Zurich to open offices in Bristol and Southampton

The provider opened a regional office in Chelmsford in April to service East Anglia.

In his final interview before his resignation, then head of retail David Martin told Insurance Age that the provider was on the cusp of opening in Bristol with a target of achieving it “by year end” with the “hope” that Southampton would be up and running in Q1 2023.

“We came up with a strategy to make sure that our regional markets were opened up,” he said. “We’ve invested heavily in them and expanded the workforce.”

According to Martin, servicing Bristol from Birmingham has been difficult.

“We are very keen to make sure as many brokers as possible have access to local offices where they can deal with local underwriters with autonomous decision making,” he stated.

“What we don’t want is an awful lot of referrals coming back into our head office function. The ability to be flexible and reflect everything that we do at speed is important.”

Expand

In Bristol, he detailed, the expectation was to “have about five or six employees up front in that and then we’ll continue to use Birmingham and expand as necessary”.

Explaining: “We’re making them hubs to the region itself. So, for Bristol, that would be a hub to Birmingham. Chelmsford is a hub now to Croydon. The important thing is to put in underwriters that understand the local market. We continue to expand that as the demand requires. And also put account developers in the same areas.”

Zurich also has its sights on two further offices.

“We’re looking at the feasibility, looking at the brokers in those areas, how we can serve them geographically and whether there’s some real benefit we can bring to those markets,” said Martin.

The sweetspot for business will be turnover of up to £50m or by another metric SMEs with up to 250 employees.

“We look quite closely at what trades are in those areas that we open to make sure that we are relevant,” he added.

MGAs

Martin’s sudden departure, as revealed by Insurance Age, has led to speculation about where he will be heading next.

During his time at Zurich he was also involved in expansion of managing general agent business and the process of simplifying products.

Under Martin’s guidance Zurich signed up to partner KGM Underwriting, part of Howden-owned A Plan. The solus capacity five-year motor portfolio arrangement is worth over £700m GWP.

Zurich also struck a five-year £105m deal with Ardonagh-owned specialist agricultural underwriter AIUA in 2021 as it displayed increased appetite for MGA business.

Specialisms

Martin flagged that it had worked with MGAs that “have real specialisms or niches” with a particular focus on non-standard business.

He said: “What we’re not doing is trying to compete with ourselves. We’re trying to compete in areas where we know the MGA has expertise and we are very happy to be able to serve the market in that way.”

Ahead of his exit he indicated the provider was open for more.

“We have an appetite to continue to diversify,” he maintained.

“Over the next three years I expect our existing positions to grow quite substantially as you can see the growth in MGAs in the UK at the moment. And we’d expect to add a number more. I think the opportunity depends partly on the economic situation and also when the capacity’s due.”

He listed that the business considers everything that comes to it: “We take the appropriate judgment, we look at whether the alignment fits with us and if the alignment doesn’t fit we don’t put the capacity down.”

Digital

Martin, who previously had around 650 people under his leadership, also tackled the insurer’s moves on digital and product simplification.

At Allianz, where he worked for 18 years, he had been involved with the launch of QuoteSME in 2009 and the relaunch in 2013.

At Zurich the offering is Zurich Online and a further system, yet to be officially named, is coming.

“Our strategy is all about making sure brokers have the time to give the advice that they need to without us creating too much frictional cost,” he summed up.

The business has invested in its digital SME autorated functionality, its customer relation management platform and more, he listed, to enable underwriters to liaise with each other, enrich data and service brokers swiftly for all clients.

Simplification

Alongside this it had simplified product sets with SME achieved it will push into mid-market in the first quarter of next year.

“We’re looking at both the breadth of appetite and also simplification,” he said. “We’re consolidating a whole host of property and casualty wordings that we operate in the UK today. We’re bringing out a full modular combined.”

Adding: “In SME we’ve gone from over a hundred products to eight, in our mid-market simplification journey, we’ll take our products from 70 to one.”

The further “digital push” will involve greater digital functionality even where auto-rating is not available. The model, he argued, will empower underwriters and remove time consuming administration factors making the insurer even more accessible for brokers while retaining the oversight.

“An underwriter will interact with that system and make sure that the appropriate quotes in the technical oversight is provided,” he set out.

Personal lines

Martin’s role had also involved Navigators & General and Zurich Private Clients as well as personal lines.

If he had stayed he would have also been engaged with “the personal lines simplification journey”.

“We concentrate entirely on broker models,” he concluded. “That’s because we believe clients need advice.”

Ending: “We support a number of brokers across the UK in personal lines, we think that will continue just like there’s different ways customers and brokers want to interact.

“We are running our business model that actually is dedicated to customers and brokers can come to us as they want to and how their business model dictates.”

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