Session Information:

Building Client Centric Financial Organizations: A SwissRe Case Study

Intro:

We have moved past the faster, cheaper, efficient topics: to create real impact, and to make the world more resilient, SwissRe continues to transform towards a better tomorrow. This session gives an overview over how SwissRe's P&C Business Management organization focuses to be consistently client centric in core services and create new propositions that help clients grow and manage their portfolios in a transforming marketplace.

Key takeaways:

1. How to transition a 150 year old organization to learn new tricks: strategic direction and internal drive
2. How to define a better new: approach and structure to improve
3. How does it look like: examples of what can change in a (re-)insurance claims handling department
4. How to bring employees on board: change management and collaboration

Session Transcript:

Directly, from Munich, Germany, we have Sebastian. He's here with us. Sebastian. ...

goal is to drive transformational change in financial service organizations. And he's here today to talk about how he and his team of operational excellence experts are pushing Swiss re's back office towards a more client centric approach with more than 20 years of cross industry experiences. Sebastian will demonstrate to us a case study on claims transformation to highlight the impact Swiss Re can can have on its customers. So very thankful for you to be here with us a bastion and very much looking forward to your presentation.

Alright, thank you so much of a, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. And I'll start sharing my screen here, and I really appreciate that opportunity. Let me make sure I'm sharing the right thing, And here's our presentation.

All right, welcome, everybody. I would like to talk about Swiss Re.

Swiss Re is a very old organization.

It's about 150 years old, and it's quite traditional.

With our, our background, heared, allows us to be more heavyweight, more back, office oriented. We have excellent buildings across the world, our headquarters in Zurich is full of tapestry and excellent carpets.

And it just feels very Lush, At the same time. I'm here in my Home office. Just like most of you are based at home right now, and Swiss Re actually allowed me to work from home extremely easily, even with all these nice buildings, Swiss Re has set up a great environment for their employees to be able to work from wherever they want in the world.

It shows how flexible we are, even though we're quite an old fashioned organization and we have actually gone through a lot of transformations in the past.

Re-invented ourselves quite a bit throughout these 150 plus years, and one of the things that I want to talk to you about today is how do we became a more client centric organization?

So, I'll take you on a little journey here to give you a little bit of context of where this is coming from, and a lot of people don't know, Swiss Re. Swiss Re is one of the leading reinsurers in the world. So we insure the insurance companies, right? So, very far back, removed from individuals and peoples, and their needs.

Within the re-insurance business, we're split up across property, and casualty, and life, and health. So, there are two sites. one is the non life Insurance and re-insurance and the life re-insurance. What I want to cover today is the P&C business. So we're here talking about large scale things that happened around the world be the earthquakes, speed hurricanes, plane crashes, large amounts of car accidents. Anything that can happen in the world at large is something that we ensure.

And that kinda defines our mission, that we want to make the world more resilient.

And we're doing this by managing risk, right? That means that we need to know what happens in the world, what problems happen in the world, understanding them, and then be able to manage these risks better.

We're doing this for our clients, So our clients are the insurance companies around the world. These are large insurance companies that acts as the lens of the world, but also the mom and pop shop around the corner that is handling Car insurance is just for very local markets.

And this is where we want to be more client centric. We want to provide these clients, our clients, more value, and we want to focus more on them, because we know that we can only succeed if they succeed.

So, how do we do this? Well, to be fair, Swiss Re has always been extremely client centric, meaning we have claimed markets teams, we have underwriter's, with people in a lot of different locations around the world, that work day-to-day with our clients.

But when we look at the More Back Office function, the teams that handle claims, book accounts, reserve update, reserves, received, insurance, risks around the globe, Those are teams that we call. the P&C Business Management Team, which I am part of.

It's a relatively large organization with about one thousand employees. And within that organization, because we're traditionally quite back office oriented, The client focus was never a big topic until about five years ago, and then, we started to say, well, what are the things that we, as business management, can do better to be more client centric.

And the outcome here are these four items you see on the right.

