In today's ever-changing environment, business success requires a company to be able to anticipate opportunities and effectively understand and respond to risks.

Organizations are feeling pressure on all sides to enhance their risk management practices. External stakeholders—such as regulators, ratings agencies, investors, lenders, and trading partners—often seek data or performance metrics related to an organization's risk management framework. They may incorporate this information into their assessments of the organization's resilience and its likely future financial performance. At the same time, various internal stakeholders—such as boards of directors, audit committees, executive management committees, and employees—are exerting greater influence on risk leaders to integrate an understanding of the organization's myriad risks into key strategic decisions.

In 2011, in response to these pressures, Aon plc collaborated with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to launch the Aon Risk Maturity Index, an online questionnaire that assesses, benchmarks, and tracks the development of different organizations' risk management frameworks over time. It also provides a platform for the collection of global data on corporate risk management practices across a consistent set of parameters.