COVID-19: Zurich Continuity of Business Update

Our focus over the last few days has been to provide a continuity of service for key transactions, while also reviewing our working practices with the aim of limiting the disruption for you and your clients. This primarily involved testing and preparing our remote working practices.

As of today, we can confirm that we remain open for business and that we are implementing our work from home practices. We will still maintain a small number of people (on a rotational basis) to manage key processes within our Blackrock office, but most of our staff will now be working from home.

We will be making the following operational changes to ensure that we can operate as efficiently as possible:
1.       All queries should be directed by email only to your dedicated Zurich Service Team (Groups and Individual). You can also phone your Zurich Broker Consultant in the usual way.
2.       All Transfer payments to other Life Offices will be made by EFT.
3.       For encashments and maturities, we will need you to supply bank details for customers when submitting requests so that payments can be made by EFT.
4.       We will be emailing confirmation letters to you rather than sending these by post.
5.       For Group Pensions, all Benefit Statements for group pension schemes will be sent directly to pension scheme members. A copy of a members Benefit Statement may be accessed via the clients policy details view on the secure Broker Centre (under the heading ‘Correspondence’).

As you can imagine, this is a new way of working for all of us, so for the short term, we are going to continue to prioritise key customer transactions (such as paying pension and other income payments, processing switches etc). Please bear with us over the coming days and weeks as we adjust to the new environment and scale up our work from home capabilities. Working together with you, we are focused on helping you and your customers through these difficult times.

Our Business Resilience Team continues to closely monitor the ever changing situation. We are taking all the necessary precautions and actions to protect the health and safety of our people while reducing the impact on the service we provide to you and our customers in these challenging times.

In the meantime, we hope that you and your families keep well over the coming weeks.

Jonathan Daly & Joe Creegan