As a Global Partnership Director, I am part of the Customer & Distribution Management (CDM) team inside of Zurich Corporate Life & Pensions’ (CLP) central team unit. We help customers take care of their employees wherever they are in the world.

I am leading and developing Zurich’s strategic global business relationship with a key distribution partner for employee benefit solutions. I am also involved in supporting out the transformation of our customer and broker interactions. The CDM team engages with customers and brokers bringing their voices and needs to the heart of CLP’s offering.

I have spent my 17 years in the Corporate Insurance Industry (B2B) across Life & General Insurance, but two main things helped to delineate my path: I have always worked on “market-facing” roles, being close to the customer and broker needs, and tasked with coordinating solutions. Secondly, I have done a journey from “micro” to “macro”, starting in underwriting at a local unit and then moving to a global unit and developing distribution partnerships.

Last but not least having spent the last 2nd half of my career in “Life”, where we care and protect people and their families, enabled a closer understanding of the individual needs (B2C), which I believe will be key going forward in our industry.

In the past months, companies stood out by becoming true partners to their employees for their wellbeing and resilience, well beyond legal requirements. I believe that employers that have “cared beyond duty” quickly realized how their employees recognized it by adapting to new ways of working, generating ideas, and providing great customer experiences in very challenging times. People have become even more important and will continue to do so.

I guess Covid was the most impactful “Chief Transformation Officer”. Lots of things – use of technology, evolving work structure, gig-work, etc. were already underway but have significantly accelerated due to Covid.

In our industry, there is a great opportunity to “capitalize” on the growing employee awareness and demand for support of their wellbeing. The challenges would be to make effective use of the technology to be able to provide the needed flexibility and personalization so we are working precisely on that.

Traditionally insurance companies have already been among the data-savvy; after all the ability to calculate risk accurately distinguishes winners and laggards. What the insurers have not done so well (and this is changing) is:

• first: truly expand the data-use out of the pure risk selection and pricing purposes towards the customer & broker engagement experience.
• secondly: seamlessly mix & blend siloed or distinct data sources to move from lag to lead indicators, generating more insights and data-driven agile decisions.

In the customer & distribution area in Zurich for example we benefit from having a true global CRM system, also Life and Non-life providing us a holistic view. Analytics enables us to have a single customer or distributor view, and not only measure performance but also assess white-spaces and growth areas. We are currently enriching our views by tying up formerly internal but siloed data (eg underwriting or financial data) as well as external data that helps us have a more complete view.

Open Data provides extra layers of information that enable us to make faster and better decisions in an effective way. It also helps us double-check, complete or complement our own data (that can often become outdated or be incomplete). By doing so we gain learnings, find connections and trends, that were impossible or very time-consuming a few years back.

We can for example better understand now which solutions resonate best with a particular customer segment/distribution partner by using this “new lenses” analysis. And shorten and sharpen our targeting whilst ensuring we provide them with a meaningful solution to their needs.

We are at the very beginning of a long journey. I trust there is plenty of margins for us to learn and refine.

We experience also very different levels of maturity and development among our own operations; you have to have decently good management of your internal data first, so to be able to maximize the insights you get by incorporating new data.