The first one is this, improving our core services to our clients, meaning, when we're paying a claim, when we're booking premium, when we have feedback loops to the kind, we want to be efficient and effective. And we want to make sure that our clients understand that, and that they get this feedback.

But that's not enough, we believe that. That's just our core, what can we do on top of this? And this leads to this forethought, ability forethought. Here means that with all the knowledge we have in our organization, all these expert claim handlers and accountants and risk managers. Why can we use the knowledge that they have for the greater good of our clients, and provide these insights and expertise to our clients directly?

And then third, how can we deliver new solutions? This goes into direct insurance solutions, ensuring new opportunities, but also what we call large-scale transactions. So very large changes for our clients and making sure that they are succeeding in their business.

And all these things are requiring a real commercial culture mindset. So, do we have these thousand employees? Can we make sure that they have the right attention on these topics, and making sure that we can bring this value add to our clients.

Now, that said, we want to take you on that journey, right? How do we make this happen? How can we be very specific of to additionally changing this traditional organization to be more in this client centric arena?

But before I do this, I wanted to ask Jodi to share a little poll with you, getting a little bit of feedback from you. So, today, if you could share your, the first poll and ask everybody to vote on one of those five options, and to see where are you in your transformational journey.

Very well, ladies and gentlemen. So the poll has been launched. And the options are, Where are you on your transformation journey? The first one is that we are where we want and need to be.

See, writing on the wall change needed, not sure what and how.

We know what has to improve and are on that journey.

We are implementing changes and ready to collect the benefits. And we're considering a complete overhaul of what we stand for. So please go ahead and cast your votes in. Where are you on your transformation journey on your organization? So cast your votes and I'm gonna give you a little bit of time here to go in and cast your vote and pick one of this, the five options here.

And thanks for seconds, about more than half of you have already voted.

So the other half, waiting for you to participate where it's 75% well done, good job.

I'm going to be closing in the next NaN, so go ahead and cast your vote well done well. Over 90% of you have voted. So I'm going to close the poll right now, and I will share the results.

So sharing the results and the he is what we have. six to 5% say that we know what has to improve and are on that journey. That's the greatest, the largest portion of the answers, as 65%. And then next at 12%, we have, we see the writing on the wall changes needed, not sure what and how, 12% says we are implementing changes and ready to collect the benefits as well. So there's a split there, 12% each on those other chou. And the 6% on the other options off, we are where we want to be. And we are considering a complete overhaul of what we stand for. So the middle option got 65% of the vote and it's almost like a perfect distribution around that with 12% and 6% on the Tails.

I'm going to write that back to your presentation.

Thank you, Just enter that, We didn't come up with this, right? We didn't come up with the answers before, but it's, This is quite standard, right? A lot of changes are happening right now and to be fair with things like covert 19 more changes will be out there, right, to companies have to re-invent themselves again and again. Because the environment changes. I would say that what I want to cover now with you, on our changing to be more client centric, we would be right now at that C to D level. So, we are in the middle of the journey, but we also are seeing now how these changes implemented are taking effect, and what benefits we get out of it. And I went to share that with you today.

Oh, excuse me. So, I want to take you on a journey of that transformation. And the key thing that we're doing in this transformation is that we're moving from a yesterday, task management oriented view into the future.

And this, yesterday, is heavily based on this individual processing work.

You can see this picture here of people handling corn. I don't compare that 1 to 1 with Swiss Re. But we have similar processes, or we had similar processes where we're receiving individually information from our clients and shareholders. And we then process it 1 by 1, and we check and recheck everything. We want to be accurate and very good at what we're doing. And because of that, we actually spread the ownership across a lot of different areas, which means nobody really feels accountable.

It also instills a lot of mistrust mistrust within the organization where the one hand is not sure what the other hand is doing, but also the level of mistrust against our clients. So, can we trust what the client is presenting to us? And, can we move forward with it?

Which all results into our focus so far on this, protecting the bottom line, right, making sure that we're profitable, and that we don't pay anything, We shouldn't be paying.

