Center Management

Managing Bratislava Competence Center - based in Bratislava & Kosice - as well as providing management services for all 5 ZCCs and further companies.

• CEO Office and PR represent the center within Zurich and within the country, liaisoning with government, AmCham, HSSR, Swiss Embassy, IT Valley, PR and also general management.
• Transformation and Innovation executes Local strategy, supports of transformation and innovation activities, changes management, continuous improvement, and local LEAN implementation.
• Center Legal, Risk and Compliance represent these fields for the Slovakian Center and for all 5 ZCCs globally.
• Center HR and HR services provide services related with HR topics for Zurich IT companies in Estonia and Slovenia as well as the employer Communication.
• Center Finance consists of local statutory accounting, tax, billing, expense management, performance management and cash management.
• Center Real Estate, Office Management & Procurement are responsible for local real estate, workplace, office management & procurement services.
• Center IT is responsible for local eWP and IT infrastructure services, Center IT Service Desk, IT stock management as well as the business Continuity Management.

Global SAM Strategic Vendor Management

Global SAM Strategic Vendor Management manages Shared Software contracts and optimize costs for strategic software vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, IBM; maintains oversight of global business development opportunities in order to maximize investment value, license re-use and contract consolidation; conducts licensing reviews, execute contractual demand assessment and True-ups; manages internal stakeholder relationships, provide advice on contract and licensing options for products and services offered by vendors; assures DXC software charges are minimized and in accordance with contractual agreements.

Actuarial Services

Slovakia based Business Actuarial Services is an internal global service provider for the Zurich Actuarial Functions across the globe to provide insight, analysis, reports and advice on the business unit’s performance and valuations.

• Financial & Actuarial Reporting Team supports local Business units across the globe in respect of actuarial reporting and capital management support for Group and for local authorities. Part of the team is dedicated to Prophet on Cloud support. Extension of the actuarial team based in Switzerland and provide capital management support for business unit Switzerland.
• Replicating Portfolio uses mathematical models and tools to deliver:
  - Replicating Portfolios for all Life Business Units
  - Economic assumptions for all Life Business Units
  We also participate by improving and developing methodologies. The team is experienced in assessing the fit of estimated models, valuing various financial instruments and creating risk-neutral simulations.
• Actuarial Development Team provides global actuarial model development support to Zurich Group and its Business Units, maintaining long-term relationships with clients in Australia, Austria, Spain and FNWL. Our services encompass Prophet model development, ownership of the IFRS 17 Prophet plug-in (IFRS 17 Prophet calculation engine), database development and model results analysis. Additionally, we prepare Excel and Python tools, while managing the Global Prophet Help Desk to ensure comprehensive Prophet assistance for all.

• IFRS 17 Team develops and implementation of new central end to end solution for IFRS 17 for our life business. To enable this:
  • we are developing Zurich IFRS 17 methodology with GLA,
  • we are preparing the implementation specifications for external vendor of system,
  • we are supporting the roll out of solution within Zurich BUs joining the central solution.

PPM team was created in Bratislava to support GPPM Finance function in respect of technical actuarial expertise. Key objectives of the team in upcoming years are, firstly, to develop a transparent and comprehensive Life analytical framework that will help management to understand underlying performance of the Life products under IFRS17 and trigger appropriate actions in respect of individual local country portfolios. Secondly, the team will conceptualize and develop a Life Driver Based Model that will facilitate the Planning and Forecasting exercise in order to understand IFRS17 impacts in timely manner and provide ability to challenge local views on future business outlooks.

• Actuarial Solutions & P&C Reserving Team provide support for Non-Life Reserving teams within Group Actuarial and EMEA Reserving CoE. For Group Actuarial, we are involved in:
  - development and BAU support of central End-to-End solution for IFRS17 for non-life business
  - development of visualisation tool for Group Actuarial Performance & Reporting team
  - support of quarterly processes for Group Actuarial Performance & Reporting team For EMEA Reserving CoE, we provide support for several Business Units, helping them with:
  - quarterly reserving analysis
  - IFRS17 and Solvency II reporting

• Project Support Team was created to support various project activities across the whole Actuarial services pillar. Our key objective is to strengthen the project management process to deliver professional service to our stakeholders. We aim to bring innovative solutions to support the automation and optimization of the actuarial processes by delivering technical project support. We also run administrative processes on the pillar level including support of the pillar head in finance topics.

