTSE100.

What is the risk that everyone is talking about at Airmic?

There was a lot of discussion around cyber risk. It is one of the topics that Airmic have in their discussion panels for this conference. It is an interesting area because people don’t necessarily understand it very well. Certainly from the risks we are now facing from a cyber perspective are much less tangible, especially around brand reputation rather than a physical asset.

But even the physical asset of data itself and the danger of losing it is not very well understood. If you look at some of the things we have seen recently in terms of the way in which people are using social media creates a very different risk environment for customers. And of course the pace that it moves at is not something people are used to dealing with. I think it presents a very different environment from what we are used to and we need to look at risk differently.

What is the biggest risk that no one is talking about?

I think looking at risk holistically is something which is missing. As an industry, insurers are very good at chopping up risk into manageable sizes to try to deal with it effectively. What we are not so good at is looking at the risk from end to end. I think we have seen this with some of the losses that came out of Japan and Thailand following the catastrophes there, the impact of a relatively contained incident on a supply chain was not very well understood. The fact we can have an event in just a few square miles but cause an effect on the other side of the world. Plus, you don’t see it straight away because it takes a while for the supply chain issues to hit your end customers. I think looking at that end to end theory is something that we are not there yet at doing. It is the trick we are missing?

Who needs to make that happen?

I think it is about working more closely within the organisations that the risk managers work in. It is about engaging with supply chain guys, engaging with business people so that you understand how it works. And supply chains change. If you look at it one year and look again later in the year, it will be completely different. looking at a snapshot view isn’t enough. You have to keep going back and revising and refreshing.

What is the biggest risk you have taken personally?

 Jumping out of a plane! I have done it ten or so times now.