Mid-market boss Lyons wants Zurich to become a “nuisance” to rivals

The insurer’s growth is coming in the low mid-market space, according to Lyons, pictured.

“That’s property and casualty [risks], [clients with] £5m – £50m turnover, and we’ve written 25% more new business in 2024 than we did in 2023, which is absolutely aligned to what our strategy is,” said Lyons. “It is growing our customer numbers in that lower mid-market space, and not necessarily exponentially in corporate.”

We are a market for more difficult, bigger property placements in the mid-market space.

Morgan Lyons, Zurich

In the next year, Lyons would like the competition to be talking about Zurich as “a bit of a nuisance”.

He added that he hoped they viewed the insurer as a business “that actually knows what they’re doing, has the right people in the right places and is taking business from them. Because that’s what we will need to do to meet the the aspirations that we’ve got”.

Lyons sees mid-market opportunities everywhere and hopes to increase the amount of business the insurer writes with all of its brokers.

Taking market share

Lyons was promoted to head Zurich’s mid-market business division last year and wants to continue to challenge broker views on its property appetite outside of real estate.

“The only way that we can do that is by quoting and winning property and casualty placements like we are at the moment, so that we can reinforce the changing perception that actually we are a market for more difficult, bigger property placements in the mid-market space.

“We’ve got the tools to do it, but I think realistically it means taking market share from some of those established players who may have increased scale in those segments.”

Zurich isn’t the only insurer targeting mid-market. Axa UK CEO Tara Foley told Insurance Age the insurer had been eyeing up the mid-market and was looking to enter the “white space” between Axa and Axa XL. Allianz is also targeting growth in the space, according to UK CEO Colm Holmes.

Service

Lyons explained that service delivery to brokers has been high on its agenda for a year, but that there were some areas it could still push to improve.

“The sentiment of the last two or three years has been most carriers service has been pretty poor. We felt that we had improvements to make, but we certainly didn’t consider ourselves to be in that category of not delivering a service.

“We’ve definitely remained focused on that and increased our responsiveness and the availability of local decision makers for brokers.”

Speed

Indeed he has made speed of response involving quotes to brokers a priority.

Lyons said: “If I look back to 2022, we were responding in 24 hours, about 67–68% of the time. If I look at where we are now, we respond within 24 hours, 90–96% of the time when it comes to new business requests from brokers.

“A lot of those will be well within the 24 hours, but to be at 96% of response time within 24 hours for us is a real positive, and we measure that internally, pretty forensically.”

In May, Lyons told Insurance Age that for anything under £40,000 in premium, it was aiming to have a contract and quote within three days with the target of doing that 70% of the time.

“We’re not quite there, but we’re at 68–69% average for the year, and it’s been an absolute key focus,” Lyons continued.

Zurich sees an increased uptick in conversion when it responds within that timescale.

Technical quality

However, Lyons noted it isn’t just about improving the speed of response but also about the quality of the discussion between Zurich and its brokers.

“And that is having the same underwriter responsible for that case throughout the whole journey, from point of quote to binding the risk. It’s the same individual that’s involved.”

He added that dealing with different people concerning the same inquiry is one of the challenges brokers get frustrated about.

“What that allows us to do is to offer them personalisation, so if technical discussions about cover are required, they’re having them with the same individual,” Lyons explained. “Brokers said that’s valuable to them and beneficial for the clients too. That’s something that we very much will continue to be focused on in our regional network.”

Products

The insurer launched its commercial combined proposition in October 2023, which involved “significant investment” in digital capabilities within Zurich’s regional offices.

We have just refreshed our marine product, which again we will launch in 2025.

Morgan Lyons, Zurich

“In 2024 we saw a high percentage of our business being written through that platform. Again, it’s about speed – the flexibility to underwrite a client’s business and effectively deliver that product much quicker.”

Zurich will be migrating its existing book of renewals onto the platform as well.

There are no immediate plans to launch new products, but it is looking to broaden the availability of its excess-of-loss offering in 2025. It is only traded through some brokers at the moment.

“We have just refreshed our marine product as well, which again we will launch in 2025. An element of that will be digitally traded as well, so that will be a refreshed offering.”

Blending with SME

Earlier this month, David Nichols, head of retail at Zurich explained blending mid-market and SME to create a seamless experience for broker partners is a key priority for the insurer. He added the two propositions “have been segmented by industry for quite some time, and this will create a much stronger solution for everyone”.

Lyons added: “We’ve started to work with some brokers on specific arrangements where digital quote requests are submitted into our SME business, and if there’s no capability to quote, they transfer into our mid-market regional business for review by the mid-market team

“We will then make sure it finds itself to the right place, to the right expertise, and then we will deliver it back to the broker, whether that’s digitally or manually, depending on where it’s landed with our business.”

Zurich named Nikki Lidster as head of SME and trading at the start of October.

“Nikki has spent a lot of time in the last six months out with our brokers, educating them about what capabilities we actually do have from a digital perspective, just to give them the confidence that you can submit [risks] digitally and we will be able to trade it digitally too,” Lyons concluded.

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