You have been leading Zurich since 2016 and are now in your fourth three year plan running until 2027. Looking back on these almost ten years as Group CEO: How has your understanding of how Zurich needs to be led today changed the most?
Ten years is a long period of time and a lot has changed. The markets have evolved, the company has developed, and the issues and needs today are very different from ten years ago. At that time, Zurich needed a clear strategy and had to restore credibility and reputation in the markets. Today everybody knows our strategy, and we have both credibility and reputation. We are now building on strengths and developing the organization further, which is very different from fixing reputational issues and creating a strategy from scratch.
Your career has taken you from McKinsey to senior roles at Allianz, Sanpaolo IMI, Zurich and Generali before returning to Zurich as Group CEO in 2016. Which stage of this journey has shaped you most as a leader and how do you notice this in your day-to-day work as CEO?
What you do when you are young has a strong influence on you, because it shapes who you are. I learned a lot early in my career at McKinsey; that formed my basic character and way of thinking. But I have continued learning throughout my career and I am still learning today.
The good thing about age is that all this learning compounds. Over time, you sum up these experiences and become a better person, a better leader and a better human being. Time is inevitable, but it gives you experience and knowledge that you simply cannot have at the beginning of your career. Today I can draw on everything I have learned over the years and apply it directly to my job as CEO.
In 2025, Zurich delivered record results with a BOP of USD 8.9 billion, net income of USD 6.8 billion and a core ROE of 26.9%. To what extent do you attribute this to structural changes within the organisation, and to what extent to a supportive market environment?
The market environment has been favorable, and without that we would not have achieved these results. At the same time, we clearly outperformed the P&C industry, which reflects the actions we have taken over the past ten years. Years ago, our expense ratio excluding distribution commissions was above 15%. Today it is in the low 10s, so we have gained roughly 5 percentage points of profitability or price competitiveness by becoming simpler, more productive and less bureaucratic. Our margins are now at levels we would not have considered achievable ten years ago, and we reached them step by step.
When I started, our return on equity was barely above 10%. We have increased it to 26% by using better market conditions, but also by reshaping the portfolio: we exited low‑return businesses, improved capital efficiency and looked for ways to free up and better deploy capital. Many individual actions lie behind these results, the market helped, but our own transformation was equally important.
Your new three-year plan 2025–2027 sets ambitious targets (core ROE above 23%, EPS CAGR above 9%, cash remittances above USD 19 billion). Which one or two levers are you most consciously prioritising and how do these translate into concrete priorities for capital allocation, growth and efficiency across the group?
We have been growing by roughly one and a half million net customers per year. Our most important lever is therefore to continue expanding our customer base and to broaden the products and services we offer to these customers. This is our central priority over time.
Over ten years we have effectively created a new company with more than 10 million net new customers, the size of a serious mid‑market player, built organically. That is a powerful value lever, especially because you cannot rely on doing large transactions whenever you want. What you can control is the path to steadily grow your customer base.
You achieve net growth in two ways. First, by reducing leakages: every year you start with a certain number of customers and inevitably lose some. So we analyse which customers we are losing, why, and what we can do about it. Improvements in customer satisfaction very quickly translate into higher retention and loyalty. Satisfied customers stay longer and recommend us to others, so the indirect effect is larger than the direct improvement in satisfaction.
Second, we look for new customers in a targeted way. We invest heavily in profiling and segmenting customers: where they are, what they value about Zurich, and who is most sensitive to our strengths. No company is the best fit for everyone. You need to understand who likes you and why, then actively go after these segments and make your proposition visible to them. That is why customer growth remains our most important lever.
From your perspective, what are the key factors that really drive customer satisfaction in the insurance business?
The most important factor is service. Insurance is not an industry with daily customer interactions. When customers contact us, to file a claim, make a change, request information or ask for help, we must be impeccable, because we rarely get a second chance.
The challenge is that customers reach us through many channels: agencies, phone, apps, websites, distributors, brokers, car dealers, banks and others. We need to optimize each of these contact points and ensure a consistent level of experience across all of them. This is especially critical at key moments such as when a claim occurs or when the policy is renewed. These are the moments when customers truly understand why they have an insurance contract. They need to be as flawless as possible, and we use technology, including artificial intelligence, to improve these processes.
The second key factor is price, which is the least flexible. Some customers are simply not happy with the price. We can respond and sometimes adjust, but if they receive an offer that is much cheaper and we cannot match it, there is a limit to what we can do. In contrast, if we do not answer the phone or fail in service, that is fully within our control. So pricing matters for satisfaction, but it is also the hardest lever to manage.
In 2022, you said: “What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber.” Looking at this statement today: Has your assessment been confirmed, and which parts of cyber risk do you still see as insurable in the medium to long term?
I still stand by that statement, but it needs to be understood correctly. Insurance is about covering non‑systemic risks. Systemic risks, those that affect everyone at the same time, such as pandemics, cannot be insured in the traditional sense. If everyone is exposed to exactly the same risk, it is no longer a classic insurance problem; it becomes a public policy issue to be addressed through taxes, regulation and government action.
