Zurich to pioneer strategic business risk modeling

Zurich - Zurich Financial Services Group (Zurich) 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
Notes to Editors:
About Zurich’s Global Risk Assessment Module

Following its successful launch in 2009, the tool has been expanded to include additional risk factors and also adapted from a tool focused solely on public policy makers to a tool that is also applicable for corporate customers. GLORAM now references 158 countries and 66 global risks through sophisticated modeling, using six analytical risk categories (economic, geopolitical, environmental, health, technological, and risks to the business environment). It generates a series of objective, dynamic ‘at a glance’ visuals, which enable intuitive analysis of risks arising from unfamiliar sources or territories.

Detailed information about GLORAM as well as static output, showing the clustering and relative positioning of countries with the respect to certain risks, can be downloaded from www.zurich.com/media.

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Zurich Financial Services Group (Zurich) is an insurance-based financial services provider with a global network of subsidiaries and offices in North America and Europe as well as in Asia Pacific, Latin America and other markets. Founded in 1872, the Group is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. It employs approximately 60,000 people serving customers in more than 170 countries.