Zurich Insurance, a multinational insurance provider offering commercial and retail cover, has completed a 90-day rollout of Cytora’s agentic AI-enabled risk digitisation platform across five countries.
Cytora, an insurtech firm focused on AI-based risk processing, is now set to be expanded by Zurich Insurance into more than 20 markets over the next 16 months.
Zurich Insurance has developed a fully integrated underwriting model in which Cytora operates as an upstream intelligence layer within its underwriting workflow.
Using Cytora’s platform, Zurich Insurance can transform unstructured, multilingual insurance submissions into structured, decision-ready risk data aligned with its global underwriting framework, improving consistency across markets.
Zurich Insurance reports significant operational improvements following deployment. Manual triage time has reduced by 80%, falling from 75 minutes to 15 minutes. Digitisation accuracy has improved from 70–80% to 98%, while intake straight-through processing has increased from 10% to 95%. Zurich Insurance has also established a repeatable deployment approach designed to support faster international scaling of the platform.
Prior to adopting Cytora, Zurich Insurance underwriters were required to manually review and interpret each submission, which constrained capacity and made prioritisation inconsistent. Multiple disconnected systems also slowed decision-making processes. Zurich Insurance aimed to reduce time to quote by up to 60 minutes by automating the conversion of submissions into decision-ready risks and increasing the volume of submissions that could be processed efficiently.
Zurich Insurance selected Cytora based on its configurability, commercial insurance expertise and its ability to function as a headless digitisation layer capable of handling unstructured, multilingual inputs at scale. Cytora enables Zurich Insurance to define a consistent global view of risk while accommodating local market variations. The platform also delivers outputs in local languages by default, supporting Zurich Insurance teams with locally relevant insights within a globally standardised system, without requiring custom-built local solutions.
Armin Schaefer, Head of Customer & Digital IT, Commercial Insurance and Project Director at Zurich Insurance, commented: “Cytora united cutting-edge tech and a winning team to deliver fast, collaborative, high-quality results at unprecedented speed.”
Richard Hartley, Chief Executive Officer of Cytora, added: “Through this partnership we have created a model for the rapid and effective deployment of agentic AI powered automation across Zurich’s global operations. Huge efficiency savings have been achieved without compromise.
“Zurich can launch new markets and products with minimal setup while adapting to local requirements – delivering consistent, accurate, decision-ready output every time. This partnership showcases the power of agentic AI to deliver tangible and immediate results on a global scale.”
