Allianz Partners transforms claims, targeting €300M in profit uplift

90 Million Cases, Dozens of Systems

Allianz Partners processes over 90 million cases annually across its global protection and care portfolio, spanning health, automotive, and travel insurance. The scale alone would test any operating model.

Rapid organic and inorganic growth had left the company running on dozens of disconnected systems with little standardization across markets. Claims handling averaged 29 days. Fewer than 10% of claims were processed in under 12 hours. The operating model scaled linearly with volume: more cases required more people, with no leverage and limited paths to margin expansion.

For CEO Tomas Kunzmann, responsiveness was the single metric that connected growth and profitability. Faster resolution drives top-line expansion through customer satisfaction and retention while enabling bottom-line improvement through lower cost per claim. With intermediaries moving to redefine the insurance value chain, the cost of inaction was not just operational drag. It was structural margin erosion and loss of competitive position.

Previous attempts to address this through Robotic Process Automation had failed. RPA could not handle the variability inherent in insurance claims across product lines and geographies, the compliance demands of regulated markets, or the decision-making complexity required to execute an entire case from first notice of loss (FNOL) through settlement and payment. The technology addressed certain repetitive tasks but left the core process, and the 29-day cycle time, untouched.

Allianz Partners concluded that the problem required a fundamentally different category of technology: autonomous agents capable of executing entire business processes, not isolated steps. The question was not whether to invest in AI. It was whether to lead the industry or be overtaken by those who did.

Autonomous AI Agents for Claims and Invoice Execution

Allianz Partners and Otera aligned on a single strategic objective: responsiveness through autonomous processing, deployed at production scale.

Otera's deep insurance domain expertise gave Allianz Partners the confidence to bypass proof-of-concept cycles entirely. As CDO Pieter Viljoen explained, capabilities of this magnitude should be treated as platform-level investments that scale from the start, not patchwork fixes validated one experiment at a time.

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Two high-impact use cases went live in production within 2.5 months across the UK and DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) markets before scaling globally:

Autonomous Claims Execution. Otera's specialized AI agents operate across the full claims lifecycle. They review incoming claims, validate coverage against policy terms, assess liability, settle cases, generate customer responses, and trigger payment. The complete chain from first notice of loss through settlement runs autonomously across product lines (health, automotive, travel), languages, and regulatory environments. Only a small number of complex cases escalate to human specialists for single-touch review in a central control hub. This is the variability, the compliance burden, and the decision-making complexity that defeated previous RPA attempts.

Autonomous Invoice Execution. The same agentic architecture extends to invoice operations covering millions of invoices from Allianz Partners' 16,500-strong partner network. Agents handle ingestion, invoice processing, service validation against contractual terms, and payment decisions. Human involvement is reserved exclusively for complex or exceptional cases. A high-volume, high-friction process now scales with partner network growth without proportional headcount.

Allianz Partners built for global reach by leveraging Otera's reusable technology components: standardized building blocks that enable rapid replication of production-ready solutions across new markets. An early investment in regulatory compliance, including engaging third-party legal experts specializing in AI regulation, cleared the path for deployment in heavily regulated environments. Tomas Kunzmann described this as "outsourcing assurance" to remove uncertainty, accelerate progress, and give stakeholders the confidence to move at speed.

The underlying architecture reflects governed autonomy: agents execute entire business processes without human intervention, while operators maintain full visibility into every decision with the ability to trace, explain, and override any action. This is what separates agentic automation from task-level tools. The agents do not assist human workers with steps in a process. They execute the process, with humans governing exceptions and outcomes.

A New Default for Claims and Insurance Operations

On impacted business lines now in global rollout, the operational shift has already been delivered:

Average claims handling time has dropped on affected cases from 29 days to 3.5 days, with a significant volume of touchless cases resolved in minutes. The share of claims processed in under 12 hours has jumped from under 10% to over 70%. End-to-end automation rates have moved from below 10% to over 90%.

This is not incremental process improvement. It is a new operating model where the majority of cases run from intake to settlement without human intervention, and where the speed and consistency of execution are no longer constrained by workforce availability.

The voice-of-the-customer score has risen from 4.30 to 4.64, a direct consequence of faster, more consistent resolution across product lines rather than a separate customer experience initiative.

These operational results now form the foundation of Allianz Partners' broader transformation program. Tomas Kunzmann and Pieter Viljoen have confirmed that the company-wide initiative, with agentic automation at its core, targets €300 million in incremental annual profit by 2027, while supporting a revenue growth trajectory from €10 billion to €13 billion. These financial targets are forward-looking, but they are anchored in production-scale operational results that are already being delivered across live markets, not extrapolated from pilot data.

Allianz Partners is now extending the architecture across additional use cases, markets, and business lines. The reusable components that powered the initial deployment make each subsequent rollout faster and lower-risk. The company has moved from asking "can autonomous agent execution work end-to-end in insurance?" to scaling it as the operational default.