What are the international focal points in the new strategy programme?

The “Ambition 2025” strategy programme, which was presented by Munich RE CEO Joachim Wenning and ERGO CEO Markus Rieß in December 2020, is an internationally oriented programme. Together with the stable, profitable core markets in Europe and the growth markets in China and India, it is intended to achieve the ambitious goals of the ERGO Group. 

“All the international companies actively participated in developing the new strategy. And each of them now has its own strategic journey and at the same time cross-border topics ahead of it,” says Oliver Willmes, COO of ERGO International AG. By 2025, ERGO aims to be one of the leading insurers in the European markets – measured in terms of profitability. In Asia, ERGO is concentrating on the important growth markets of India and China and is benefiting from their good growth perspectives.

In the following, you can read about the key priorities of the local subsidiaries. As you read these quotes, you will see three underlying topics that are essential for our international success:

• diversification of distribution channels,
• growth and digitalisation initiatives as well as
• sustainability.

Bogdan Benczak, CEO ERGO Baltics

“Diversification of distribution channels is a paramount strategic target for ERGO Baltics. This model meets expectations of hybrid customers. The harmonized platform implementation in P&C, taking place right now, is a notable example of the approach and it illustrates perfectly the transfer of know-how and digital assets within the Group. Building on the extensive application of ERGO Hestia's vast experience in the retail and corporate business and its systems, new solutions in ERGO Baltics are being delivered by ERGO Technology & Services Management: back-end and a flexible, matrix-based front-end solution. Furthermore ERGO Baltics plans P&C and Life integration on the front-end level to boost sales of biometric products and to create on a CRM-based, dedicated solution for handling individually underwritten business for corporate customers.

And that is not all: Lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic have indicated the importance of online channels for end customers, and so ERGO Baltics has embarked on a digital strategic journey. It is intended to replace current end-user portals with one modern and harmonized platform, enabling online sales and self-services for all business lines.”

Josep Santacreu, CEO DKV Seguros 

“Our updated strategic plan, which will set the course for the company until 2025, has the ultimate goal of generating sustainable growth. Accompanying our clients to improve their health and well-being, throughout their lives with personalized and excellent solutions, will be our great focus. For this, we will need to improve our service level, being more flexible and working in an agile way. On the other hand, we will continue to innovate our solutions and increase the number of collaborations with external talent to be more agile and fast. 

We will continue to leverage the power of people, relationships, between our employees, our collaborators, our clients and of course, incorporating advanced data management methodologies and an intensive use of technology. If we succeed, we will be creating shared value for our stakeholders, including the health of society and the planet. In this sense, we will continue working to help combat climate change, with strong emphasis on health impacts. After more than 15 years of striving to reduce DKV’s environmental footprint in Spain, succeeding in becoming a “Zero CO2” company and reducing emissions by more than 80 percent, we have launched another ambitious programme called “Planeta Salud”, which includes ten challenging commitments, ranging from planting one millions trees before 2030 to offset all the emissions generated since the company’s inception in 1932. Our aim is to become Spain’s first climate positive insurance company.”

Jürgen Schmitz, CEO ERGO China

“The ERGO Ambition 2025 in China includes focused measures to scale and shape our development by growth along the full value chain of insurance, build up of differentiated capabilities as well as synergies between our affiliate companies.

In 2020, we brought many initiatives into fruition, such as our Joint Venture with Great Wall Motors and a strategic move into P&C industry by signing a shareholder agreement with Taishan P&C. 

For upcoming years there are further projects in the pipeline to facilitate the implementation of our China Ambition 2025. We expect to stand out as a distinctive multiline insurance player in five years’ time and play an important role as a growth pillar for ERGO Group.”

Nikos Antimisaris, CEO ERGO Hellas 

“With an updated strategy, ERGO Greece – amongst other aspects – aims to become a multichannel insurer, offering more choices to its customers, which will allow it to grow further, but also decrease its dependency on current channels.

In addition to securing our current position, strengthening our existing succesful bancassurance co-operation and our longstanding good relations with the independent network, we aim to increase channel diversification by further enhancing our relationship with the commercial brokers' channel, and more specifically by developing our corporate business. Furthermore, in the same direction and in close cooperation with other ERGO entities we are currently investigating hybrid customer sales models, leveraging Group know-how and experience. All of the above initiatives will push ERGO Greece's diversification on distribution channels to a new level in the medium term.“

Philipp Wassenberg, CEO ERGO Austria

“ERGO in Austria has a great deal of experience in bancassurance thanks to its long-standing cooperation partners, UniCredit Bank Austria and Volksbanken. In order to reduce our dependency on this sales channel, we have established the diversification of our sales channels as an essential part of our strategy until 2025. An important factor here is the expansion of our own sales force. There is a gread demand for successful sales staff in the Austrian Insurance market. In order to clearly stand out from the competition, we launched a recruiting campaign via social media. The objectives are to increase the speed of the recruiting process, to attract employees with strong sales potential and to make positive contributions to the employer branding of ERGO in Austria using digital recruiting channels.

The increase in the number of applications we have achieved so far and the high level of identification of new recruits with ERGO impressively confirm our approach.“

Piotr M. Śliwicki, CEO ERGO Hestia 

“Sustainability is important to ERGO Hestia. We were announced the second-most socially responsible company in Poland in 2020, received ISO 14001 certification and the EMAS certificate – the most prestigious recognition in the field of eco-management, which only four P&C insurers in Europe can boast having. These achievements result from our long-term commitment to sustainability perceived by us as taking care of the community and the environment we live in. Our goal for the years to come is to remain in the top three of the most socially responsible companies in Poland and to keep both ISO 14001 as well as EMAS certificates.”

Ritesh Kumar, CEO HDFC ERGO

„HDFC ERGO, our Indian joint venture, has embarked upon a journey to have an Artificial Intelligence-First Service Architecture by 2023. A centralised AI-layer today services around 30 percent of the requests from its customers, agents and its sales team, received digitally across channels. It shall be extended to Voice in 2021. Another AI project taken up is to service private car claims on a straight-through basis. Claim AI tool assesses external damages and automatically generates a survey report providing damage and severity assessment along with claim amount.

HDFC ERGO believes that data-driven decisions and adoption of AI would further augment its value creation journey for its stakeholders.“

Silke Lautenschläger, CEO DKV Belgium and ERGO Belgium

“For the Belgian entities the new strategy programme is a next step of a journey to realize local ambitions and to bring sustainable value to the ERGO Group. For DKV this would mean keeping position of the market leader by launching new products and ensure less complexity for clients and staff by getting more and more digital.

ERGO Insurance will focus on managing the run-off in an efficient way. Both entities will work in strong collaboration and run multiple projects such as a new customer portal, CRM-system integration and robotics to boost our efficiency, digitalise our business and introduce modern technologies in servicing our customers. Our targets are ambitious, but I’m convinced that together we will make it happen!”