Risk Management Services

Risk Management Services Teams of Risk Management Services are integral part of Group Risk Management providing different services related to Capital and Life models starting with development, followed by maintenance, validation, production and reporting of different metrics for regulatory and business purposes.

• Capital and Risk Production Team is an integral part of the Financial Risk department in Zürich providing services for the calculations of the Internal Economic Capital Model and Solvency II Standard Formula, including Quantitative Reporting Templates:

Internal Economic Capital Model:

• maintenance of Risk Based Capital, Swiss Solvency Test and Solvency II capital production, including coordination of input delivery across various departments, calculation of particular modules and aggregation of risks across risk categories and businesses

• cooperation on Risk Based Return Measure production

• maintenance and related improvements of modelling implementation and documentation

• support for analysis of internal economic capital model results
  

Solvency II Standard Formula and Quantitative Reporting Templates:

• support of the development, testing, documentation and production of the regulatory models and reports
• support of the users of the Solvency II Risk Engine and Abacus

• Life Model Risk Management team is specialized in the technical areas of life actuarial and analytical software development, providing support of the Life Model Risk Management, including:

• technical support of Life Model Risk validation
• validation and testing of life valuation models implemented by countries
• development of processes and tools for validation of life valuation models
• support of validation of the capital and risk models

• Credit Risk Support provides support to Finance Risk Governance team in credit risk business analyses and development of Credit Risk Data Repository (CRDR) tool. Main tasks are:
  • Regular reporting for Financial Risk Governance team related to Credit risk
  • Data Quality checks
  • CRDR development and testing of new features and applications in CRDR
  • And also automation and simplification of processes and tools we use.

   

• Risk Modelling Platform (RMP) Team consists of software architects, software engineers, data scientist, data modellers and system administrators, providing particularly the following services:

• IT development and maintenance of risk modelling applications to reflect regulatory and/or business driven model changes for Internal economic capital model and Solvency II Standard Formula
• performance of operational tasks regarding platform infrastructure and RMP micro services
• support of reporting processes, i. e. risk modelling calculations of high complexity
• ad-hoc analytics services.

Commercial Insurance IPZ Service Center Slovakia

The IP Network Service Centre Slovakia, is one of five Zurich Network Service Center globally, supporting our global clients to insure their risks in over 30 countries across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It consists of the following teams:

• IPZ Network Service Center Slovakia
• IPZ Assumed Accounting Team Slovakia
• IPZ IT Reporting Team
• IPZ Contract Setup/Ceded Accounting

Data & Business Intelligence 

Service pillar is part of the Data & Business Intelligence team within Group Technology & Operations. We are one global team which is located across various locations: Switzerland, Spain, Slovakia, Germany, UK, Portugal, Belgium, Argentina, Estonia, Poland. The focus of the Data & Business Intelligence function is to enable global data access, governing data quality and standards, and driving data tagging, while staying true to our Zurich Data Commitment to protect and govern data usage and privacy across the group. This function will work with the Customer Office ZCAM unit to deliver business value through the use of current and predictive data insights solutions.

• AI Innovation Team:
  • Drive DBI’s impact on innovation as a game changer, starting with AI
  • Stay on top of current developments in the AI domain and assess their relevance for Zurich
  • Inject advanced AI capabilities into PoCs, MVPs etc. in close collaboration with DBI Studio and Must-wins teams

   

• BI (DevOps) Team enables better business decision making by converting data into insights, using business intelligence tools/visualization solutions:
  • Make data accessible to business through intuitive, appealing visualization
  • Collaborate with Business Engagement Mgmt. to enable business stakeholders and support ideation / co-creation
  • Builds/develops backend for Business Intelligence solutions (project/product), bringing together business-relevant measures/KPIs from different data sources (e.g. via data integration features of Business Intelligence solutions, data warehousing, data marts incl. semantic layers and/or ETL solutions, in the latter case, working closely with Data Engineers who drive the data pipeline build), closely working with BAs to reflect business logic of data. Working closely with Frontend and Visualization & Xperience Design to present these in a compelling manner
  • Design, develop, and install software solutions on the operating system-side
  • Operate the solution (project/product) after it has been integrated in a business process (e.g. refreshing data sets, resolving technical issues on L2/L3 in close collaboration with Platform DevSecOps and Service Management)
  • Enhance visualization in case of new/changing requirements in close collaboration with BEM/PO, Service Mgmt.

