Rethinking Risk and Resilience in North America's Middle Market

Rethinking Risk and Resilience in North America's Middle Market
October 27, 2025 6 mins

Rethinking Risk and Resilience in North America's Middle Market

Rethinking Risk & Resilience in North America's Middle Market

The 2025 Global Risk Management Survey shows North America’s middle market turning awareness into action. Cyber leads; talent, liquidity, and competition rise. Leaders quantify exposure, govern AI, and invest where resilience delivers the strongest ROI.

The latest findings from Aon’s Global Risk Management Survey reveal how North America's middle market1 leaders are transforming risk awareness into confident, decisive action.

Current Risks: Pressure Points Close to Home

Cyber attack or data breach remains the top-ranked risk, mirroring global trends. But the rest of the North American middle market risk profile reflects unique operational, financial and people-related pressures that set this segment apart.

Top 10 Current Risks – North America Middle Market:
  1. Cyber Attack or Data Breach
  2. Economic Slowdown or Slow Recovery
  3. Failure to Attract or Retain Top Talent
  4. Regulatory or Legislative Changes
  5. Cash Flow or Liquidity Risk
  6. Increasing Competition
  7. Business Interruption
  8. Workforce Shortage
  9. Damage to Brand or Reputation
  10. Supply Chain or Distribution Failure

This risk picture is shaped by limited organizational bandwidth and heightened exposure. People challenges, from attraction and retention to frontline shortages, rank significantly higher for the middle market than the enterprise segment.

Among North American middle market respondents, 37.8% identified Failure to Attract or Retain Top Talent placing it in the top three risks. In contrast, only 28.2% of global respondents recognized it as a primary risk, ranking it eleventh overall.

Furthermore, pressing concerns around liquidity and cash flow signal the impact of rising costs and margin pressures, amplified by broader economic uncertainty.

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The survey underscores a critical truth: middle market businesses are exposed to more risks with less room for error. Success in this environment demands more than awareness – it requires the confidence to act swiftly and strategically, even when resources are stretched. That’s how resilience is built.

Joe Galusha
Head of Risk Consulting, North America, Aon

Future Risks: Anticipating Disruption

The C-Suite isn’t just looking at what’s urgent in their current environment, they’re also focused on what could disrupt their operations in the years ahead. The top-ranked future risks reflect an evolving landscape where technology, talent and access to capital will define competitiveness.

Top 10 Future Risks – North America Middle Market:
  1. Cyber Attack or Data Breach
  2. Economic Slowdown or Slow Recovery
  3. Increasing Competition
  4. Cash Flow or Liquidity Risk
  5. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  6. Capital Availability
  7. Failure to Attract or Retain Top Talent
  8. Supply Chain or Distribution Failure
  9. Failure to Innovate or Meet Customer Needs
  10. Workforce Shortage

AI’s emergence as a top-five future risk signals a growing awareness of its potential for both opportunity and disruption. Capital availability is another notable inclusion: an early warning sign that many middle market firms are uncertain about their ability to fund growth, transformation or respond to shocks.

Capital availability ranks as a top 10 future risk for15.4% of NA middle market firms yet it does not appear in the top 10 for global respondents.

Further, failure to innovate or meet customer needs reflects a broader concern: that staying competitive in a fast-changing market requires more than just reacting to disruption: it requires strategically anticipating and adapting to it.

The pattern across current and emerging risks points to a core reality: business leaders understand what’s urgent, but resource constraints and signal noise make prioritization difficult. The imperative now is to translate risk awareness into decision advantage–clarifying where to place scarce time, talent and capital for the highest resilience ROI.

What that looks like in practice:

  • Move from lists to ladders: Rank risks not only by likelihood and severity but also by business dependency. Which risks threaten cash conversion cycles, customer trust, or foundational operating criteria? Those become the priorities on the “first response” ladder.
  • Quantify to qualify: Convert "known" risks like cyber, workforce and liquidity into financial terms and scenario ranges. What is the estimated annualized loss if controls hold versus if they fail? This keeps debates grounded in outcomes, not opinions.
  • Treat talent as an operating system: Workforce constraints manifest as slower cycle times, higher error rates and reduced capacity for change. Link talent risks directly to operational KPIs and margin impact, not just recruiting metrics.
  • Separate resilience from redundancy: Focus on building flexibility by diversifying suppliers, cloud locations or talent pipelines rather than indiscriminately increasing resources which may tie up valuable capital.
  • Make AI a governance question before it’s a tooling question: Establish guardrails for data, intellectual property and model risk; then prioritize use cases with measurable productivity or decision quality gains.

A Practitioner’s Playbook: Four Focal Areas

  • 1. Cyber Resilience as an Operating Discipline
    • Questions to ask:
      • What is our acceptable loss threshold and recovery time by business service?
      • What are our top two business services by revenue at risk and how quickly can we recover them after a breach?
    • Moves to consider: Map critical processes to digital assets; quantify loss exposure; test incident playbooks against supplier and customer dependencies; align coverage structure to modeled scenarios.
  • 2. Workforce Resilience Beyond Headcount
    • Questions to ask:
      • Which roles are critical to growth and how do we protect them?
      • Which roles, if vacant for 60 days, would slow revenue or compromise compliance and what is our cross-coverage plan?
    • Moves to consider: Identify skill bottlenecks tied to revenue cycles; implement cross-skilling; manage cost volatility with balanced reward and wellbeing levers; build succession around risk-critical roles, not just titles.
  • 3. Capital Resilience Under Uncertainty
    • Questions to ask:
      • Where does risk consume capital – and where can it release it?
      • Under a 10% demand shock or a 30-day supply delay, where does our working capital break–and what buffers are in place?
      • Which risks currently produce the most earnings volatility and which financing structures could compress that volatility?
    • Moves to consider: Stress-test cash flow against supply chain and demand shocks; evaluate alternative risk transfer options; prioritize investments that reduce earnings volatility; align risk financing to balance sheet tolerance, not last year’s premiums.
  • 4. Future-Proofing Decisions with Scenarios
    • Questions to ask:
      • Which two or three plausible scenarios would materially change our plan?
      • What are our first three governed AI use cases that measurably improve decision speed, cost per output, or risk detection
    • Moves to consider: Run lightweight scenario modeling quarterly; test regulatory and AI inflection points; set trigger points for action; define no regret moves versus reversible bets.

Final Thought

North America's middle market drives significant innovation and employment. In this era of interconnected and rapidly evolving risks, the competitive edge belongs to leaders who translate awareness into decisive action. This demands a clear, disciplined approach, grounded in robust scenario planning, quantifiable metrics, and transparent trade-offs. By cultivating this foresight, organizations not only build unparalleled resilience and strengthen stakeholder trust but also significantly expand their strategic capabilities, ensuring sustained growth and impact.

1 Middle market defined in this survey as annual revenue between $100M – $1B

General Disclaimer

This document is not intended to address any specific situation or to provide legal, regulatory, financial, or other advice. While care has been taken in the production of this document, Aon does not warrant, represent or guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, completeness or fitness for any purpose of the document or any part of it and can accept no liability for any loss incurred in any way by any person who may rely on it. Any recipient shall be responsible for the use to which it puts this document. This document has been compiled using information available to us up to its date of publication and is subject to any qualifications made in the document.

Terms of Use

The contents herein may not be reproduced, reused, reprinted or redistributed without the expressed written consent of Aon, unless otherwise authorized by Aon. To use information contained herein, please write to our team.

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