A risk in business terms is the potential for a loss of value, either realised value e.g. an asset/contract degrading or unrealised e.g. a potential contract or asset degrading. Risk intelligence aims to provide information on:

• The risk type – what is the risk, and what information describes it
• Likelihood – the chances the risk will create a loss of value
• Impact – how much value will be lost if the risk is realised

• Adverse Media Monitoring – searching for negative mentions of your (or your customers) organisation to better understand external threats.
• Customer Risk Intelligence – understanding the threats to revenue or partnerships with existing customers of your organisation.
• Partner Risk / Supply Chain Risk – conducting due diligence and monitoring for emerging risks around your partners and suppliers.
• Sector Risk – Understanding broad changes that will affect your, or your customers as a larger group, for example, changes to social sentiment driven by news events.
• Credit Risk – Conduct due diligence and monitor for changes in risk around customers to whom you have provided a line of credit or lent money directly.
• Portfolio Risk – undertaking due diligence and monitoring portfolios of investments to ensure you are aware of risks and can proactively react to them.
• Regulatory Risk – Risk created through legal or geopolitical changes that could signal future regulatory challenges, such as the change of government to a less import-friendly regime.
• Geo-Political Risk – risks related to geo-political events, such as conflicts or destabilisation of systems of government.

Risk Intelligence is essential to businesses as it allows them to take a more proactive approach to negative change, often hidden from them by bad actors or unexpected by the majority.

Risk Intelligence provides the insights required to have a more proactive and accurate risk management programme. Allowing organisations to plan and take appropriate mitigating steps more easily.

AI-powered risk intelligence platforms can significantly reduce the effort required to uncover, analyse and take action around risks, without over-burdening existing teams with more information and tasks.

Risk intelligence can benefit any part of the organisation that is exposed to changes that are outside of their control, from a strategic to operational level. For example:

• Helping growth teams plan which markets to enter exit
• Helping sales teams understand which accounts could change
• Helping financial teams to price credit or investment
• Helping procurement & partnership teams to pick better partners and react faster to changes

The most valuable Risk Intelligence is often the “unknown unknowns” as such the broadest possible set of surface and deep web data sources should be selected to find the earliest and most hidden warning signals. This generally requires the use of AI tools to reduce the burden on teams to parse the information.