Risky Science Podcast · Risk Market News

Greenland, Venezuela and the New Political Risk Model Reality with WTW’s Sam Wilkin

·47 min·1 clip

Political risk is no longer background noise. Chris Westfall starts with a business problem: Greenland, Ukraine, and Venezuela now belong in planning and investment decisions. The practical question is what to do when decision makers do not have clean empirical inputs but still need a way to organize uncertainty. Samuel Wilkin takes the modeling problem seriously. He says political risk models can get better when conflicts produce more accessible event data, as Ukraine has through political violence reporting. But he does not oversell it. Models used for pricing, limits, or bias control can still miss abrupt changes in political risk levels. That jumpiness is the hard part. Wilkin keeps modeling in the toolkit, but the burden moves away from precise forecasts and toward better scenario thinking. Ukraine is the clearest example. Longer conflicts create more data, and that gives modelers more to work with, even while the patterns keep changing. More data helps. It does not hand anyone certainty. The conversation keeps circling prolonged, open ended, simultaneous conflicts, where traditional risk tools start to look a little tidy for the world they are meant to describe. Gray zone attacks make it messier. Covert sabotage and infrastructure disruption sit somewhere between war and peace, which makes them awkward to model and insure. Wilkin's management answer is organizational: map exposures and build governance that brings political factors into decisions across teams without drowning people in meetings. The useful takeaway is not a perfect political risk model. It is making geopolitical awareness part of how a company operates.

As heard by us

A sober look at political risk as a frontline business problem.

The episode frames political risk as a day-to-day business issue, with Samuel Wilkin of Willis Towers Watson arguing that Greenland, Ukraine, and Venezuela belong in the same wider headwind facing executives and investors.

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You want a practical read on political risk when the headlines stop being enough.

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