Zurich Financial Services Group has entered into a master service agreement to transfer the document management processes of some of its European entities, including post, filing, indexing, scanning and archiving, to Swiss Post or its local subsidiaries.
With this move, Zurich expects to get access to document management services tailored to the specific needs of a modern insurer operating across borders.
Countries in scope are the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Austria. In all these countries about 400,000 documents will be processed each day. The implementation is subject to the execution of additional local agreements. Zurich will take a phased implementation approach starting with the UK and Switzerland in the first quarter of 2009. Implementation in the other countries is expected to be finalized by the end of 2012 in line with pre-existing agreements and related operational transformation plans.
Employees working in the document management area will transfer to Swiss Post or its local subsidiaries respectively as each country goes live upon implementing the master service agreement, added Zurich.
Claudia Dill, COO of general insurance for Europe at Zurich, said: The initiative is part of our operational transformation efforts to make Zurich an even leaner organization. Applying consistent state-of-the-art technologies across borders will streamline and speed up our internal processes which will help us to better serve our customers.
Frank Marthaler, board member at Swiss Post, added: We look forward to working with Zurich as an internationally based organization and assisting them in achieving their goals and demonstrating our ability to deliver a market-leading service in document lifecycle management by being able to manage physical and digital documents in a truly integrated process.
