Achmea accelerates adjustments in customer focus

Achmea, the largest insurer in the Netherlands with a cooperative identity, is accelerating adjustments to its organisation, in order to further increase customer focus, reduce costs for customers and facilitate investment in its online services. These adjustments are being made in response to the continuously and rapidly changing demands of our customers. We expect the changes to result in a gradual reduction in staffing levels of around 4,000 positions over the next three years.

These changes follow improvements made in the past. In combination with already existing plans, the adjustments will enable us to continue investing in new solutions for our customers, retain our high customer-satisfaction levels and maintain our long-term financial health.

Willem van Duin, chairman of Achmea's Executive Board: "The changes mark the start of a new episode in our group's history. Our eight million customers are doing more and more online and also want to able to arrange their insurance in that way. That's why we're accelerating our adjustments and we're investing more in our customer focus and online customer services. In doing so we can be sure of preserving what we are in the future: a cooperative insurer with the strongest of brands that communicate with their customers in a modern way."

Achmea is a sound company and is undertaking these organisational changes on its own initiative. Over the coming three years, the group will be reshaped to create a more customer-driven and more effective organisation. Achmea will invest more in online customer services, for example via social media. Society is changing ever more rapidly, which puts current working methods under pressure. By among other things increasing our commercial effectiveness, we aim to generate a sustainable and adequate return. Further standardisation and complexity-reductions in our processes should make our costs more competitive.

These adjustments will have consequences for our staff. Over the next three years, the expectation is that staffing levels will be reduced by around 4,000 positions out of a total of around 19,000 in the Netherlands and other countries. This means that we will have no option but to declare employees redundant.
Willem van Duin: "As a cooperative insurer, Achmea will take great care in balancing the interests of all our stakeholders including of course those of our employees. The Works' Council and the trade union organisations have been fully informed."