Zurich Financial Services
Creating a shared service platform across the Finance function in Zurich
Like many in the insurance sector, Zurich was looking for ways to enable its own staff to provide more added-value whilst seeking options to reduce the cost of repetitive transactional activities.
In the Finance area this manifested itself through a greater focus on financial analysis and financial reporting that provided business insight, and the development of greater partnership between Finance professionals and business managers.
As a consequence, some of the transactional activity traditionally part of the finance function was ‘off-shored’ to vendors who specialize in such services.
Having a strategy that makes sense is fine. Implementing it successfully, particularly where it affects the lives of many employees in an environment full of complex legal and consultative requirements which differ greatly across country borders, is another.
Our approach to helping implement this change involved encouraging and creating opportunities for the central communication team to work very closely with project implementation teams in each of the countries concerned, both to plan a programme that would work for each country individually, and to enable the collection of individual plans to be managed within a global framework that all were comfortable with. The result: a global communication strategy and overall global message which could be supported throughout, whilst respecting the expectations of staff and the legal and consultative requirements in each affected country.
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