And, a lot of these things don't go away, right? But, when we look at our tomorrow, we're focusing on, we're what we call portfolio steering.

It's more holistic view into what we're doing at Swiss Re and identifying the different patterns and groupings of work that we can bring under one umbrella.

And then performing an analysis at that holistic level to gain insights. So really understanding of, what are we actually doing a Swiss Re as a? Or? What are the things that we're producing? And how do we make sure that we can take that knowledge that's within the team and the these insights that we're gaining from it and bringing them back to our clients as value.

So, at the end, it's a shift, right? It's a shift from this individual task handling and over time, and I'll talk about that in a second. This takes awhile. We want to transform into this portfolio, steering and generating client incites world, and to us, that's a transformation. By transformation, we don't mean just change management.

Change management means you can go back to the old ways of working at any point.

But what we want to do here is change from the past to something new. And we don't intend to go back. And that's the indicator of our butterfly here, right? We want to remain a butterfly. We don't want to go back to being caterpillars.

So, let's take a concrete example. Something that we're actually doing and where we have done now in Swiss Re is around what we call claims transformation. I'm using that example, because it's quite easily explainable. A lot of people know what claim handling is all about I'll go into that just a second and it really shows how we can change from. Yesterday.

In fact, yesterday, our claim handling process has been the same process for pretty much 150 years. Now, we have digitized, did we have automated? We have moved away from the paper based process into workflow tools.

And you see your task lists online, we have cockpits and dashboards, we have a really good understanding of how our process is performing, but it's still the paper based process that we did 150 years ago.

And in fact, it's heavy, the reactive to the client, meaning the client is sending us information. It's sending us individual claim notifications, claim updates, and based on that, we then process it similar to that picture on the right and go through it 1 by 1.

It's a sequential working style, meaning the, if we double the amount of claims we have to handle, we have to double the number of people that actually work on it.

And the knowledge that our employees bring to the table is just at that individual claim level. So there's no consolidation yet, I'm looking at one document that I received from the client, I interpreted, I understand it, and I make a decision.

And if you look at that picture below it, showing that how badly or how much our work on the claim side is skewed, the top 10 claims make up for more than 50% of the reserves, so the risk behind.

And you can see the largest amount, about 50,000 claims, have a value of less than $1, yet we still process everything, 1 by 1.

To take a very concrete example, if we look at a hurricane or tornado or large-scale disruption, you will see patterns in those, the claims that come in have a pattern behind it, yet. And traditionally, we would take every single claim that comes in from this hurricane event, and process it 1 by 1. And we felt like there's a quite an opportunity here to improve this.

So, we came up with our claims transformation, and we started to say, How do we make this change actually happen? And in order to address this, we worked with senior management first on the so-called design principles. We wanted to get an input from the senior management to tell us their expectations and the things that allow us to wiggle, right to, to make changes to the traditional way and how much flexibility we have. And you can see here, there are some key elements in there that are changing from the past, trusting the client's ability to deliver us, Do claims presentations, as an example, and then working with it.

Also, given the fact that we're a global organization, we want to make sure we have a global process. But we also know that we have very regional requirements to execute.

These are regulatory requirements, but also client requirements, right, and making sure that they, we adhering to very specific, for example, high growth market needs, and also connecting it to our employees. Do we have the right skills globally? Not at the same level. There are people that are better in certain markets than in others.

We also want to eliminate inconsistencies. This means that the same person doing the same job on two different days, should come with the same outcome, and traditionally that's not the case.

Number four is important from a pure processing perspective, eliminating stoppage points whenever we stop something. It means we're increasing turnaround time. We usually don't make our clients happy when we're asking a lot of questions that don't make much sense. And we're slowing down the overall process, and we pay slower.

And number five is around an outcome based analysis model. We want to look at things holistically. As I said before, and we want to make sure that whatever we touch and analyze, we actually see a value in it.

