Allianz Direct: Advancing as Europe’s leading digital insurer

Allianz Direct had three cornerstone goals: a fully digital business model, highly competitive market positioning, and an agile corporate culture, radiating the engineering mindset throughout the organization's activities.

With support from McKinsey, Allianz Direct built a state-of-the-art, digital platform that can be scaled across all countries in record time. The platform allows teams to learn from one another as they launch new products, improvements, and plug-and-play software. For customers, the online experience is easy to use and features many time- and cost-saving innovations with maximum self-service capabilities. In one example, Allianz Direct built a flagship service—the “60-second claim”— enabled by AI-based loss assessment and evaluation, allowing customers to process a claim in less than a minute by uploading photos and documents.

“The successful transformation can be attributed to the combination of technical excellence, sophisticated IT infrastructure, and advanced digital marketing capabilities, along with robust execution and global delivery in a compliant way. We dedicated utmost attention, allocating 150% of our focus to launch and establish our platform as a solid foundation. In addition, we complemented the approach by emphasizing key aspects such as market analysis, retail marketing strategies, pricing optimization, efficient damage management, and streamlined operations to maximize our competitiveness within the industry.”
– Christoph Weber, Chief Transformation Officer Allianz Direct

Allianz Direct built momentum in the direct insurance market in Europe in just a few years by targeting two important market segments: “smart shoppers” and “price seekers.” The business provides them with the features they value, including competitive pricing and a broad online presence.

“The most impactful decision was to be stubborn about the outcome, and to never waiver on what good looks like. And that means you need to invest in the best technology and in the best people, and be really stubborn about it.”
– Philipp Kroetz, Chief Executive Officer Allianz Direct

All of this was enabled by a foundational change in the organization’s culture, operational and technical excellence, and a disrupting operating model. McKinsey helped Allianz Direct create a talent strategy built around hiring the best engineers. This infusion of talent was crucial to building an agile, engineering-focused corporate culture. Today, a third of Allianz Direct’s employees work in technology or data roles. The Allianz team  created an operating model based on best-in-class technology capabilities and cross-functional agile squads responsible for creating and marketing insurance products. The result is a highly adaptive and scalable operating model that fosters cross-market collaboration.