Reputation Risk Solutions

Anger, disappointment, and surging public humiliation of companies and their directors.

It takes guts to run a business—and to oversee a business—profitably, ethically, and mindfully. The reward can be great, but so is the risk. Especially today.

C-suite and board members guided by their personal moral convictions and legal counsel are knowingly risking their personal reputations. Today they’re also unapologetically looking for safety armor for their firms and themselves.

No matter what course of action firms take, in our increasingly chaotic economic and political business environment, some customers, employees, regulators or investors will feel betrayed. Acting directly or through professional activists, they are holding corporate leadership in a double bind—liable for actual losses and culpable for alleged future losses. D&O liability insurance can help cover actual losses, but not what may happen in the future. Nor for the damages incurred by individual directors tried for culpability in the court of public opinion, where unlike the court of law, there are few rules. 

This is reputation risk—now less predictable, governable, or manageable.

Personal risk in a corporate crisis is back. Strategies to preserve financial resilience after a crisis may lead to painful board exit conversations and impair board members’ personal reputations. Board members “voted off the island” will lose compensation and, more significantly, future opportunities. Compensation clawbacks are no longer unthinkable. Only Steel City Re’s Side R^® D&O parametric reputation insurance, a companion to D&O liability insurance sides A, B, and C, will cover these costs and add to resilience.

Benefits to companies that are resilient include customers buying, not boycotting; employees working, not fleeing; investors buying, not selling; lenders adjusting interest rates down, not up; regulators deferring, not enforcing; and social license holders acquiescing, not protesting. But even in resilient firms, stakeholders may still demand a “fall guy.”

Steel City Re’s strategic tools help risk managers build corporate resilience by forecasting reputation risk and protecting enterprise value. We help companies, c-suites, and boardrooms mitigate personal costs—armor—with strategic Side R^® D&O parametric reputation insurance.