At many organizations a gap remains between risk managers and senior leaders regarding whether risk management’s role should be primarily defensive or be more anticipatory, according to 2012 Excellence in Risk Management survey.

Published by Marsh and the Risk and Insurance Management Society, The 2012 Excellence in Risk Management survey gathered the views of 1,322 risk managers, top executives, and others. Although primarily from North America, respondents represented companies with headquarters in nearly 50 countries.

Among the key findings:

• Fully 85 percent of risk managers said that leadership’s expectations of them have increased over the past three years. But that percentage dropped to 71 percent among C-Suite respondents.
• A majority of C-Suite respondents (51 percent) reported that adopting a formal strategic risk management process would better integrate risk issues with the short- and long-term strategic planning goals of the organization.
• More than one-third of respondents said that the economic downturn helped increase the use of analytics in risk management
• More than half of C-Suite respondents said their organizations do not measure total cost of risk (TCOR), up from 36 percent who said so in 2011.