As risks become more interconnected, businesses need more than financial protection. Libby Benet, CEO of AXA XL Risk Advisory,explores how specialist expertise, data, technology and claims insights can help organizations act earlier, strengthen resilience, and protect insurability.
Based on years of experience, I’m fiercely proud of the way our industry steps in at times of great need for our clients. And while an insurance payment can fund recovery from physical and financial damage, it can’t always restore lost trust, or protect disrupted jobs, or reverse the impact on a community.
That’s why resilience matters. It helps businesses prevent avoidable losses, prepare for disruption, and recover more effectively when an event can’t be prevented. In doing so, it protects people, reputation, operations, and future value. The combination of resilience to future threats and the financial protection and security offered by an insurance policy adds up to a comprehensive risk management strategy.
Building resilience before a crisis
Insurers have deep experience in both risk and crisis management. We help clients prevent avoidable losses and prepare for risks that can’t be eliminated. When disruption happens, our role is to limit its impact and help clients resume operations as quickly as possible. The quality of a company’s response can determine whether a serious event remains manageable or develops into a more damaging crisis.
Take, for example, a business that received risk consulting recommendations but did not act on them before suffering a major fire a few months later. The insured loss was significant, but the wider consequences were even more far-reaching: employees and the local community were affected, environmental damage occurred, and the company’s reputation was severely damaged, making recovery more difficult and costly.
This example underlines an important lesson about resilience. It cannot simply be thought of as a policy on a shelf, waiting to be consulted when the worst occurs. Prevention, informed by the expert knowledge of risk consultants, data and analytics, has long been central to how insurers help clients understand and reduce risk. What’s changed is the urgency and scale of the need: resilience must be considered up front and built before a crisis, not during one.
For boards and executive teams, preparedness means using realistic scenario testing to understand potential consequences, investing to address vulnerabilities before disruption occurs, and considering resilience in strategic decisions. All this needs to happen before a crisis event. The objective is not only to understand the risks the business carries, but also to know how well it is prepared to respond.
Seeing risk across the enterprise
Resilient businesses understand that events can’t always be avoided. Instead, they work to anticipate the impact of disruption, identify the weakest links in their supply chains and operations, and create contingencies.
“By protecting people, operations and reputation, resilient business are better positioned to pursue future growth with confidence”
Mindset is important, too. Creating the conditions for colleagues to adapt, remain flexible, and make strategic decisions during a high-impact event is not easy. My experience as Chief Underwriting Officer for Cyber, and later as Global Chief Underwriting Officer at AXA XL, showed me how quickly a threat in one area can spread across operations, supply chains, and markets. No business can anticipate every threat or maintain specialist expertise across the full range of changing and emerging risks in a global economy. And that is where we can help.
That breadth of risk consulting and specialist expertise can help close the gap. Our teams advise on a wide range of risks, not only those that may appear immediately relevant to a business in a particular sector. For example, when a client purchases a property policy from us, we can draw on perspectives from political risk and credit, mergers and acquisitions, climate, and other specialties. Together, those experts may identify an overlooked exposure and recommend appropriate action.
AXA XL Risk Advisory helps clients identify changing exposures earlier and helps clients to prioritize action by combining our risk engineering and specialist expertise across several domains of traditional physical and liability risk along with our corporate intelligence, cybersecurity, crisis response expertise, and, of course, our claims experience. Together, these capabilities provide visibility across locations and portfolios, interpret emerging signals in the context of a client’s operations, and show where early intervention can make the greatest difference.
Preparing for interconnected risks
AXA’s 2026 Future Risks Report shows that the risks considered most important by experts and the public are interconnected, including climate change, geopolitical instability, cyberattacks, and artificial intelligence. Crucially, 85% of experts and the general public say the most worrisome risks could be partially avoided through prevention measures.
The COVID-19 pandemic made this interdependence of risks impossible to ignore. A disruption that began as a public health emergency quickly affected operations, workforces, and supply chains around the world, demonstrating why businesses must prepare for risks that cross traditional boundaries.
Cyber provides another clear example. A threat can spread within seconds, with artificial intelligence increasing the speed and scale of attacks. The lesson applies well beyond cyber: when risks spread across an enterprise, the ability to anticipate their wider effects and coordinate a response becomes a key differentiator.
Making resilience a leadership priority
Businesses typically organize risk by function, with different people responsible for areas such as operations, finance, technology, supply chains, and reputation. Crises do not respect those boundaries.
Boards and executive teams therefore have a critical role in connecting the dots, ensuring that risk information is shared across functions, decisions reflect the full range of potential consequences, and accountability remains clear.
And by protecting people, operations, and reputation, resilient businesses are better positioned to maintain essential services, support the communities and economies that depend on them, and pursue future growth with confidence. That is the wider value of prevention.
The powerful combination of risk engineering and specialist expertise, data, intelligence and technology, coupled with our experience in assisting clients through events and the claims insights we have gleaned along the way, enable us to support our clients over the entire lifecycle of a risk. Bringing all this together helps our clients make better decisions about risk, building long-term resilience in a fast-changing world.
