The new entity, AZT Risk and Technology, will be part of the international industrial insurance business of Allianz – Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty – and will be linked to the Chief Underwriting department under the management of Hermann Jörissen. Research into automobile safety and accident risks – AZT Automotive GmbH – remains assigned to the property and casualty insurance business of Allianz Deutschland AG.
In this interview, Gerhard Courage, who will head the section AZT Risk and Technology as Chief Risk Engineer, talks about the reasons for this step and the future of Allianz Risk and damage research.
Allianz bundles its know-how in risk assessment
The Allianz Center for Technology was founded 75 years ago
Allianz.com News: The AZT is a major competence center for risk and damage research. What are the reasons for this merger?
Courage: Accurate assessment of risks and damage prevention is naturally extremely important to us as an industrial insurer. These are key factors as far as managing our business successfully and profitably is concerned. Up to now, we had two units formed by the global network of Allianz Risk Consultants and the experts at AZT. These two units approached risks from a different perspective.
The Risk Consultants are specialized in damage prevention and risk assessment for our international insurance programs delivered to major companies. They advise our industrial customers on how damage, business interruptions and catastrophes can be avoided or at least reduced.
On the other hand, there is nowhere else where you can learn as much about risk than from the analysis of damages and accidents. And this represents the competence of the experts at AZT. The quality of advice on fire prevention at a large chemicals factory increases, if you are able to draw on research into the causes of concrete claims of this nature and make the relevant conclusions relating to risk management. Bundling the two units has been based on this logical consequence.
What do you want to do in order to ensure that the competences of the two units interact better within the new structure?
Courage: The keywords here are “lessons learned”. We learn something new from each claim. It might involve loss or damage relating to material in the course of constructing a plant in South America or a major fire with production downtimes in Poland. Any data is valuable in order to offer top service in this area, which in turn helps us and our customers to save a lot of money.
270 engineers from around 20 countries will be working together in our new unit. In addition, the lion’s share of the Global Fortune 500 companies is insured with Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty.
International cooperation between risk and damage experts is therefore extremely important as far as we are concerned. This is because the new structure allows us to offer our know-how on damage and risks directly to our customers, independently of whether the particular case relates to a production facility in Germany, construction of a dam in India or gas turbines in Italian power stations.
What other positive effects are you expecting from this?
Courage: By deploying our high level of risk and damage expertise, we want to improve service to our customers even further. Our knowledge about risks is more quickly available to customers throughout the world - this also decisively increases our proximity to customers.
New findings about risks and damage potential can be transported to our customers, for example via risk studies. That helps us to manage our insurance portfolio proactively on the risk side. We are able to identify negative trends at an early stage and in many cases take steps to counteract dangerous developments. Our combined ratio, i.e. the ratio of claims expenses and costs to premiums earned, provides us with an important benchmark in this context.
Ultimately, this is simply about preventing damage. After all, everyone benefits if a claim is never made.
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