Building a digital-first insurance organization

Achmea is the largest insurance company in the Netherlands. It provides health, casualty, and income insurance to over 10M individuals through its brands such as Centraal Beheer and Interpolis. Achmea’s Casualty Insurance division has set its ambition to become a digital and data-driven insurer and installed a team to lead this transformation; the Data & Digital Team. This team explores and tests new business models, redesigns customer journeys, and digitizes and automates internal processes. Over the course of 2019, 2020 and 2021, Achmea has collaborated with SparkOptimus in multiple focused stints to set up the Data & Digital Team, build up its capabilities and realize impact in its customer journeys.

In an action-oriented approach, we jointly built up the Data & Digital Team through three parallel efforts.

First, the customer: we jointly redesigned the most urgent customer journeys into digital-first journeys, increasing NPS while reducing costs. Based on a co-created handbook, the organization is now independently continuing the digitization of its customer journeys and operating models.

Secondly, data and tech: we introduced data-driven thinking by designing action-oriented dashboards, delivering them, and installing a rhythm of acting on the dashboards’ insights. Teams now operate in this way to redesign or optimize journeys and internal processes.

Finally, the organization: the Data & Digital Team has grown to 15 FTE that work cross-functionally and data-driven. Following a coaching approach, we guided the organization in its way of working and governance, which is now independent and self-propelling. Next to this, Achmea has a clear growth path for its wider organization towards its ambition of a digital organization.