For a long time, corporate risk management has been a fragmented exercise. Cyber is handled by IT, property by facilities, climate barely handled at all. That model is breaking down. Increasingly, the question boards are asking their brokers and insurers is not simply "are we covered?" but "how do we stack up against our peers?"
New research from Beazley, surveying 3,500 leaders across the US, UK, Canada and Europe, found that risk silos are fading, with 94% of global businesses planning to build resilience through insurance and risk management in 2026.
The survey indicated that environmental, geopolitical, technological and board-level exposures are no longer viewed in isolation but increasingly merging into interconnected pressures.
That shift toward portfolio-level thinking and industry benchmarking is emerging as one of the defining trends of the current market, according to Yvonne Moore (pictured), head of Zurich Resilience Solutions.
"Rather than it being quite fragmented and perhaps a line-of-business or risk-specific approach, there's more acknowledgement that we need to look at risk at a total organizational level," she told Insurance Business. "Customers are quite excited about understanding how they stack up against some of their peers."
Brokers are reorienting around this demand. In its Q4 2025 market overview, Aon said the industry is seeing "a clear shift from transactional broking to holistic, portfolio-based risk advisory — using data and analytics to optimize total cost of risk, integrate alternative solutions, and strengthen resilience across the entire program."
The broker noted that advanced analytics, benchmarking and scenario modeling now enable more precise views of volatility and total cost of risk, which can be used to challenge historic program designs and stress test earnings at risk.
For Moore, the appeal of benchmarking is rooted in prevention rather than recovery. "We talk a lot about risk transfer, but when you're relying on risk transfer, the worst has already happened," she said. "The key… is how do we stop that in the first place?"
The premise is that comparative data, drawn from decades of loss experience across a sector, lets a manufacturer or construction firm see where it sits relative to common industry exposures, and where to direct mitigation spend.
Nowhere is the case for benchmarking clearer than in cyber, where confidence and capability are dangerously out of step, particularly among smaller firms. Moore noted that maturity "isn't quite there" in the mid-market and SME space, and that cyber "isn't one person's job… it's something that needs to be dealt with through all layers of the organization."
In the US, while 71% of SMBs believe they are prepared to handle cyber incidents, only 22% report having an advanced cybersecurity posture, according to BDEmerson's 2026 analysis.
The exposure is also growing: roughly 43% of all cyberattacks target small businesses, yet 47% of firms with fewer than 50 employees have no cybersecurity budget at all, and only 17% of US small businesses carry cyber insurance, according to figures aggregated by StationX from Verizon, Hiscox and other sources.
The problem is compounded by interdependence. Third-party risk has doubled to 30% of all breaches, particularly affecting manufacturing supply chains. Because every organization carries a different web of vendor dependencies, Moore argued, generic assessments fall short and benchmarking adds value.
Benchmarking is also reshaping how the market handles climate, a risk Moore worries has "fallen a little by the wayside" as cyber and geopolitics dominate boardroom attention. Here the insurance sector's analytical assets become a selling point: catastrophe models and decades of loss data allow insurers to build forward-looking scenarios testing how prolonged drought or extreme rainfall might cascade through a company's operations and supply chain.
The common thread across these perils is a move from isolated, reactive coverage toward integrated, comparative resilience. For Moore, brokers sit at the center of it, and she framed risk as the one interest the broker, client and insurer all share.
"It's in everyone's interests to recognize and understand risk and then appreciate what actions can be identified and put in place to manage it," she said. "The client needs to be at the forefront, and the broker is working on their behalf."
