Big Interview: Matt Cox, Allianz UK
By Scott McGee
28 Apr 2026
After Allianz UK merged the claims operations of commercial and personal lines, Scott McGee speaks to Matt Cox, the man in charge of the integration and the joint claims team moving forward.
Early last year, Post revealed how Allianz UK was in the process of merging its two claims operations for commercial and personal lines sides into one team.
While Allianz had two very well respected and established heads of claims to choose from, it was somewhat of a surprise that the task of leading the combined department was given to the provider’s head of internal audit, Matt Cox, pictured.
Speaking to Post in his first interview since taking on the role in February last year, Cox says it was “probably a combination of different factors” that landed him the position.
“I’ve done large operational roles before when I was at Deloitte as a partner,” he explains. “I was working with big organisations, leading various different things.”
He also says the “privilege” of being able to see how a claims operation fits within an organisation, helped him see the big picture of what needed to be done.
“In the same way as an internal audit, you have a really broad understanding of how things connect within the organisation.
“You need that within claims, because you need to understand how the decisions you make about how you handle the claim impacts everything throughout the lifecycle of the organisation.
“That raw perspective is really important.”
So, after speaking to Allianz UK CEO Colm Holmes, stating his interest in the role, Cox felt his fresh set of eyes, plus the ability to see how it all connects, was the rationale behind him being named head of claims.
“Colm said the immediate priority within claims was bringing the teams together,” he says.
“But I guess also the board saw in me the ability to set that vision and get people to coalesce around it.”
Cox says his colleagues from his days at Deloitte, working external and internal audit, were happy to see someone from that area taking on a senior operational role.
“That doesn’t happen very often,” he says.
“That was quite refreshing to people in the industry. It’s also about saying: ‘You’re probably looking at the skill set the person’s got, rather than the title of what they do, and what’s transferable across into the role of claims.’”
Integration
In his previous roles as an auditor, Cox worked on mergers and acquisitions.
He says his job was to focus on “day two” of the merger, after the excitement of completing the deal on day one.
“On day two, you have to actually look at the business and figure out what it is going to look like in the future.”
Cox applies that same logic to the mammoth task of bringing the Allianz claims operations together.
“I break it down into different phases,” he explains. “Last year was very much about getting the right roles in place, getting the right structure, and getting the right people into those roles.
“It’s almost like we had two very large, complicated Lego sets that we needed to take apart and build back together as one.”
Of course, with dismantling the two “Lego sets”, there were some bricks that simply were not needed any more.
“In simplifying it, we were getting rid of duplication and things like that. So that was really setting the foundation last year,” he says.
That work was to provide Allianz’s claims team with the “launch pad” for what he wants to achieve this year, he adds: “Getting that model really ticking, getting the best out of the underlying technology, obviously facing into some of the new stuff around artificial intelligence and some of the new capabilities that are coming forward.”
Disruption
However, the job has not been short of challenges.
Cox says merging the units was “hugely disruptive”.
He explains: “You’re moving individuals around, changing responsibilities. You can never rush that, which is why it took from February through to Q4 before that had all washed through.”
He says most of that disruption was within the team, but that his predecessors, Graham Gibson and Caroline Johnson, had done a lot of work already.
“Graham and Caroline had worked extensively on what would the operating model for a combined claims team look like,” he says.
So, what needed to go?
“There was a lot of inefficiency, where we had different teams doing the same thing,” Cox says. “You don’t need that.
“We had different contracts with the same suppliers, and it was a headache for them, because we had two different teams interacting with them and sharing information.
“Or you had different teams using different processes, which was just confusing for us internally, and to some extent out in the market, particularly where we had a broker working with both our personal and our commercial business, and they were seeing slightly different things.”
But the changes he made went further than internal teams.
“Some of it was with our suppliers,” Cox continues. “So, we had different contracts with the same suppliers, and it was a headache for them, because we had two different teams interacting with them and sharing information.”
He says there were some “big decisions” to be made around roles and suppliers.
“It really was taking a step back and going: ‘It’s not quite a blank sheet of paper, but if you had a blank sheet of paper, what would it look like working forward?’”
Jobs cut
Shortly after Cox was named head of claims, it was revealed that Allianz UK was cutting up to 650 jobs across the business.
