Solution

One intake layer feeding Zurich’s underwriting workbench

Zurich chose Cytora for its configurability, insurance market expertise and headless platform. Cytora handles unstructured, multi-language submissions, scales quickly and lets Zurich move to managing the platform itself. That gave Zurich fast deployment and control over its global view of risk, with room for local flexibility where markets need it.

Cytora now sits upstream of Z-Horizon+. It converts incoming submissions into structured, decision-ready risks that match Zurich’s global underwriting standards. Underwriters then assess, quote and bind in Z-Horizon+, or pass risks to specialist underwriting platforms. Outputs arrive in local languages, so each business unit works with native-language insight in one global tool, without custom local builds.

Underwriters no longer rekey, reformat or switch systems. “The platform has an incredible workflow that will have many benefits, such as providing more customer information and a deeper analysis for decision-making in the UW area,” said a senior property underwriter at Zurich Mexico.

The rollout moved fast and kept speeding up. By late 2025, Cytora was running across seven countries and two major lines of business at 95%+ accuracy. In Q1 2026, a modular delivery model and a shared master schema added four countries and four lines of business. In Q2 2026, Zurich began moving to self-serve deployment, training its own teams to launch new markets in 12-week cycles. Local underwriters’ trust in the results has helped keep that pace.

Behind that speed is one principle: build once and reuse. Every line of business shares a set of common data fields, and those fields form Cytora’s intake master schema. Zurich harmonized the requirements for them globally, so core configuration is done once and reused in every new market, with local adjustments where needed.