Cyber has the potential to become systemic. For individuals or small companies, cyber risk is insurable without major issues. But if we talk, for example, about the availability of electricity in an entire country and the risk that someone attacks and shuts down the grid, this becomes a systemic, national‑security problem. These attacks are typically handled by states and defense institutions, not by insurers.
Insurance can cover weather events, but it cannot cover war. Similarly, we cannot cover large‑scale cyber warfare or events of that magnitude. There is a “normal” part of cyber that we can and do insure, individuals, SMEs, mid‑sized companies. But cyber risks that affect entire societies at once are beyond the capacity of insurance companies. The same applies to war, major cyber attacks of this kind, pandemics and nuclear events, they exceed the capital and risk‑bearing capacity of insurers.
Zurich uses AI in more than 160 use cases. Where do you see the greatest value creation today and which elements of underwriting and the customer relationship will, in your view, remain essentially human even in an AI-driven insurance world?
AI is an important and complex addition. We recently launched an AI lab with the University of St. Gallen and ETH in Zurich and Singapore to test radical new AI solutions for insurance.
So far, however, AI has not fundamentally changed the economics of our business. Most use cases deliver productivity gains and better customer service, but they are incremental improvements rather than game changers. They make things work better, not entirely differently.
Many announcements in the industry focus on using AI to replace people with machines. Given that our expense base excluding commissions is about 10%, even a very aggressive use of AI would change value creation by perhaps 10%. That is meaningful, but not transformational. I believe AI can do much more than this. It can deepen our understanding of data, make pricing and underwriting more accurate, and significantly improve claims handling and customer interactions. But these possibilities have not yet been fully realised.
For now, many aspects of underwriting and customer relationships remain essentially human: complex judgment calls, building trust, understanding nuanced client needs and making strategic decisions. AI will support these activities, but it is not replacing the human element at the core of these relationships.
What does your interest in Beazley as a specialist in cyber and specialty risks reveal about Zurich’s strategic direction and what makes a company like Beazley particularly attractive to you?
A key component of our strategy has been to move away from commoditised segments of the market. In commoditised areas, products are standard, many competitors offer the same thing and differentiation is hard, motor insurance is a classic example. Everyone offers it, and the service is relatively similar. We have therefore focused on areas that are not commoditised and ideally will never be. In these “specialty” segments, positions are more stable and sustainable. Specialty business involves highly tailored solutions that require deep expertise, which is difficult to build and replicate.
In cyber, for instance, Zurich has a little under 100 underwriters and Beazley has about 130. Together, we will get close to 250 cyber underwriters. You cannot write cyber policies without real expertise; the risks are too complex. By bringing Beazley’s capabilities together with ours, we strengthen our position in a knowledge‑intensive, defensible part of the market. Today, around USD 15 billion of our revenues are in this more sustainable specialty space. The same applies to renewable energy or data centers: to insure them properly, you need engineers and specialists who understand the technology, construction, operational and security risks in depth. Over the last decade, we have grown our specialty business from roughly USD 1.5 billion to more than USD 9 billion in revenues. Beazley adds to this journey of shifting our book from simple, standard products to highly specialised, more sustainable ones.
You have said: “In the past, most waves of globalization have been stopped by wars. This time it is not a military conflict, but a social one.” What do you see as the most important social tensions that are currently slowing down globalization?
Globalization has been uneven and often unfair. It has clearly benefited some parts of the world while harming others. It was largely driven by the goal of benefiting consumers, but to do so it hurt workers and middle classes in many developed countries.
Take the example of manufacturing moving from the US to China. Chinese workers gained jobs, skills and better pay. At the same time, the US lost factories, jobs and income. US consumers benefited from lower prices, but workers paid the price. In general, Western middle classes have lost out, and that fuels the anti‑migration and protectionist movements we see across many Western countries.
As a result, societies react by wanting to protect their citizens and middle classes. This is a consequence of how we managed globalization in recent decades: the benefits accrued mainly to emerging markets and the developing world, which are clearly better off, while parts of the developed Western world feel worse off. These tensions are now slowing down the current wave of globalization.
If you were starting your career again today, would you essentially choose the same path through consulting and industry or would you opt for a different route?
I have to disappoint you a bit: you do not control as much as you think. Life offers you certain options, and your choices are mostly among those options, not among all imaginable paths. When I was young, I believed I was in charge, but in reality I had the choices that life put in front of me.
I ended up in consulting by coincidence; I did not plan to become a consultant. Later I moved into insurance, again by coincidence. With the same opportunities, I would likely make similar choices, because they fit who I am. With different opportunities, I might have taken a different path, for example, I once wanted to be a professional basketball player, but I did not have the height for it.
You do not really plan your life; you live it. Living your life means making the best decisions you can with the options you have at each moment. Life will bring surprises and shocks, and what matters is how you react. That is where your freedom and responsibility lie. But your ability to plan everything in advance is quite limited.
