Matt Cox: Turning claims into a strategic asset at Allianz UK requires a 'mindset shift'

The chief claims officer role at Allianz UK was newly created in February 2025 as part of a wider effort to unite its personal and commercial lines claims operations.

Stepping into the role during an executive leadership reshuffle from his previous position as chief audit officer, which he had held since 2021, Matt Cox wasted no time embarking on the daunting task of restructuring over 2,000 roles in the claims team to “simplify” the insurer’s market face.

Now, 19 months into the role and with the restructure officially completed in October 2025, Cox admits that the past year has been a “very steep learning curve” as he set about turning claims from an end-of-process function into a “strategic asset”.

This task, he explains, aimed to address feedback from brokers and suppliers that it was “complex doing business with Allianz in the UK”, with its personal and commercial lines claims operations deemed difficult to navigate.

Speaking to Insurance Times, Cox says that the merging of expertise on the personal and commercial claims operations has “cut down the different steps that the customer or the broker has to face”.

He explains that creating “two front ends to the claims system” – motor and property and casualty – underpinned by unified teams to support the enabling functions, has created a simpler route through the claims operation for customers and brokers.

The restructure has also promoted “synergies” across its personal and commercial claims operations, he adds, helping to reduce duplication.

Notably, he says that Allianz’ commercial lines claims investigators team has used its expertise to support personal lines claims that lacked the “in-house strength” of the former.

He continues: “There were loads of examples where we had real strengths in one area, which we could basically copy across.

“Recovery is another good example. We’re strong on recovery in the personal motor space and can just copy that real strength across to the commercial side as well.”

‘Mindset shift’

As Cox undertook the restructuring over the past year, the success of claims in the broker-distributed commercial lines business highlighted that the personal lines operation required a “mindset shift”.

For Cox, this meant bringing Allianz UK’s claims operations to the forefront of commercial decision-making, with claims “leading the proposals to the big commercial brokers or corporate partners on the personal lines side”.

Using what he calls the “power of claims” to sell the business, he also explains that he has worked on broadening the claims impact on underwriting within Allianz.

With the recent launch of new products on its digital-first motor MGA Slick in July 2026, and through its partnership with motor MGA Ticker from November 2025, Cox says that it was imperative that implementation was underpinned by the “right claims information” to “know how to price for young drivers, or how to go after new market segments”.

He explains that the insurer’s underwriting and pricing team “couldn’t have achieved what they are achieving now without claims fundamentally changing its mindset”. By transcending the minset of simply managing claims, Cox says this function was able to “help the rest of the business achieve its objectives”.

“Simplification’s the hardest thing you can do, because people naturally want to make things more complicated,” he explains.

“This year’s pivot, from January onwards, has been to figure out how we maximise the benefit and the assets that we’ve got, as well as how we recognise claims itself as a strategic asset in the whole of the insurance cycle.

“The knowledge and the data and the insights that we generate in claims allow us to develop the products, work out a distribution strategy, price them and underwrite them safely, all the way through to reserving and capital management at the end.”

Learning from across the globe

Looking ahead, Cox sees an opportunity for Allianz UK to use its global footprint to rethink the role of claims to include claim prevention, particularly in home and property lines.

He explains that the UK insurer has been working with some of the teams in Australia to learn how they partner with homeowners to help them identify vulnerabilities in insured properties and mitigate risks before a claim.

“They’re doing that in the context of natural disasters and forest fires, which we don’t really have as a problem here, but I think the same principle carries across,” he says.

“Imagine a world in the future where, as a homeowner, you would have information from your insurer that talks about whether there is a need to get something fixed in your roof before it becomes a wear and tear type problem.

”The same principle will carry across into motor insurance as well. That’s where you can start to imagine some of the new technology, such as connected cars, allowing us to do things in the future that we can’t do now around claim prevention.”

The benefits of having a global business lie in “pushing the boundaries” of what a traditional insurance company can achieve, he adds, especially as simply being there when a customer needs to make a claim is no longer enough.

“It’s difficult, within the UK insurance market, to have that relationship with the customer because it’s so competitive and transactional,” he continues.

“But we see more and more information that tells us our customers do want to have the sort of relationship that you might have with online retailers, which will tell you what you bought before and what you might be interested in in the future.

“The information is there – we just need to make use of it.”