The COVID-19 pandemic offers valuable lessons on risk and resilience. The pandemic revealed fault lines within many organisations, and degrees of systemic risk that few organisations previously considered. A lack of business continuity planning, the breakdown of supply chains, and overall stresses on business operations have brought to the forefront the need to reimagine approaches to managing enterprise risk.

Risks associated with the pandemic have changed the risk profile of the world. While the disease and pandemics don’t make it into the top five risks of the 2021 Airmic survey, risk connectivity means that every risk in the Airmic top ten has been and continues to be touched by the pandemic and its systemic effect.

Ransomware attacks have continued hitting the headlines, and has rapidly become the key cyber threat to organisations globally. This despite an increasingly active and disruptive geopolitical threat picture with individual organisations, global supply chains and critical infrastructure also increasingly targeted by state-linked actors.

A new guide, this addresses 12 frequently asked questions associated with D&O coverage, posed from a director’s perspective. The Guide aims to provide an insider’s guide to directors’ and officers’ liability insurance (D&O) for end users, and for board members in particular. Twelve questions make up the core of the guide, focusing on practical issues that commonly arise. Although designed to be answered by reference to specific policy wordings, the answers are intended to provide general guidance as to the likely position, subject to the significant caveat that no two D&O policies are the same.