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By DAN REYNOLDS, senior editor of Risk & Insurance®

VANCOUVER---Of course as a broker you want to do all things well. You want to be a great advocate for your client in an insurance transaction, you want to be tremendous in customer service and you want to be a valued strategic advisor.

Mark Moreland, an executive vice president, risk management services, with Kansas City-based Lockton sat down with Risk & Insurance® on May 2 to give us his views on these and other topics at the Westin Grand Hotel in Vancouver during the insurance festival that is the Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc's (RIMS) annual conference.

In the tension between the triple focus of the transaction, service and strategic advising, Moreland said, it was in the area of strategic engagement that Lockton was seeing the most demand from risk management clients, given the uncertainties of this economic climate.

It's by helping to align the goals of the risk management department with those of the company over all that Lockton sees a chance these days to give its clients some of the greatest value and enable risk managers to have much more of a say in a company's dialogue.

"We call it strategic engagement because you can articulate to the C-suite exactly how the activities within your group are going to influence the company's overall business strategy," Moreland said.

One of those strategies that companies may focus on is cost-cutting. Risk management has every right to be a part of that conversation, Moreland said.

"Almost every company has a cost-cutting initiative, but they express it differently," he said.

"'One piece of that is how does the risk management strategy plug into that? How does this risk management strategy influence that objective of cost-cutting?"

"Another one may be around (that) we need to make sure about the preservation of our balance sheet. So, one of the strategies of our risk management may be to make sure that we have an exhaustive listing of all of our risks and how they may impact the organization,' he said.

"We are putting a lot of time and energy into making sure that we are doing that," Moreland said.

May 3, 2011

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