Kiwi Businesses Unprepared to Deal with Risks

Kiwi Businesses Unprepared to Deal with New And Emerging Risks

Auckland, 26 November, 2018 – Kiwi businesses are not as prepared as they should be to deal with their current and emerging risks, according to the seventh Marsh Survey of Risk.

The survey asked New Zealand organisations to identify their biggest current and emerging business risks and then state whether or not they had a plan in place to address them.

When it came to the top three biggest emerging risks, 23% of those surveyed said that they did not have a procedure in place to deal with cyber risk, 43% did not have plans in place to deal with increasing corporate governance requirements and 44% were similarly placed when it came to talent attraction and retention risks.

“Understanding what the emerging risks are that will impact your business plays a big role in helping to manage them”, says Marcus Pearson, Country Head, Marsh New Zealand. “Conducting a regular review of your risks and then putting a plan in place to help mitigate them, helps to secure the health of the organisation.”

While 95% of the respondents stated that they did have processes and procedures in place to manage the biggest current risk “destruction and disruption of assets by fire, flood or some other natural disaster / extreme weather event”, 45% of respondents did not have a plan in place to deal with business interruption due to supply chain failures.

“It was pleasing to see that organisations said that they were prepared to deal with natural disaster risk, especially given the increasing propensity of extreme weather events in New Zealand”, says Pearson. “An area that is often forgotten about however is what you will do if your suppliers are hit. Many organisations focus on what happens if their location is affected by an event but forget to consider what they would do their supply chain is impacted.”

The Marsh Survey of Risk also asked how entities manage their risks and whether they are reviewing risk more than they were two years ago.

The top risks, as identified in the survey, were –

The survey was completed by executives from 132 organisations across New Zealand – from SMEs to large corporates across a range of industries and organisational types.

A full copy of the survey can be downloaded from marsh.co.nz.

-ENDS-

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