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Reputational risks emerging as top priority     (Copyright Thompson’s World Insurance News     Not to be redistributed by individual recipients.)     Reputational exposure is emerging as a primary concern for risk managers, an annual report from a UK trade group shows.     A third of those polled by the Association of Insurance and Risk Managers regard it as a great or very great cause for concern.     The subject is now a greater priority than insurer solvency — the issue that dominated much of the past two years and which 22% still regard as a significant worry.     Ensuring insurance losses are paid continues to cause difficulties, with 27% of respondents having had a claim declined in the past two years. Only 59% rated their lead insurer’s speed to pay as good or very good.     Level of concern about the compliance of international insurance programs has risen in the past 12 months for 43% of respondents, with no one seeing an improvement.     There has been considerable discussion within AIRMIC about the near-impossibility of ensuring that insurance programs are internationally compliant.     Failure to get it right can result in fines, non-payment of claims, gaps in cover, increased taxation and bad publicity.     The survey also found that risk management resources had been squeezed during the recession, with 51% reporting lower departmental budgets, 26% staff reductions and 38% lower bonuses or pay. At the same time, they are being asked to do more and 53% report that their responsibilities have broadened while resources are cut.     AIRMIC members also see the soft insurance market running out of steam in all their main classes of business with more of them anticipating rises than falls in the coming year.     John Hurrell, the association’s chief executive, told Thompson’s that the most worrying and surprising finding of the survey was that 27% of respondents had experienced a claim denial in the last two years, of which one-third were due to non-disclosure.     “In this professional group of large insurance buyers, this is an unacceptable failure rate — hence our further work on the issue of non-disclosure against the background of the outdated 1906 Act.”     More in our June 28 2010 edition        Thompson’s World Insurance News P.O. Box 1027,  Waterloo, Ontario,  Canada  N2J 4S1 Tel: 519-579-2500 Fax: 519-745-7321 mpub@sympatico.ca THOMPSON’S WORLD INSURANCE NEWS , Canada’s only independent weekly for p&c insurance professionals, has been the industry’s most trusted news source since 1988.