By Guy Williams, Exposure Subject Matter Expert, Ebix Europe

“For exposure managers, one of the biggest gaps is lack of visibility. Businesses often can’t provide meaningful supply chain data, yet expect cover. That opacity makes exposure management harder for insurers, and crisis response harder for organisations – increasing the risk for everyone involved.” 

That was the point I made recently during a roundtable on crisis management and incident response. And if the last year has shown us anything, it’s that systemic, cascading events are no longer outliers – they are the new normal.

Cascading Risks in Action

Take April’s Iberian blackout. A €300m event that plunged parts of Spain and Portugal into chaos, it revealed the fragility of critical infrastructure and the knock-on effect on insurers. Claims surged simultaneously across business interruption, property, travel, and personal lines. For exposure teams, the challenge wasn’t capital adequacy – it was stitching together a coherent picture of risk in real time when information was fragmented, incomplete, or locked in silos.

Or look at the UK’s Marks & Spencer, Co-Op and JLR cyber attacks this year. They didn’t just impact each company’s own operations; they rippled across suppliers, logistics partners, and millions of customers. It was a supply chain visibility crisis as much as a cyber event. Insurers covering cyber, business interruption, and even liability lines suddenly faced interlinked claims with little transparency over where exposures started or ended.

Both events underline the same point: opacity amplifies chaos.

Legacy exposure management tools weren’t designed for these kinds of cascading scenarios. They work on static schedules and roll-ups, meaning by the time insurers have pieced together a picture, the event has already evolved. In the Iberian blackout, days mattered. In those recent cyber cases, hours did.

From Static to Dynamic Systems

Best practice today requires a shift from static to dynamic systems – a “living” exposure management environment. While no system can magically create data where none exists, a dynamic system can help you make sense of the data you do have, and allow for a faster, more effective response. That means:

  • Connected data: Policy and asset data linked with external feeds – from energy grid operators to cyber threat intelligence.
  • Real-time visibility: Exposure mapped as it changes, not at month-end.
  • Cross-line integration: The ability to see how a single disruption cascades across property, cyber, casualty, and specialty lines simultaneously.

Insurers, brokers, and regulators expect timely, transparent updates in a crisis. And systemic risk events are not going away. Blackouts, cyber outages, climate-driven infrastructure failures, and supply chain collapses are becoming more common. Insurers should be auditing their exposure data flows, identifying blind spots, and investing in dynamic, connected systems that can provide the kind of continuous improvements in visibility and event tracking that the modern world requires. Because when the next systemic event arrives – and it will – the real test won’t be “can we pay?” but “can we see?”