So, we got these principles, that was extremely good input, Then, we did some more data analysis, and I don't want to go into too much detail. This is Project management, or Lean Sigma one-on-one. But we looked at our organizational structure, we looked at different teams, how they work together. We looked at our data, and we have mass data, right. We can see, where do we put effort, worth the risk. Where's the out?

We also looked at our processes. So we said, How do we work today? Where the handovers between different team members, in between different teams, and where are the root causes of problems, right? Where do things get stuck, and what does that mean?

Then, we work together as a team, and we defined our so-called claim handling pyramid. It's the pyramid you see at the bottom And what we're doing here is we move away from a very task based level. You see this PID level at the bottom. These are the individual receives that we get from our clients, and we want to move up the pyramid. We want to more focus on the overall claim and how claims develop over time. We want to look at deals. We want to look at the contracts that we have with our clients and how they perform. And we look at our claims holistically, and we want to understand, what, how do our clients take? What are the things that they need? How do they deliver, what kind of execution model do they have?

And while we're moving up that ladder, we now have a better understanding from the top down, so we can more clearly define, what are the different activities and rules that we need to have in order to execute the individual PID level, right? The individual claim updates.

With that, we defined two different teams.

The claim management on the left is the claim manager. The the person that really understands claims traditionally has done most of this work, and they now say, in this new world, What does my claim portfolio look like? So, all the claims that are responsible for, where are the claims that, where I can change the outcome of the claim. Meaning, where do I actually add value when I'm doing this work?

And, secondly, the contract fulfillment team is now delivering on the promise.

They make sure that we're paying the claims timely and accurately, and also based on the client's needs. And at the end, they then perform checks and generate insights based on their knowledge, and they ensure the protection of the bottom line. So, we still need to make sure we stay profitable. We still want to run the right business, and we want to pay claims when it makes sense, and not pay the claims that we shouldn't.

So, based on that, we come up with a solution. And the solution heavy the bit is based on this claim portfolio. Portfolio monitoring. The idea is here to say, rather than working in the world of e-mail and inboxes, and looking at 1 by 1. We want to look at our full portfolio. And the first point here is important, the ability to see all claims and their impact. So, while in the past everything that came in, we processed 1 by 1, it's easy to miss things because there's so much coming in.

Now, in this portfolio level, we will spot trends, We will see individual claims that are moving away from these trends, these outliers. And we can now say, What are the things that we need to concentrate on, and drill down into the details to say, How do we handle these exceptions? And This is what we're already good at, right? We know how to handle exceptions. We know how to handle these claims that are not going well. We can read all the documents. We have plenty of lawyers. We have experts for every field, and here, we continue to shine, but that's not the first step, is really the last step in this portfolio steering.

So, what does that look like for a claim manager? Alright, the Claim manager of the future looks different than the ones in the past.

So, here's my claim manager in the Morning, Rise and Shine, a New Day, or Wade's, He or she logs into the computer, and the first thing they will see is what we call ... Advisor, Business Management Advisor.

It's a new tool that we have developed. And what it allows the claim manager to do is see that full portfolio. So they can drill into things like different lines of business, right? Can I compare my fire claims with motor claims with hurricane claims?

I can also then see these outliers, right, Are all these claims behaving the same way, or their claims that behave differently? And based on that, it's flagged for me and I can take action.

We're also incorporating more advanced technology in this whole thing that now goes into understanding and actually reading the incoming documents that we received from the client to look for certain patterns in these documents and keywords. It goes beyond full text search. It's looking mainly for these patterns, and based on that, the claim Manager can now say, What are the key challenges that I need to focus on?

So identifying the claims and updates that I received from the client that need my attention.

So if I login in the morning, I can see what happened yesterday, and I can see, based on that what has actually changed. Or even if I was gone for two weeks, I can see what has happened since then.

Based on that, the claim manager can manage expectations. So he or she can now say: how do my claim portfolio's develop?

