CFOs: MANAGING CHANGE Zurich Insurance Group is reskilling thousands of staff as digitisation moves from the front to the back office. One impact will be to allow CFOs to play the more strategic, value-adding role they’re increasingly needed for, says John Keppel, Chief Operating Officer in the UK When Mario Greco, the big boss of Swiss-based Zurich Insurance Group, declared at the end of 2020 that the old insurance business model was ‘dead, or at the very least dying’, it surely sent shockwaves through the industry. But his reasoning was sound. New customer needs due to lifestyle changes and advancing technology have caused huge drop offs in traditional revenue streams. And historically-low interest rates, which many analysts forecast will remain for the foreseeable future, have seen insurers’ investment income plummet.
Greco was speaking from a position of strength; Zurich had repositioned its strategy some five years ago to be more service-minded so that it now derives more than half of its income from recurring fees – and although, of course, even global entities like Zurich can do little about interest rates, they can do something about technology to mitigate the impact of that decline. John Keppel, Zurich’s chief operating officer in the UK, admits that the insurance industry – and Zurich itself – might have been slow to see the value of digitisation, but the company now considers itself a pace setter. And it’s determined that this won’t come with an associated human cost in what has been an intensely-manual industry. For example, Zurich has started a company-wide upskilling programme for its staff as it introduces disruptive technologies. The company will spend £1million over the next five years in the UK alone, retraining, upskilling and augmenting 3,000 roles – about
two-thirds of its UK workforce – and not just because it foresees an industry-wide shortage of robotics, data science and cybersecurity skills. “There are many preconceived ideas about implementing automated processes into a business and how these roles must be carried out by tech specialists,” says Keppel. “In reality, the best people to do this effectively are those who have worked within the function you’re looking to automate. They are the ones who really understand the process.” Zurich has also made a strategic decision not to outsource any of that digitisation work to third parties on the grounds of costs alone. Instead, it has set up an Automation Academy that has already helped to create a 40-strong artificial intelligence (AI) team comprising of staff from across the business. One external investment it has made is in insurtech Instanda’s low-code, Cloud-based insurance platform, precisely because it gives inhouse teams the autonomy to build, test and distribute products. But such transformation is not just about frontend products. It extends deep into Zurich, notably affecting the finance team.
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TheInsurtechMagazine | Issue 5
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