A risk management information system (RMIS) is software in which a large company keeps all of its own insurance policies, claims and exposures in one place. An exposure is something on which the company could lose money, such as a factory, a fleet of trucks or the safety of its workers. An RMIS is used by the insured company, the buyer of insurance, not by the insurer.
A large company may hold hundreds of policies from many insurers, bought through several brokers. It may also have thousands of small claims a year, such as injuries at work or goods damaged in transit. The company's risk manager, the employee in charge of its insurance, needs to see all of this together.
An RMIS does three main jobs. It keeps a list of every site and asset with its value, often enriched with property risk data such as flood risk. It records every policy, with its insurer, its limit and its renewal date, often taken from the broker's insurance agency management system. And it tracks every claim and incident, from the first report to the final payment.
Imagine a cement company with 14 plants across India. Before renewal, the risk manager pulls the value of every plant from the RMIS, along with five years of claims. The report shows that two plants account for 60 per cent of all claims, mostly from machinery breakdowns. The company spends money on better maintenance at those two plants. It also uses the report to negotiate its premium with insurers.
An RMIS is close to a GRC platform, which records a company's risks and controls of every kind, such as cyber risk and regulatory risk. The difference is in focus. A GRC platform tracks all of a company's risks. An RMIS concentrates on the risks that are insured, or that lead to claims.
Insurers make two decisions about the same risks from the other side. Underwriting decides the price, and the insurer's claims team decides what to pay. An RMIS gives the buyer its own record of both, independent of any one insurer.