Specialist insurer Beazley has announced an enhancement to its reputational risk insurance policy. The enhancement provides artificial intelligence-enabled tools to help policyholders more effectively control their corporate brand and reputation.
Underwritten by the Beazley-led Custodian Consortium at Lloyd’s of London, the policy’s coverage includes crisis management services to minimise reputational damage and business interruption coverage to protect against the impact of a downturn in revenue.
The policy now includes a subscription to Polecat Intelligence, a provider of reputational, economic, social, and governance (ESG), and risk intelligence. The platform uses online and social data to assess an organisation’s reputational and performance profile, and benchmarks its performance against competitors. The Polecat platform will be available 24/7 to policyholders through a web portal.
Beazley’s reputational risk product is designed for consumer-facing companies in a range of industries, including leisure, hospitality, technology, manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare. Subject to licensing, the policy is available to businesses globally.
“Rising public anger, intolerance and lower trust in authority are contributing to a more volatile reputational environment,” said George Beattie, head of incubation underwriting at Beazley. “The exposure of the public to manipulative social media content compounds the difficulty business leaders have in meeting their fiduciary responsibility to minimise balance-sheet risk and maintain stakeholder value. This solution helps companies in two key ways. Firstly, it provides executives with reputational insights at a time when many companies are the target of stakeholder action relating to perceived failures to act on emerging risks. Secondly, it helps companies mitigate the risk to profitability posed by reputational crises by paying for loss of profit and providing immediate access to crisis consultancy services.”
“Global companies and their executives are experiencing significantly more scrutiny over their conduct and risk management through both social media and growing social activism,” said James Lawn, co-CEO of Polecat Intelligence. “Organisations that seek to actively manage their reputations and ESG profiles by harnessing data and market intelligence are more strongly positioned to anticipate and manage emerging threats. Access to the Polecat platform gives Beazley reputational risk policyholders more control over managing and appraising their corporate reputations, benchmarking objectively against their peers, and understanding the material implications of what their stakeholders are saying.”
“Reputational risk is a fast-evolving issue, and a growing priority for many businesses around the world,” said Trevor Maynard, head of innovation at Lloyd’s. “We launched the Lloyd’s Product Innovation Facility to support new, innovative, and brave products such as this reputational risk policy, and I’m thrilled to see such fantastic risk-sharing collaboration in our market. By forming partnerships with our peers and Polecat, we’re able to use a blend of AI, benchmarking, and industry intelligence to proactively support our customers in protecting their reputation.”
