Bancassurance: An ecosystem for customer excellence

This is something to look forward to: the booking portal for holiday apartments shows a cozy chalet, not far from sunny vineyards with a wonderful view of the Valais Alps. After booking, the platform suggests possible activities in the area, a guided photo hike or a cooking course with local specialties. Such supplementary offers reach the customers exactly where they are in the Customer Journey. They can be booked just as easily and conveniently as the holiday apartment itself. This type of customer focus also offers great opportunities for banks and insurance companies in Switzerland.

In the course of digitalization, insurers and banks are once again cooperating more closely, for the benefit of the customers: Depending on their current life situation, they are offered banking and insurance products as well as other financial services from a single source – within a digital ecosystem. The companies involved are aware that customers in a specific situation often have different needs that can be met best by different specialists. As part of an ecosystem, a company consistently focuses on the needs of its customers and offers them the best possible service, at the right time and through the best channel. That is customer excellence.

The described cooperation between banks and insurance companies is called bancassurance. This approach is already successful abroad. In Spain, for instance, bancassurance products in the life insurance and pension sector already account for over 60 percent of the market. The situation is different in the Swiss market, where the market share of bancassurance products has so far been less than 1 percent. But this could change now, thanks to a new cooperation between Zurich and UBS for young entrepreneurs.

UBS and Zurich are convinced that there is great potential in Switzerland, too, when banks and insurers identify specific situations at each stage of their customers' lives and offer products and services tailored to them. Around 40,000 start-ups are founded in Switzerland every year. Young entrepreneurs focus on their ideas and plan how to successfully implement them. However, banking and insurance products are often low on their list of priorities. Nevertheless, they are extremely important, and in some cases even obligatory when it comes to founding a company.

This is why the two partners UBS and Zurich are offering the one-stop "all-you-need package" for entrepreneurs via the digital platform UBS Start Business. However, the package includes far more than just individual products. The entrepreneurs receive support when they want to start up their company or prepare their business model. They also benefit from numerous cooperations with other partners for mentoring programs, services or accounting. The figures speak for themselves: since the two partners launched the offer in March 2020, it has already been taken up by several hundred start-ups.

With their start-up package, UBS and Zurich are taking another big step towards customer excellence of the future. With this solution, the two partners are shifting their focus from simply selling products to meeting specific customer needs in a particular life situation. But the idea has much more potential: Zurich and UBS will continue to develop both the Customer Journey and the joint bancassurance offerings based on customer feedback and data analyses.