And now, I'm looking at these individual claims, and I can say, how do I believe this claim will develop in the future, Right? Those are, this is interesting for these long term claims claims that take longer periods of time. And we can see this development, and because they're usually large scale claims, right? Let's take that hurricane example again. It will take quite awhile until all these claims get paid, and we can now set our expectations.

We have tools in there where you can, for example, be approved for claim, or you can say, how often do I want this claim to be brought up into my to-do list and into my Beam advisor tool so I can review it?

And that leads to fixing problems, right? Again, this is the traditional bread and butter of acclaim manager. He or she will be able to drill down into these individual claims, read all the documents we received, and use their knowledge to really make a difference. And what we then do is, we're starting to engage more with our clients, I'd if we see opportunities that claims or an unjustified or that we have cut our portfolios, not right. Then We're providing that as feedback to our clients. And our clients then can use that to steer their portfolios better.

In addition to that, we're generating insights, and this is now the client centric piece, right?

B, This was so far the core, right, the traditional piece. Whereas this generating insights now allows us to use be an advisor to really understand, how does not just the individual claim perform, But how do, how do I spot trends and developments over larger scales, right? In my hurricane example, I can now see how all these claims develop over a period of time, comparing it with past hurricane or other large events. And I can say, what is the progression from there? I can look forward and say, what is my expectation for the future?

And again, this is where we shine with our clients. We want to bring this information to our clients, so they can get better at to attitude. So when they start going into renewal, right? They set new policies. They work with their customers.

They can be much more accurate to predict the risks that are coming in, and based on that, making better decisions for themselves, but we don't stop there. We want to get into this forethought right now. We're going a step further and we're saying, based on these insights, based on the trends and developments, we can see. For example, new patterns evolve.

A traditional example would be here, is since we're doing a lot of car insurance at the large scale level, we're able to see what has an influence on car accidents. Right, and I'm sure you've heard them by now. We did this quite awhile back, how mobile phones are impacting accident rates. And based on that, we can be in the forefront. We know this ahead of time, and we can work with our clients to actually give that information to them, so they can, again, set better policies, and even develop new solutions. So, solutions that cover, for example, new flood risks and things like that, but it can be in any other business area.

So, these new solutions development is an area where we want to strive, and from a pure, client centric approach, that is the bread and butter of tomorrow.

If you look at the claim handler of the past, they spend 90% of the time on this traditional individual claim handling.

We see this by now, It has gone down to about 40% of their efforts. So, they spend 60% of their time on this generating insights, providing for thoughts, working on transactions, and solutions, and really focusing on what is the value of decline brings to the table?

So based on that, I want to cover a little bit. the challenges that we have with this setup, right? Obviously, we're not perfect, And we have our own issues here and there, so I want to ask just a one more time to bring you back to the poll and get a little bit more insight from you. What is your top challenge you're facing during your transformation journey, since yours, a lot of times stolen earliest, early stages, it would be interesting to get your feedback on what that is, and I just learned that we don't have all seven options. So I'll put that away Josie. Would you be able to read the options to the audience?

We'll do Sebastian. And we have what is the top challenge you're facing during our transformation journey, so you have five options to choose for. Please go ahead and cast your vote. The first option is, how to get started, having the right focus.

Number two, How to Define a Better Tomorrow, three, project management challenges, for change management challenges, and five, Making changes, Stick, making it a true transformation. So please choose your options. And I'll give you some time to cast your vote. And the votes are coming in. So very good.

So Kip, choose one out of this five options. What is the top challenge you're facing during our own transformation journey?

More than half of you have already voted.

Well done. five more seconds here, to get to about 90%.

Last chance to cast your vote, So what is the top challenge you're facing in your own transformation journey?

All right, great.

We got to, to the most of you, I'm going to close the poll now. I'm going to share the results and read those results for you.

And then what we have here is the number one challenge, with 20 set, with 47% of the votes, is actually making changes, stick.

As we all know, we're now 95% done. You're halfway there, and it seems like everybody's feeling that making those changes, stick is the hardest thing for 47% of the responses. Second one was change management challenges with 27%.