   

• Platform DevSecOps:

• Empowering Zurich to provide value from data at scale by provisioning and continuously evolving the appropriate platforms
• Accountable for the platform’s architecture, operations, and development
• Plan integration, centralization, storage, and maintenance of data sources
• Responsible for maintaining, improving, and developing the platform functionalities in a secure environment including first level of defense for Compliance requirements

• Data Office Management team:

• Oversight & reporting on capabilities and capacity required for execution on DBI mandate
• Manage onboarding of all DBI new joiners to accelerate time to value and contribute that all people understand the bigger picture of our mandate
• Produce communication contents for DBI that to be published by Comms business partner
• DBI Finance champion for Commercialization program in close collaboration with Finance BP
• PMO responsibilities to ensure oversight across DBI and continuous evolvement of TOM and to ensure foundation for resource cost allocation to services and products
• Administrative responsibility for CSAT (customer satisfaction) process and related KPI collection / Knowledge management processes
• IT compliance progress tracking using KPI dashboards to ensure IT compliance standards such as e.g. SOXs are fulfilled (compliance ensured by data governance and service mgmt. as 1st / 2nd level of defense) provide internal services to EDAA such as procurement, invoicing, finance.

• Data Science & Engineering (DataOps) Team:
  • Enable Zurich to capture value from data by deriving insight from complex data sets & uncovering hidden patterns
  • Attract and develop suitable talent for delivery & operation of DBI solutions in alignment with DBI Engagement Hub

   

  Data Science:

  • Apply data analytic techniques from design to prototyping, implementation and testing
  • Apply statistical & machine learning methods to discover hidden patterns & information

   

  Data Engineering:

  • Prepare internal and external data for subsequent application (e.g. ingesting, preparing, curating data)
  • Industrialize data feeds, create pipelines into existing data systems, leveraging smart cloud
  • Driving all ETL/data transformation activities except for Business Intelligence integration, in which case Data Engineering collaborates with Business Intelligence I Engineering
  • Design, develop, and install software solutions on the operating system-side
  • Operate the solution (project/product) after it has been integrated in a business process (e.g. refreshing data sets, resolving technical issues on L2/L3 in close collaboration with Platform DevSecOps and Service Management)

   

Business Engagement:

• Enable business value from data as SPoC (single point of contact) for our customers to support the use case journey from ideation, to delivery and business impact
• Manage the project portfolio (bespoke solutions)
• End to end business liaison who blends insurance business AND technical skills - bridge from business to the DBI team, by translating and identifying D&A opportunities into requirements (e.g. identify business problems, alignment with Data Scientists); brings in experts/“gurus” as needed.

Scrum Masters (in the case of projects that cannot be delivered in agile set-up, this will be a PM):

• Build and lead a cross-functional team to develop and improve solution (after 1st stage gate)
• Remove impediments so that the team delivers the solution, to enable continually improving its quality
• BA acts as requirements engineer and provides process-related insight in close collaboration with BEM
• Work with Data Office (who owns Knowledge Management process) to ensure DBI marketplace is up to date and use case library covers key Zurich data use cases from DBI, as well as from BUs/GFs - for the latter, with DBI Data Office providing template and respective BUs/GFs filling in the template

• Solution Architecture Team:
  • Enable efficient and scalable data solutions by guiding and assembling the right components and building blocks, considering the Architecture Blueprints as defined with the Enterprise Data Architecture and Modelling team
  • Contributes to building a project/product throughout the entire solution journey (incl. services included by Platform DevSecOps)
  • Technical counterpart to the Product Owner being responsible for the technical implementation of the solution
  • Comprises of Data Solution Architecture and Solution Integration profiles
  • Supporting resolving technical issues on L2/L3 in close collaboration with other teams in DBI studio (in particular Platform DevSecOps responsible for L1.5 and 24/7 platform related support) and Service Mgmt.

