How leading boards turn risk management into growth

Insurers working with emerging technology, new markets and infrastructure are a source of forward-looking, cross-industry signals. These provide insight to manage risk and build resilience to enable growth.

Presented by Liberty

The hardest risks for any board to plan around are the ones with no track record. Risks that have no history to draw on or no comparable loss data to price against.

Cyberthreats, Al, energy transition and the data centre boom mean directors are being asked to navigate a risk landscape that shifts faster than any annual renewal cycle.

The organisations getting ahead of this shift are treating insurance as a strategic input. They use it as a source of intelligence, a growth enabler, and develop an ongoing conversation with insurers rather than leaving it as a once-a-year transaction.

John McCabe GAICD, President Australia at commercial insurer Liberty, says many directors are finding that landscape "genuinely unsettling", not because the risks themselves are new, but because so many of them are unprecedented in scale and speed.

"There's always something coming over the horizon," he says. "Where once boards dealt with well-understood, homogeneous risks for motor vehicle cover or property, today's agenda looks very different," he says.

Multi-layer risk

The current data centre boom is an example of what looks, on the surface, like a straightforward construction risk, but quickly becomes something else entirely once a facility goes live.

Power demand, back-up diesel generation, cooling infrastructure and community noise complaints create a risk profile that barely resembles the one insurers priced at the build stage.

Rather than waiting for loss experience to accumulate before extending cover, Liberty's risk engineers and claims specialists work alongside underwriters to identify where genuine, insurable value can be created, even in the absence of precedent.

"You don't know what you don't know," says McCabe. "And there can be risks within a risk."

Staying "constantly curious" about what is developing in a given sector allows Liberty to work with companies and their insurance brokers to extend meaningful cover into spaces that a purely retrospective, data-driven underwriting model might exclude.

Engaging with imperfect data In Australia, Liberty is a branch of Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, an Australian-registered and Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority-regulated insurer. The Australian entity forms part of the Global Risk Solutions division of the Liberty Mutual Group, a Fortune Global 500 insurer based in the US.

Liberty partners with insurance brokers to bring value and solutions to 25,000 of Australia's most significant business and government organisations, including 79 ASX 100 listed companies right through to small, privately owned businesses.

The fully integrated team of underwriters, risk engineers, credit analysts and claims professionals can draw on more than 110 years of experience evaluating, pricing and managing risks for almost all types of assets - from shopping centres and oil rigs to power plants, office towers and company boards.

For boards trying to move into new markets or back novel ventures, a willingness to engage with imperfect data can be the difference between a growth initiative proceeding or stalling.

At Liberty, claims specialists, underwriters and risk engineers are structured to sit together, rather than in separate silos. Their combined knowledge and global reach create a potential early-warning system for clients. "The claims and engineering teams see things developing in the market fast, often before the trend shows up in formal loss data," says McCabe.

That intelligence flows to clients through broker relationships. For example, if Liberty has seen a cluster of losses in tunnelling projects across the construction sector, that pattern is raised with brokers ahead of a client's renewal.

This can prompt a conversation about whether existing cover and risk controls are adequate before a loss occurs, rather than after.

"This predictive intelligence is a fundamental part of a BCP (business continuity plan), a growth enabler for ventures with no precedent or loss history, and as part of an integrated view of enterprise risk," says McCabe.

There is a reframing of the insurer, not simply as a counterparty that pays claims. Loss data on its own is inherently backward-looking. More value comes from triangulating claims, engineering and underwriting insight to build foresight of what else might happen.

Resilience planning and risk transfer

Working closely with insurance brokers to develop new products, Liberty's coverage becomes a growth enabler for ventures with no precedent or loss history. This integrated view of enterprise risk has recently created a product that provides protection against the inherent complexities that come with mergers and acquisitions activity. Liberty Acquisition Protect™ covers both historic and future risks of the acquired business.

Because risk no longer arrives in neat, single-line categories, property, energy, reputational or regulatory risks now converge in the same asset, sometimes in the same incident. Cyber exposure compounds this, cutting across data, operations, regulatory obligation and reputation simultaneously.

As climate change intensifies, so does the urgency for insurers to reassess traditional models and adopt innovative strategies that can mitigate losses and build long-term resilience. Regulators in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia now require insurers to integrate climate risks into solvency assessments and board-level reporting.

Being prepared is not a new phenomenon. Organisations have long-established fire and evacuation procedures to ensure business continuity.

McCabe says boards now need an equivalent discipline for climate change, a ransomware attack or a major data breach. However, resilience planning and risk transfer need to be designed together, not treated as separate conversations between different committees.

Capital implications of strong risk management

Businesses that can demonstrate they have genuinely thought through their risk profile and have appropriate cover or alternative risk-transfer mechanisms in place can be more attractive to investors.

"Public companies, in particular, have regular opportunities to communicate this progress to the market," says McCabe.

"Visible, proactive risk management builds exactly the kind of confidence that shapes where investment capital ultimately flows."

When the insurer relationship with the board becomes closer to a strategic partnership than a transactional one, it puts organisations in the best place to weather risks nobody has fully anticipated yet.

Liberty's specialist risk-engineering capability and cross-line claims data put it in a position to be the partner that makes this shift possible. 

Find out how Liberty's global reach, financial strength and local authority can help your organisation.

This article first appeared as 'How boards are reframing insurance' in the Oct/Nov 2026 issue of Company Director Magazine.