With commercial and corporate insurance facing increasing complexity, evolving client expectations and an accelerated shift toward digital-first experiences, companies face a challenge: maintaining pace and scaling efficiently and effectively to stay competitive.
This, however, is not the case for Generali Global Corporate & Commercial (GC&C). GC&C is a specialised business unit of Generali Group – one of the world’s largest insurance and asset management companies. The division offers P&C insurance and service solutions to medium-large companies and brokers in more than 180 countries.
Not content with just keeping pace, GC&C is committed to playing a leading role in the transformation of the industry.
Strategically created as a separate business unit from Generali 13 years ago to provide a single, standardised global business division capable of serving customers across Generali’s decentralised operations, GC&C has always worked with a mindset more akin to that of a start-up than a legacy player.
“Innovation is in our DNA, and Generali GC&C is accelerating its commitment to technological innovation and AI, investing in cutting‑edge solutions that fuel excellence, efficiency and sustainable value in the 2025–2027 strategic plan,” says Global Head of Operations & IT Matthew Richardson.
“The idea behind our formation was that, whether you walked into a Generali office in Madrid, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Milan or anywhere else in the world, you would get exactly the same excellent experience across pricing, methodology, data and output for our corporate clients, who have complex needs that can only be met by a small number of corporate players. It’s a focus that has always allowed us to be at the forefront of innovation.”
Over the last five to six years, Matthew and his colleagues in GC&C’s IT Operations team have steered the business through an ambitious modernisation and transformation programme, designed both to deliver on the initial mission of the business and meet shifting market demands.
In what is a relatively short timeframe for a such a significant change management programme, the business has moved away from traditional technology and large disconnected databases to a cloud-first, low-code/no-code model enhanced by AI solutions that enables smarter, faster and more connected insurance services and creates an IT ecosystem that is resilient, scalable and primed for further innovation.
A life in the industry
Matthew is no stranger to delivering this kind of IT change programme, nor to the intricate processes, challenges and opportunities that span Generali GC&C’s global operations, having worked for the business for more than a decade. This breadth of experience is a critical aspect of his approach to his latest role and to IT leadership more broadly.
“Today I’m responsible for driving the operational excellence and technology strategy across our international businesses in 27 countries from our Central Team headquartered in Milan,” he explains. “Essentially, my diverse team and I manage the end-to-end IT and operations initiatives across GC&C, from internal process improvements, through to IT governance and resilience, as well as steering major transformational projects.
“I’ve had a pretty unique experience at GC&C,” says Matthew. “I joined Generali 12 years ago at entry level before moving my way through the business, first in our London offices then to Milan across six different roles.
“It has given me real oversight across the IT landscape, moving from business analysis and application support, through to IT support at GC&C and then into transformation and business relationship management, before taking my latest role in April 2025.
“It means I have strong grounding in all areas of the business and good relationships right across the organisation.”
This progression has fundamentally shaped Matthew’s approach to leadership and transformation, with him viewing communication and collaboration as essential to effective change management.
“I consider my role people-centric,” he explains. “I work with consensus across teams and countries and we are very open and transparent – you have to spend time with the business to understand exactly what is necessary, because IT is such a complex area.”
Focus on continuous improvement
Matthew is Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certified, a globally recognised framework for providing best practices for IT service management and helping organisations to align IT services with delivering strategic business value.
“My first transformation project was implementing an ITIL-oriented service desk, centred around a no-ticket, no-problem mindset,” he says. “ITIL gives a great grounding around service improvement and an understanding that IT is a service to the business and, increasingly so recently, a strategic enabler of value.
“Today, you need to be an underwriting expert, a risk engineering expert, have knowledge of claims, have expert IT knowledge and more. We want to be a Lifetime Business Partner, deeply connected to our clients and their business challenges,
“If you look back 15 years ago when I first started, IT was essentially a back-office function,” Matthew says. “We had big systems that were not very flexible or agile. That’s completely changed.
“No business can service a client or give the kind of exceptional customer service we expect for our multinational programmes unless you have an IT service that works. It has completely come to the fore in terms of business enablement.”
The rise of digital technology
This shift is crucial in an industry facing rapid technology-driven evolution. The rapid pace of innovation means the industry is becoming more data-driven, customer-focused and competitive as insurers move beyond traditional models to reshape how policies are priced, sold and managed.
AI in particular is having a transformative impact, speeding up risk assessments and claims, while greater automation is also helping to reduce administrative workloads, allowing employees to add value to the business.
“The challenge the corporate insurance sector faces with the rise of AI and large language models is getting the business people on the ground to come with us,” says Matthew.
“Everyone is transforming and talking about AI, but we face a genuine challenge of death by proof of concept. There are so many AI projects but you see companies still struggling to scale.
“And while many AI initiatives are proving effective, scaling them requires us to remember that corporate insurance is, first and foremost, a people business rooted in relationships and human interaction. AI plays a key role, but the real shift is as much about mindset and culture as it is about technology.”
The rapid acceleration of AI and other technologies and the rise of innovative insurtech firms is pushing established players like GC&C to move quickly and decisively.
“Change happens fast in the retail and SME sectors, where business is less complex when it comes to unstructured data and the volume of data. On the corporate side, where you have the complexity of very large multinational organisations, there is more tentativeness generally,” Matthew says. “But my advice to the business is ‘if we don’t do it, someone else will and they will be the true disruptor’.