   

• Service Management Team:
  • Ensure customer satisfaction and continuous improvement of our DBI solutions as trusted partner to our customers in the delivery of business value through both existing applications and delivery of change requests.
  • Responsibility for and evolvement of services and support for DBI solutions. Close collaboration with Platform DevSecOps team (who owns L1.5 process)
  • As part of continuous improvement cycle, monitor & evolve customer KPIs, feedback loop to BEM (for projects after handover) and close collaboration with POs (for products/must-wins for joint resolution/service provision).
  • The Custodian of the assigned Application Portfolio, supported by our key Platform and SME's to agreed SLA's, measured by core KPI's. This custodianship ensures and underpins customer satisfaction
  • Owner of the DBI finance transparency facing BUs and Group Functions with proper monitoring and controls of the Service Delivery budget and actual costs in collaboration with all key stakeholders, through the agreed frameworks, to highlight gaps, omissions and deviations customer
  • Improve and enhance service delivery, through operational excellence, transition management and continuous improvement in close collaboration with our customers, BEMs & product owners and DBI Studio to ensure the best outcomes for Zurich (for products / must-wins, joint resolution and service provision with POs)
  • Management, control and enforcement the delivery and use of ITIL framework, assuring robust and complete service delivery supported and underpinned by salient tooling

ITSS Delivery Services supports Microsoft services, productivity, and collaboration products within the Software as a Service (SaaS) support model. The infrastructure and services are supported and provided by Service Architects and Subject Matter Experts through standardized processes, SLA and a continuous cycle of service changes and development dictated and enforced by the supplier. The new global Microsoft 365 support functions within ITSS are responsible for all aspects of changes, releases, services, suppliers, and stakeholders.

• The ITSS Office 365 Support team, established in 2021, is based in Bratislava and Mexico. The primary objective of the team is to minimize external costs and enhance service delivery on a global scale for the entire Microsoft Office 365 service portfolio. The strategy encompasses a support model that employs dedicated and accountable teams for both Tier1 and Tier2 services, while leveraging existing Zurich delivery centers with a multilingual "follow-the-sun" structure. The team is committed to providing globally standardized services with consistent service levels, processes, and reporting, including proactive service transformation and improvement.
• IT delivery provides support to nine countries: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, South Africa, and Bahrain. This encompasses 11 offices and a workforce of 879 individuals, including seven CEOs and three COOs. The primary deliverables for IT delivery include ensuring operational stability, taking full ownership of the customer and user experience for IT services in operations, and delivering projects and initiatives within the agreed budget and requirements. Additionally, IT delivery holds full responsibility for the transformation of IT technologies to the user estate. This includes managing incidents and problems, overseeing service level management, stakeholder management, decision making, supplier management, change management, platform management (both physical and virtual), and continuous improvement.

Pricing & Analytics Services

Serving our customers since 2007 allowed us to help in a variety of areas within Property and Casualty Insurance. We take your data and deliver impactful insights.

