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Some you insure. A policy exists, the actuarial history is there, and someone will write it. Some you plan around — enough cash in the bank, the right mix of investments, a contract clause that shifts liability to the other side of the table.

Then there is the third category. The one-off event, tied to a specific decision or a specific date, that could cost real money if it breaks the wrong way. No insurer will write the policy, because there is no history to price it against. No contract fully closes the gap, because the party who could hurt you isn't across the table — it's a regulator, a court, an agency, or a single person your plans depend on.

That is the exposure most mid-sized companies simply carry. Not because carrying it is a decision, but because until recently it was the only option.

Why the big firms don't carry it

Large, sophisticated companies don't sit on this kind of risk. They call a desk.

The major banks build custom hedges for their largest clients as a matter of routine — bespoke structures priced to a specific, measurable outcome. If your exposure is large enough and your relationships deep enough, that access has always been there.

The catch is the threshold. That service was never built for the company with a serious but ordinary exposure — a product launch hinged on one person's conduct, a revenue line dependent on a pending government payment, a commercial plan riding on a regulatory decision that lands in a matter of weeks. Those exposures are real. They're just too small, too specific, or too far outside the existing playbook for a bank desk to bother with.

So the gap isn't one of sophistication. Mid-sized finance teams understand their risk perfectly well. The gap is one of access.

What changed

For the first time, the infrastructure to hedge a single, defined, measurable outcome exists outside the walls of a bank's structuring desk — on regulated, US-based market infrastructure with real depth behind it.

That does two things. It gives a specific commercial exposure a price. And it gives a finance team a way to take a defined position against that exposure, sized to the outcome that actually worries them.

We won't overstate where this is. The category is early. The tooling is being built. Much of the work today is done by hand, structured case by case. But the mechanism is real, it clears through regulated infrastructure, and the exposures it can address are ones companies have been quietly absorbing for years.

The question worth asking

The useful exercise for any finance team isn't to reach for a new product. It's to ask a plainer question first:

How much of what could genuinely hurt us this year comes down to a single event we can name — a decision, a date, a person?

For most companies, the honest answer is more than they'd like. The next question — whether that exposure has to be carried, or whether it can now be addressed — is one that, until recently, didn't have an answer worth giving.

It does now.

Herisson works with finance and risk teams to identify defined, measurable single-event exposures and structure ways to address them. If your risk fits the shape described above, start a conversation.