Bespoke Risk Scoring

Expert insight and data customized to deliver risk scores tailored to your specific metrics

Our standard set of quantitative country risk scores provides a comprehensive picture of risk across over 211 countries. However, these standard metrics do not always cover the full range of country and economic risks that you are considering for your business or the specific area of interest that you want to integrate into your model. We then can deploy our subject-matter and methodology experts to develop a bespoke score index for you.

What you get from risk scoring

Categories of risk specific to your business or sector
Geographies specific to your operations such as countries, cities, regions, border areas
A scale or range in line with your internal metrics
Platform or formatting specific to your processes
Integration with your internal models or processes

What is our risk scoring methodology?

We leverage our expert country risk analysts and economists, as well as human source network. We define a methodology that is specific to your requirements and consistent with our overall approach to risk scoring. We leverage our existing risk scoring infrastructure to build a complete risk scoring system based on standing and bespoke research. We consult with you, the client, to ensure that our definitions and parameters are in line with your requirements and will integrate into your processes.

Project examples

We have extensive experience working directly with our clients to define the parameters most useful to providing inputs into their quantitative evaluations of country and economic risk. Previous projects have covered – sector specific scores, city-level scores, reputational risk scores.

Bespoke security risk scoring for a global energy company in over a hundred designated locations

Issue: A major oil and gas company’s global security team had limited in-house resources and was stretched further by having to assimilate inputs from different intelligence providers – all on a different threat scale and according to different categories – to then deliver a company view on the global threat picture.

Impact: The country risk consulting team was able to recalibrate our weightings and risk score definitions to speak to the client’s in-house risk scoring scale, threat categories, and specific locations. On a monthly basis we deliver customized risk scores for over a hundred designated locations across the world and include qualitative justifications for any changes in the threat levels from the previous month.

Bespoke global risk model for an extractives company

Issue: A global mining company was struggling to design a standardized approach to rate country and subnational risk. Business lines and functional areas all took a different approach to risk; used their own scale; and monitored risk ad hoc. There was little to no liaison or joint approaches between teams. As a result, the country risk picture across a global portfolio was unclear and lacked ownership.

Impact: Our quantitative risk experts partnered with the head of the country risk council to populate a comprehensive country risk model on a bespoke platform with quantitative risk scores for over 180 countries. We drew on the existing portfolio of country risk scores from our Connect™ platform and adjusted and weighted these to the client’s definitions of threat types. In addition, a set of bespoke mining and human rights scores were generated drawing upon our global network of country risk and sector experts, as well as scores for specific regions of interest. We continue to support the client with ongoing updates to the scores and dedicated support from the consulting group for ad hoc requests, plus the client has direct access to the country risk analysts for quick turnaround questions.

Tailored risk scoring for financial institutions

Issue: Financial clients often are trying to run internal pricing or risk aggregation models that are driven by numerous inputs. They use our country risk scores to supplement these models and calibrate them for the political, operational or security environment. These clients require external input both for an independent perspective, but also for coverage of small countries or territories for which they do not have sufficient in-house resources.

Impact:: Our quantitative risk experts work with the client’s internal risk definitions, the larger goal of the internal model, and the characteristics of the other inputs into the model to assess the needs of the client and supplement their existing infrastructure. We map their definitions to our country risk score definitions, and then work with the client to assign the appropriate scale, weighting, and exceptional rules to the risk scores. The client can then import this into their internal model. We are also involved in the testing process for the results of these models, to help the client maintain continuity as they transition to the new system set up.