• Europe, Middle East & Africa Team is specialized in providing comprehensive predictive modeling and building analytical tools for pricing teams across the EMEA region. Our predictive models are designed to help the pricing teams anticipate future trends and adjust their pricing strategies accordingly. We cover also all aspects of pricing and portfolio management analytics ranging from data visualisation to dynamic pricing models and simulation tools. In everything what we do, we pay attention to scaling, innovation, and optimization to ensure that our stakeholders get the most of our expertise. In addition to our core services, we offer hands-on technical trainings for new joiners in pricing teams, to help them get up-to-speed quickly and effectively integrate into their new roles. We have many years of experience in providing training on programming software (R and SAS) and pricing analytical tools (EMBLEM and Radar).
• Global Claims & Business Intelligence Team supports the end-to-end Global Claims reporting and analytics including oversight of data quality and assurance, development of various global claims initiatives, improvement of the data architecture, and creation of front-end reports to improve claims insights. We are running data mining projects and services by gathering huge amounts of complex claims data from hundreds of information systems around the globe to help Zurich’s leadership at corporate and country levels make the right decisions. We manage a unique cross-function reporting platform based on Power BI that provides insights into company performance, encompassing information from finance, underwriting, reserving and capital. We also provide end-to-end oversight of the Country Underwriting Plan process, including ownership of the data submission, data processing and data visualisation. With increasing reach within the underwriting function, we also provide support on ad-hoc reporting needs and management of other platforms owned by the Group Underwriting Function.
• Global Commercial Insurance Actuaries Team works closely with the central Commercial Insurance actuarial pricing team and support the execution of the pricing work and related pricing projects and business initiatives. Our activities are mostly focused around data analytics leveraging central data lake capabilities, analyses of pricing performance and trends, technical rate reviews, data quality work, maintenance of central pricing platforms and environments but also development and administration of various reporting capabilities.
• Zurich Integrated Benefits Team supports Experience Insight platform developed to improve pricing quality within Life area, focusing both on business expertise as well as programming business rules into the platform. Ultimate beneficiary of this work are Life BUs across the globe, that will have much better insights and reporting capabilities based on their portfolio data.
• Life Business Management (LBM) team is a global function providing guidance, oversight, and development advice for all Zurich’s life technical needs. Our team supports rollout and maintenance of Experience Insights platform. Experience Insights investigates past claims and persistency, in our Life Protection business, to set appropriate assumptions for pricing future business. This technology enables LBM/BUs to perform their experience analysis using a modern Data Science (DS) platform, automate routine tasks, and develop more sophisticated analytics and greater collaboration with LBM. The platform is a key enabler for executing Zurich’s Life strategy.
• Zurich North America Teams is part of the Data & Analytics team in North America we work on cutting-edge analytics models based on a variety of statistical, data mining and machine learning approaches to deliver distinctive risk insights across a broad scope of topics, to achieve ongoing financial business impact. Our main focus is to improve underwriting decisions by quantifying the risk, identifying potential customers and prioritize based on potential profitability and improve the assignments in the claim handling process.

Business Analysis Services

Slovakia based Business Analysis pillar is an internal service provider for the Zurich Group/Business Unit Functions across the globe whose purpose is to identify and analyse business needs and recommend/maintain solutions that deliver value to customers/stakeholders.

• Effective Team operates as a part of Finance Solution Management team based in Corporate Centre and we focus on Actuarial portfolio of applications (Life and P&C) used by the Group and Business Units across the world. Our main goal is to ensure that our customers, the actuarial teams in the Business Units and Group, have an easy time producing and uploading figures into our tailor-made applications, which can then be efficiently reviewed by the Actuaries and used for further analysis. We maintain and improve these Actuarial systems/applications based on new requirements and feedback from our customers and other stakeholders. Our role is to ensure timeliness, accuracy and reliability of the data and systems to ensure a smooth review process for the actuarial teams.
• FSM Team operates as a part of Finance Solution Management team based in Corporate Centre and we support finance* (also risk, treasury, and expense) applications used by the Group and Business Units across the world. Our main goal is to ensure that our customers — the finance* teams in the Business Units and Group — have an easy time producing and uploading figures into our tailor-made applications. The results can be then reviewed by the finance* functions in an efficient way and used for further analysis. We maintain and improve those finance* systems/applications based on new requirements and feedback from our customers and other stakeholders. Our role is to ensure timeliness, accuracy and reliability of the data and systems to ensure a smooth review process for the finance* teams.

Business Technology Solutions (BTS)

Managing Bratislava Competence Center - based in Bratislava & Kosice - as well as providing management services for all 5 ZCCs and further companies.

• BTS Corporate Centre Apps & Support functions: Technology Services Corporate Centre Apps & Support functions team are part of BTS organization providing: Service Delivery Management services, Project management Services, DevOps (Azure and AWS) services and eWP platform management services for EMEA CI Stand-alone countries.
• ITS Professionals Team is group of IT professionals providing specific IT services. As a start there are Office 365 technical services related to Power Apps and Office 365 tools e.g. Sharepoint, the plan is the place here speciality IT positions working mostly for a group function not directly related to core insurance business.
• BTS Solutions Team: Provision of IT services to the various business units connected to the core Insurance business. Currently the following Zurich BUs are consuming the services: Ireland, CI Stand-alone countries, CI Central services.
• BTS Actuarial Application Delivery Team is part of BTS – Finance Investments and treasury, supporting Group Actuarial Services and its application portfolio. Main focus is on Application Service delivery management in close collaboration with platform and application management teams.