And third place, we have to define a better tomorrow. So creating that vision at 20%. And finally, project management challenges, 7%. And the, and nobody's 0%, had issues with how to get started having the right focus. So, again, in order, 47% making changes stick, 27% change management challenges, 20% how to define a better tomorrow, and 7% project management challenges.

Very good. Oh, thanks for running this. And, again, I would say that this is not the biggest surprise, right? I would say, and let me make sure I share my screen again correctly. We see the same thing might change management and making sure that these changes are then lasting and and stick over a period of time, especially when challenges arise is a standard thing that we're facing, too. So, I can talk a little bit more about this. When we're going into, where are we from a Swiss Re perspective?

We actually, I listed three here, and I think the first one ties pretty closely to the change management topic that you mentioned.

How do we bring claim managers that traditionally work on individual tasks, on individual claims?

To this 30,000 foot view and getting an understanding from the top down and making decisions based on that, right, that requires letting go. It requires a complete refocus of what I do on a daily base.

And, in fact, it is a key challenge from a skill perspective, right? A traditional claim handlers is not a, as they always tell me and a data analyst, right? They're lawyers, they are used to reading the individual documents and making decisions based on that.

Now, working with data and graphs and outliers, and patterns, is something that is new to them mostly, and usually, that's not why we hired them, So, there is definitely a challenge on that one.

The last one is around risks that we see, and this brings it back to the make making changes stick, right? If we're now looking at our claims, not an individual level, but first of all, at a portfolio level, it means that there is a potential that we miss something, right? That we are not looking at the right claims, that we're making wrong decisions, especially at the beginning.

And, while we're in the risk mitigation business, right, as I said, at the very beginning, it's something that we need to address here, because, otherwise, these changes won't stick.

So, let me ask you to stop sharing your presentation and start again. Because, at least on my end, the, the the poll screen is has not gone away, so I'm not able to see your your presentation devil.

So, if you could stop sharing your presentation and start again, just to reset the system, or the appreciate that, then go ahead, and share it again.

Is this better?

Yeah, I see our outcome of claims transformation as 3, 3, OK, thank you very much.

Good. And it's, I'm glad that I kept the slides simple, right? Because it just has these three words on it, and nice pictures with it, too. So, again, these are our key challenges. I think they link very closely to what you just said on your challenges on change management, and making the change stick.

Now, to go a little bit into, how did we address these challenges? and just to stay at a high level, I think one key thing for us was it's not a one-off, big bang change. Claims transformation takes time. It takes years to perfect us.

And that gives people a way forward to end the plan of how they get onto the bandwagon right, addressing the skill issue, and then we want to make sure that everybody is able to get there.

We also engaged with the teams very, very early. So during the setup and the definition of them use the new process, we worked with them hand in hand, and we received feedback right from the beginning, and we continue to receive feedback.

And based on that, we also try to identify what we call the early adopters, or the champions that allow us to move forward quicker, because they are already doing this, right? They already really good at using existing tools. Existing patterns also have the right portfolios that can work in this matter, and we worked with them quite a bit to then say, what does that mean to them. But also, what does it mean to their colleagues, and how can we address the challenges that they had their colleagues are bringing to the table.

And then, last but not least, especially on the risk side, right, making it stick, We have been working heavily with senior management. And then especially the line managers, by the people that are managing claim managers, making sure that they're on board as early as possible. Then they understand the change. They understand what it means to them, and that they buy into it.

Because the biggest thing that we have seen in the past is when we make change and everybody says, Yeah, sure. Let's do this.

When the problems arise, right, when the, when the problems hit, and in our case, when we pay a claim, we shouldn't have paid.

This is when things fall apart, if we don't get management support.

If an employee goes to their manager and says, I told you, so I shouldn't have done it this way, and the manager said, you're right. Let's go back to the old way. The whole thing falls apart. If we then have managers that stand up and say, Yep, you're right, this didn't go well, it didn't go well. We also anticipated problems like this, but let's move forward. Let's learn from these mistakes and make it better. This is how you get buy in, and you pull people along. And, again, this doesn't happen from one day to the next.

