Reputational Risk

We are in the midst of an ethical crisis. That´s why you should keep in mind what is reputation risk and how it can affect your business.

Boards and executives need more precise quantification of reputation risk, how it is evolving and the negative impact posed by certain issues, to support better decision making and the balancing of risk versus reward.

Risks to your business’ reputation are a constant threat from both external and internal factors – but with the right plan, enterprise risks can be managed and the negative effects mitigated. Here are some of our top tips for how to save your brand from an avoidable crisis.

Reputation has far more grounding in perception than in reality – perceptions held by the various stakeholders linked to an organisation –and is not necessarily the truth of that organisation. How others see it can have a far greater impact than what it does, when it comes to forming that reputation.

Corporate Affairs is most often the function being asked to provide reputation intelligence to the rest of the business. This presents an enormous opportunity – if reputation is the biggest concern to the leadership of the business, the department which is responsible for providing reputation intelligence should see a commensurate increase in its status within the business.

How can something as arguably abstract and intangible as reputational risk be quantified? More specifically, how can organisations put a price on their reputation? And, even more complex, how can that value be effectively rolled into an insurance policy that is both attractive to the insurance company, and worth the paper it’s written on to the holder of the policy?

Using the TalkTalk cyber attack as an example, this case study sets out to answer the following three questions:

1. What is the measurable impact of data breaches on corporate reputation?
2. How have data breaches affected different companies – is the effect uniform?
3. What are the variables that affect how damaging a data breach is to reputation and what can companies control to limit reputational damage?

This case study looks at the issues that Boeing has experienced over the past three years to draw a clear quantitative differentiation between a risk and a crisis. The intention is to help organisations better understand where they sit on this spectrum, when internally it may feel like every negative issue is a crisis and develop response strategies accordingly.

What is reputation risk, how do you recognise it, avoid it, manage it, and mitigate it? A guide to handling threats to your organisation’s reputation, and the consequences of not doing so

The financial services sector is experiencing a period of intense disruption and evolution. Financial institutions are grappling with challenges ranging from automation, the rise of fintech and a pronounced shift in the ways in which consumers expect to access services.

According to Accenture’s Digital Banking Tracker, neobanks operating in the U.K. added more than 6 million new customers in the second half of 2019, ending the year with 19.6 million customers globally.

In our introductory blog outlining the concept of reputational risk insurance, and how it could be employed to mitigate the effects of reputational damage, we concluded that, at the centre of any reputational risk policy must sit a real-time reputational risk quantification. Only through the use of such a framework, in concert with the efforts of insurance specialists and communications teams, can realistic policies be created to indemnify organisations against reputational damage.

As the year draws to a close, the media is full of predictions for 2020 and reviews of the accuracy (or otherwise!) of last year’s predictions for 2019. Much of this is based on opinion; experience combined with an ability, real or imagined, to read the runes of what has gone before and to apply it to future scenarios.