Zurich Financial Services Group today announced key enhancements to its Global Risk Assessment Module (GLORAM), an innovative tool designed to assist businesses around the world to cope with the management of risk. GLORAM is a fact-based management tool which simplifies the results of complex risk modeling in an easy to understand way. The tool has been further improved following the lessons learnt from the financial crisis and is designed to help businesses with strategic decision making and risk mitigation in the face of difficult and constantly changing business conditions.
“We are pleased to be able to announce this next stage in the evolution of GLORAM,” said Daniel Hofmann, Zurich’s Chief Economist. “These enhancements have been designed to help businesses build risk understanding that can be cascaded throughout an organization, ensuring strategic rationales are shared within the C-Suite and beyond. It gives senior executives a concrete, scaled illustration of risks, facilitating simple comparisons to be made across regions and providing a visual interpretation of how risk chains may apply.”
Insights gained on the basis of Zurich’s Global Risk Assessment Module have already provided a valuable contribution for the annual Global Risks Report*, which was recently published by the World Economic Forum. These insights have also been used by a number of global forums and think tanks to stimulate policy debate about the changing nature of world risk.
“GLORAM provides the potential to hedge risks in order to protect assets, earnings, operations, and personnel,” said Mr. Hofmann. “Most importantly, it enables a unique risk context to be established for major developments or plans, without taking up unreasonable amounts of senior management time and resources.”
“The financial crisis has reminded us rather painfully that risks cannot be analyzed in silos. We must broaden our perspective and accept that the definition of global risk goes beyond its geographical context. Zurich’s solution is to continue working closely with its customers to help create the presence of forethought, enabling them to calmly mitigate business threats wherever possible.”
* The latest Global Risks Report, produced by the World Economic Forum in partnership with the Global Risk Network and with participation of Zurich, was published on January 14, 2010. The report can be downloaded from www.weforum.org/grr