Alright, I know I'm pretty much at the end of the time. I do want to say, quickly, disclaims transformation is a huge benefit for everybody involved. And all the people that play a lot, it's our clients because we're providing an ease of doing business and we're generating insights for them.

It's for our shareholders because we still protect the bottom line.

It's for Swiss Re because we have a more efficient, fast, and easily managed process on claim handling.

And especially our employees, our employees now have an opportunity to have more vast knowledge. They have better CVs. They have better jobs. They have more engaging daily routines, and that's really what it's all about. Our employees are always superheroes and we want to make sure when they're happy that our clients are happy, and then Swiss Re's happen.

I'll close here. Thank you, Jose, and I'll just say, I'll bring it back to you.

Fantastic. Sebastian, thank you so much. I love your energy. I love your your clarity in your communication, which want something that's very meaningful transformation in a critical process for the business. We had as a response to that. We had a lot of questions that have come in so I'll share those with you that. the very first one is super interesting because there's someone out there who had Global pandemic insurance. Is there such an instrument out there that existed Or there will be one going forward?

Well, I'm not the claims expert, but I can tell you that historically pandemics are actually excluded from most Insurance deals just because it's impossible to manage that risk right? If a pandemic like covert 19 spreads it's impossible to say how big will this problem be and how do we mitigate for it. Now that said, I also know that large insurers, and including Swiss Re, we have stepped up, and we have actually started to fulfill beyond the contractual terms and conditions. We actually have paid a lot of insurance claims that for covert 19 on the life and health side, and on the business interruption, the PNC side, and we will continue to do this. It's, it's hurting us, But that's what we're known for, and we should be able to do this to make a world more resilient, it won't be perfect, but hopefully, we can contribute a little bit to it.

Very good. Very good. I have a question from Roger Meller Rogers asks, do you believe that you must obtain a minimum level of strategic infrastructure and platform capability before you can move to a focus on providing value to your clients?

I would say flat out, yes.

When I think about what business management has done in the last 20 odd years, it was quite a transformation already. And this required a lot of technology, right? It required having the right tools in place that create the visibility that allows us to capture the data. And in fact, then, the data side is probably the most important thing, right? Knowing what actually happened even beyond what Swiss Re. Has those data, right? What our clients have our competitors have. And creating that full picture is a key ingredient to really transform.

And then, last but not least, it's a management structure and attention, right? Having senior management that actually wants to do this, and knows it has to happen. Without it, it won't happen.

If it's the employee that starts these things, they might listen, and they might feel like, oh, that sounds interesting. But even with our team in business management, it was our executive team. When they made that conscious decision to go more client centric, that's when it really made a difference for us.

Very good, very good, indeed, Fran ... is asking a question about the process that you share, and she is, She is interesting on measurements. What were the measurements to determine success at the end of this journey?

How much time do we have? It's a lot, but I know you can summarize well. So, we did a very in-depth analysis, and one of the key things we did, and maybe that's the most important thing here, is when we started the transformation, we said very clear, guiding lights around the success criteria.

How can we measure electronically the success of this project and that transformation, and it goes into things like change management, right? How quickly is the adoption rate? How many people will play along? Those are standard things.

But, for us, the challenge was around this whole portfolio steering ability and saying, how do we know that a person is doing portfolio steering and is then making an impact?

And here, we don't want to fall back to the traditional protecting the bottom line, but saying, how do we generate insights that we bring to our clients. And that was the key focus for us. And it goes, all the way to creating net promoter scores with our clients with a client can tell us, do they feel the benefit we're bringing to the table, And that's the starting.

Very good. I know there are many layers to that, but I thought you did a fantastic job summarizing that. Another question from Roger, and the question is, how did you move the time consuming detailed tasks away from managers, so they could focus at a higher level, and focus on the key challenges? Because, you know, I think implicit on, that question, is that there may be some resistance here. There may be some concerns about, why am I losing this tasks? Maybe, fear of change? How did you manage all of that?

