Julien Alzouniès

In our conversation with Julien Alzouniès, Chief Operating Officer of Marsh France and BeLux, it was clear he shares the company’s innovative, adaptive and thoroughly modern approach to the industry. He pursues this goal by optimising digital processes and striving towards constant operational excellence.

Possessing an MBA from the Asian Institute of Technology (2003 to 2004), Alzouniès previously enjoyed a long career as a consultant or business leader at some of the most prestigious companies in the world, including Capgemini, AXA and AIG. He subsequently joined Marsh France in 2018 at a time when the team consisted of only 20 people. Recognising that, as COO, he could make a direct impact on the company’s growth and portfolio retention in an era when client servicing activities are recognised as a key quality differentiator in insurance, Alzouniès chose “service quality simplification” and “digitalisation” as his guiding principles. Subsequently, the team was expanded 1,000% to 200 people. “The objective was to put the key enablers of user experience transformation under the same scope of accountability, namely data and project management, as well as two main business activities: policy servicing and claims,” he explains.

A firm believer in the potency of modern working methods, he reports that Marsh France was able to adapt to the conditions forced upon it by the COVID-19 pandemic with relative ease: “Moving to a new operating model, where we previously had only an average of 10 to 20% of our people working remotely to close to 100%, was a significant challenge. Nevertheless, it only took us about one week to reach the optimal level of performance for all our employees.”

However, for Alzouniès, remote working is just one component of a larger consideration: the digitalisation of processes, data and document exchanges. “The need has only been accelerated by the pandemic situation and it’s going to become even more important in the future.” Having met this internal transformation with aplomb, Alzouniès states that refining the company through a new OPEX (operational excellence) programme will feature strongly in Marsh’s strategy for 2021. Started at the end of 2020, this will be an ongoing and far-reaching initiative that is currently scheduled to last until 2023. “We decided to launch this at a global level across all our geographies as a major transformation programme. Its scope covers all of our business functions, including sales placements, policy servicing, finance, and claims through digitalisation, service enhancement and quality improvement.” The end goal of this process is the “harmonisation” of Marsh globally through modernised operating models. “It's very important for us to harmonise our platforms,” continues Alzouniès. “System automation and service integration will also enable Marsh to capture and capitalise on more client data from a risk analysis and placement benchmarking perspective.” 

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