“Generali Group is more than 190 years old because we innovate. But we are also here because we are customer- and people-centric, it’s in our DNA.
“That means with AI and with technology transformation you have to really spend time with our teams to explain, train, educate and reinforce throughout. I really believe in that human touch, not just with our clients but with each of our internal stakeholders.”
Modernising IT in a global insurance enterprise
GC&C embarked on its modernisation journey around 2020, undertaking a complex and broad programme of change involving transforming our traditional set up, moving to the cloud, introducing automation and AIOps to improve efficiency and strengthening cyber resilience to protect the organisation and its high-value clients.
“When we originally set up GC&C, we went down the traditional model of databases per application, as the technology was not available,” says Matthew. “It was very structured but, as data quality and data governance came to the fore it added complexity.
“We were asking underwriters to retype information up to three or four times across the system landscape for one policy, for example.”
To solve the challenge, the team focused on integration. However, this brought its own challenges, including the need for ongoing maintenance and the inability to scale effectively.
“We took a step back and began to think about what we could do differently,” Matthew says. “Efficiency was always a big challenge – each year I would do an IT survey and the repetitive feedback was that systems were too complex. Data quality was a massive challenge, simply because our data was across multiple locations and the business was unable to understand why. They couldn’t trust or use the data.”
The result was a vast modernisation programme that was delivered on time and on budget. Six months after launch, the team had already hit close to a 75% success rate in terms of positive feedback – a significant achievement for a transformation project spanning 25 countries.
“We worked with Microsoft to develop what would be the ultimate solution and decided to use Power Apps, which was very new technology at the time,” Matthew explains. “We built an end-to-end solution – a big simplification piece that allows everyone 24/7 uptime and is cloud-first.
“Before, to price a policy would need potentially seven or eight different solutions depending on the line of business. Now the underwriter only goes into one. We called this solution Agora – Greek for marketplace, where GC&C comes to do business.
“We removed 16,000 data points from 8 systems and consolidated them into one global system,” Matthew says. “When we first started working with our system integrator they were working on one other similar workbench solution; now they're working on 37.
“This showed to us that we are ahead of the market and have a digital enablement and API-first platform which allows us to start leveraging new opportunities which are entering the market, we are also enabled to integrate into our local country solutions to avoid duplication of process and support the ‘one and done’ approach.
“Put data in once and it flows across the systems to where it is needed and consumed. This enables greater flexibility and has put us way ahead of the curve.”
Resilience and collaboration
Programmes of this scale bring challenges. Resilience and risk – business critical factors in a highly regulated sector like insurance – were crucial throughout, says Matthew, explaining that adoption of a cloud-first model helps remove some of the complexity associated with maintaining and managing data.
“We work very closely with Microsoft Azure and have dedicated IT security & Infrastructure teams in the UK, which is GC&C’s centre of excellence for IT Solutions due to our close proximity to Lloyds, we also leverage the skills that an organisation like Generali has inhouse to ensure we mitigate the risks around the cloud first,” Matthew explains.
Close collaboration with key technology partners inhouse and external has also proved crucial. Matthew explains that relationships must be rooted in a strong, strategic partnership model based on clear communication, shared ambitions and a goal of adding value to the overall outcome.
An example is GC&C’s collaboration with Sixfold, an AI-powered underwriting platform that helps insurers automate and improve the consistency of risk assessment.
“We began working together two years ago,” says Matthew, “and it has been a close collaboration between them and our cyber team on a near-daily basis. When the solution finally was embedded in the business it was already at a 95% success rate as a result of that close work and internal development.
“We are now looking at how we scale that relationship across other lines of the business.”
AI innovation and the future
GC&C’s IT modernisation provides the business with an efficient and innovative foundation on which to continue scaling. In particular, the business is developing and leveraging AI, machine learning and automation technologies.
“One area is individual efficiency approval,” Matthew says. “We’ve rolled out Microsoft Copilot to the organisation and are monitoring and training for individual productivity. We are also embedding Copilot into Agora.
“We also have our own AI models, for which we currently have eight use cases across the lifecycle of a policy,” Matthew explains. “The key is that AI isn’t about replacing underwriting but enhancing it. We want our underwriters to analyse data, not just input it into a system.”
Matthew also mentions AI Desktop, a risk analysis system that allows risk engineers to automatically upload risk reports and give accurate risk ratings, freeing up employees to spend more time onsite with clients.
“In theory you could automate all kinds of processes all while ensuring that humans remain in the loop for referrals. If you are leveraging outsourcers for data processes, these are ideal use cases to be replaced with AI,” he explains.
“You still need the underwriter to add their knowledge and understanding to ensure the correct price.”
GC&C will not stand still when it comes to innovation. Matthew reports that the IT team is now in the midst of a large-scale transformational programme called Data 3.0, which is all about ensuring that only high-quality data enters the company’s systems.
“There is a perception that you can do everything with AI,” he says, “but you have to make sure the data is there. Having a fully educated and engaged business is my plan over the next 18 months, meaning data is essential if we want to accelerate our AI solutions and get the highest insights out of our systems, giving real value back to the business on the data they put in.
“We now have a great baseline solution. My focus now is adoption, training and awareness – it’s all about change management. The next level is getting people to see the value in the solutions, making them more intuitive and doing all we can to stop the business raising a ticket. If we do that, we increase our service rates and IT is freed to focus on requirements, enhancement, change management and solutions that serve GC&C.”
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Matthew Richardson
GC&C Global Head of Operations & IT
