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About Us

Our Story

Four Decades—and Counting—of Helping People Do a Better Job Managing Risk

International Risk Management Institute, Inc., now known as IRMI, was founded in 1978, primarily to educate risk managers, insurance agents/brokers, underwriters, and other insurance professionals by conducting seminars. In conjunction with these programs, we developed risk and insurance publications to provide what we felt was much-needed information in an evolving industry. 

Today, IRMI publishes the most comprehensive (and, we think, practical) risk and insurance library of any publisher. No longer in print form, our extensive resources are available online through our own platform, IRMI Online, and as part of Vertafore's ReferenceConnect service (formerly SilverPlume). Our subscriber family encompasses thousands of risk, insurance, and legal professionals serving all industries across the globe.


Video: Our History

Additional IRMI Resources

Free Content

IRMI also publishes an extensive library of free articles, white papers, a glossary, and other content on IRMI.com, one of the most visited websites for risk and insurance professionals. With millions of visitors each year, IRMI.com has broad appeal, providing content on a wide range of topics. IRMI also offers a number of free email newsletters that serve as companions to both our free content and our subscription-based reference services. The flagship email newsletter, IRMI Update, has one of the largest circulations in the property and casualty insurance arena with more than 40,000 subscribers.

IRMI Conferences

IRMI scaled back its seminars in the late 1980s as we focused on hosting national and regional risk management and insurance conferences. The IRMI Construction Risk Conference was our first such program and has become the premier event for people who manage or insure construction risks. IRMI now also hosts the annual IRMI Energy Risk & Insurance Conference  and IRMI Transportation Risk Conference, as well as the IRMI Emmett J Vaughan Agribusiness Conference (AgriCon).

Partnership with WebCE

In 2000, IRMI partnered with a start-up Internet company, agreeing to write insurance continuing education (CE) courses that would be sold and consumed on a delivery platform the company created. That company, WebCE, subsequently became the largest provider of online CE courses for the financial services industry, and IRMI acquired WebCE in 2011. Today, IRMI and WebCE work together to maintain a dominant market position in financial services CE by providing top-notch courses at very reasonable prices and backing it all up with superior technology and customer service.

IRMI Certifications

In 2005, we identified a need for industry-specific risk and insurance continuing education that could be offered on a larger scale and more economically than is possible with live conferences. As a start to filling that need, we introduced the Construction Risk and Insurance Specialist (CRIS®) certification program, an online course of study served on the WebCE platform. Subsequently, we created the Management Liability Insurance Specialist (MLIS®) program, the Energy Risk and Insurance Specialist (ERIS®) program, and the Transportation Risk and Insurance Professional (TRIP®) program and acquired the ag program.

Here To Serve You

Throughout the years, our primary goal has always been to help people do a better job of managing risk by giving them the reliable and practical knowledge and wisdom they need to improve the way they do business. While IRMI has enjoyed many successes, what makes us proudest is our expanding family of subscribers and learning how we have helped them achieve their business or risk management goals over the years.

If our content, courses, certifications, or conferences have been helpful to you, we'd love to hear about it.