Yeah, and again, there are lots of change management things around it.

Maybe the one thing that is probably the most inappropriate thing to say on this is, if you want a dog to stop chewing on the couch, you have to give them something else to chew on. And so, one of the key things we did in this transformation is and our employees are definitely not dogs. They are superheroes.

They're the ones that then said, If I have a way out, if it means that I don't lose my job because I stopped doing this, but I actually have an opportunity to do something new and more engaging and more interesting, I'm willing to play along.

And I would say that's true for 80, 90% of the staff that are willing to do this and are excited about it.

But there's also a percentage that is not, and we have to realize that you won't get everybody.

Farewell. Another question he has a more direct question. Is that the disclaimers Process with Swiss Re? Was this done globally? Is this done regionally locally? What is the scope of the change? Yep? It's global worldwide for all lines of PNC business, which, again, accounts, for about $9 billion, in premium, in claims.

And when we rolled this out, though, it was at a regional level. Just from an organization perspective, we have three-d. regional heads on the claim side, and we wanted to make sure that they play along, and that it breaks it down. And then the implementation, they were done, some regional differences, right in Brazil. We work differently than in Canada than South Korea, and we have to adhere to the standards. So, these, this is where these principles become super important, because they always give you a guiding light to say, How do we deal with it in Brazil. Even though in Brazil, we meet and hear from Brazil. So, you know this the challenge here is to make sure that we're adhering to those local standards and making sure that we have enough reserves on hand in Brazil and we made that happen, because we have a local team there that can do this.

That's fantastic. I can only imagine that, you know, the layers that you have to go through, just out of curiosity, Following up on that. If you're have a breakdown of perhaps, you know, the 80% that's common versus perhaps 20%, that's customized for different regions. I said 80, 20. But what is the actual, how would you split that in your own experience? How much of it is common across the globe? And how much of it percent wise is customized? Yeah.

So, from a process and setup perspective, it's 100% global When it comes to what we call regional recipes, meaning, different ways of working because of regulatory requirements. Here, we see differences, and there would say that 80, 20 split is not bad, because they in fact, when we define these recipes, that's where we started. We said, What are this? What's a standard? What's normal and expected, which is very difficult for people to grasp in the re-insurance world and to get to this 80% was a challenge.

And then it was OK to let the 20% go wild, if you will. So, and but we need to keep monitoring that. That's one of those things that easily again, spreads out where everybody will do their own thing. And all of a sudden you have a million recipes and we don't want that.

That's right. You know, I have to make the comments that are having similar experiences you have on doing this global deployments. Usually, in the very first meeting, it feels like it's 20% only common, and 80% customized, and the advisor, as we go along, we realize it's the other way around. But it's difficult because everybody around the world think that there are so unique, right, and and then we have to and that, but when we really get to the core of it, that's typically the ... holds, So.

Sebastian, we could talk about this for hours. So I am so grateful for you to connect with us directly, from Munich, Germany to this global audience, and the share such great work that you and your team, as Swiss rehab have have done. So thank you so much for being with us today.

It was a pleasure, thank you for having me, Josie, Have a good rest of the day, by year two.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, This concludes this segment of our presentation on Swiss Re: and their journey of traditional transformation up next, to wrap up the conference, and should they have a fantastic presentation on financing the green economy to minimize the impact of climate change? So, this is the financial services perspective on the energy economy, if you will.

It's a perfect segue for our next events next week, where we're welcoming global leaders of energy and oil and gas, major organizations to talk about what they're going through right now in terms of digital transformation, business, and cultural transformation. So, this is a fantastic video off of a very fast growing segment of the energy business with renewables and, and how it's being finance power of financing that green economy, and the impact that it will have on, on climate change. So, look forward to seeing you at the top of the hour. For now, we'll close this portion of the, of the conference and see you back soon.