Our role as an insurer

Through our General Insurance business segment we aim to help our customers understand and manage the risks they, their families and their business may face.

As a financially strong and global business we work hard to provide innovative products and services to keep our customers on track every day. These are based on their specific needs, delivering when it really matters -- from a bump in their car to a business interruption.

We work with a wide range of customers, from individuals to small and medium-sized businesses, to large domestic and multinational corporations. Our products and services include:

• For individuals – car, home and general liability
• For small to medium-sized businesses – property, casualty, car, workers' compensation, financial lines, specialty products and accident and health
• For large domestic and multinational corporations – captive services, casualty, construction, global energy, marine, financial lines, motor fleet, property, international programs and claims
• Our customers can access our products and services through agents, tied agents, brokers or directly from Zurich depending on their needs.

Global Life delivers financial protection when our customers need it most. We help individual customers prepare for the future and corporate customers attract and retain the best talent through the provision of attractive employee benefit packages.

Global Life has a strong presence in many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing markets. We deliver a wide range of protection and savings propositions through agents, banks, brokers and employee benefit consultants to our 21 million individual and corporate customers.

Every business decision we take is made with the strength of our balance sheet in mind, as ultimately this strength ensures that we will be there for our customers when they need us most. It is with this attention on the customer and financial discipline that we formulate our strategy.

Our strategy focuses on superior market insight to develop and evolve market-leading unit-linked and protection propositions that are relevant to today’s marketplace. We use a global approach that can be adapted for local needs as we work with our distribution partners and corporate customers across multiple markets.

Farmers provides, through Farmers Group, Inc. (FGI) and its subsidiaries, non-claims related management services to the Farmers Exchanges. FGI receives fee income for the provision of services to the Farmers Exchanges, which are managed but not owned by Farmers Group, Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of the Group. This segment also includes Farmers Re, which provides reinsurance assumed from the Farmers Exchanges by the Group.

All references to “Farmers Exchanges” mean Farmers Insurance Exchange, Fire Insurance Exchange, Truck Insurance Exchange and their subsidiaries and affiliates. The three Exchanges are California domiciled interinsurance exchanges owned by their policyholders with governance oversight by their Boards of Governors.

The Farmers Exchanges are prominent writers of personal lines and small commercial lines business in the United States. The Farmers Exchanges, directly or through their subsidiaries, offer homeowners insurance, auto insurance, commercial insurance and financial services throughout the U.S.

The Farmers Exchanges serve their customers through subsidiaries including Foremost Insurance Company. The Bristol West Insurance Group and The 21st Century Insurance and Financial Services Group. Foremost Insurance Company is a leader in insuring specialty products such as mobile homes, motor homes, travel trailers and specialty dwellings.

The Bristol West Insurance Group is a leading provider of liability and physical damage insurance, focusing exclusively on private passenger vehicles across the U.S.

The 21st Century Insurance and Financial Services Group markets personal auto insurance to consumers throughout the U.S. using the internet and direct response marketing channels.

Group Operations is building a world-class operations platform for the Zurich Group. By managing Global Business Services, IT, Sourcing & Procurement, Group Project Management Office & Operational Improvement and Internal Consulting under one global umbrella, Group Operations provides efficient, high-quality shared services to our business segments worldwide.

Through this global approach Group Operations strengthens Zurich’s core functions and makes the same level of expert knowledge and skills available where they are most needed. This makes our businesses more flexible and helps them deliver one consistent Zurich experience to our customers, while contributing significantly to business outcomes and improving efficiency.

Group Operations is also the Group-wide owner and driver of Zurich’s transformation efforts, coordinating change and providing critical capabilities, notably through The Zurich Way (TZW). TZW, our headline transformational program since 2004, has been repositioned in 2011 to create a competitive edge by enhancing our global capabilities. We are doing this by selecting, improving and systematically rolling-out our core target capabilities that provide a standardized way of working and uniform processes across the Group. This enables Zurich to create global standards that all our employees can embrace: standards that represent the way we do business at Zurich.