While it wasn’t confirmed at the time, chief distribution officer Nick Hobbs told Post most of these losses came as a result of merging the two claims operations.
Cox explains that complexity within the provider had increased, and it needed to take a step back.
“Insurance companies are the worst for this,” he says. “We just build up and accrete complexity over time, because sometimes you almost don’t have the capacity to stop turning the handle on the day job, to step back and go: ‘How could we do this differently?’”
He says the insurer tried to retain as many people as possible.
“The foundations are the people,” he says. “By and large, they stayed as they were, so we retained a huge amount of knowledge. But as an organisation, we set it up in a much more efficient way so that we didn’t have some of the complexities that had built up.
“We went through literally every layer in the claims team to see what the role does, and is it doing it in the best way? Is it in the right place?”
Another aspect of the job cuts was to reflect the nature of the business.
“One of the things that we saw last year, and a good continuation of a trend that we’d seen across the market, was the reduction in motor frequency,” he says.
“We had fewer claims coming through on the motor side, and motor makes up a big part of both the commercial and the personal books.
“So, some of it was actually about right sizing the organisation to the market that it was working in. Not necessarily just because we were simplifying duplication of roles. It was probably a combination of those two factors that resulted in that.”
Cox is clear that the process is now complete.
“There’s no need to do anything further, unless we fundamentally change something in the business, or start selling something different,” he says.
Frequency
On the motor claims frequency point, while Cox says it has been reducing over the last few years, more recently it has been plateauing.
“In some places we have even seen it tick up slightly,” he adds.
“Maybe it’s a combination of people on the road a bit more, because employers are asking people to come back to work more. But the benefit we were seeing from Adas coming in is plateauing a bit.
“Frequency is not going down quite in the same way as it had been for the last two or three years. It is just flattening out.
“Maybe when we see the next generation of Adas coming in, we’ll start to see the frequency dropping down again.”
Workload
This reduced frequency and changes to suppliers begs the question about claims workload.
Allianz has historically leant on a network of third parties when it comes to dealing with claims, and Cox says that is going to continue.
“We absolutely have to still run an ecosystem for the claims network,” he confirms.
However, once again, he says there is opportunity to simplify.
“We had similar suppliers providing the same services across personal and commercial. Or where, in one part of the business, we were doing things with the supplier,” he says. “Then on the other side of the business, we were doing it internally.
“So, we did certainly move some of those things around.”
But he says having that network is a strength of the business.
“That’s everything from the investigation side through to the repair side through to the work we do in some of the more specialist areas,” he says.
“Some of those skill sets, it’s hard to replicate and justify maintaining them inside the organisation, even for a large-scale organisation.”
“It’s about saying where we have those real strengths, and then using those to support the whole business.”
Moving forward, Cox says the workload of the joint claims team will be fundamentally different to how it was before.
“We now look at it like a motor claim is a motor claim. There’s a lot of similarity between whether it’s coming through on the commercial fleet or the personal side,” Cox says. “What we’re able to do now is to link that together much better.”
He says using the different strengths from the commercial and personal offerings, to service all claims, has been key.
“For example, what we’re doing is putting more of the commercial motor repairs through what was the old LV personal motor repair network,” Cox says.
“It’s about saying where we have those real strengths, and then using those to support the whole business.
“It’s the same on the property and home side. Our commercial property book is quite similar to our home book. It is the majority landlords.
“Yes, we’ve got some factories and warehouses, but a commercial property claim is quite similar to a personal home claim.
“So, we can service that through our existing really strong home network, using our building contractor network we’ve got set up on the home side.
“On the flip side, we’ve got a really strong commercial casualty team that is now able to much better support and work on the casualty claims that come out of personal insurance.
“In the past, it was done separately, and that didn’t make sense, because you weren’t playing to your strengths.”
Balance
Allianz has signed some new MGA contracts recently, such as with Ticker, Wrisk and signing a contract with Volkswagen Financial Services.
When asked if Allianz will now be taking on those claims, Cox says it depends on the contract.
For Cox, bringing in any increase in claims volume, like with any operational update, requires a balance to be struck.
“Think about it as a triangle,” he says. “The top of the triangle is customer outcome. Then you’ve got indemnity management, and then you’ve got operational efficiency, and in the middle, you’ve got the people.
“Everything needs to balance. So, if you pull too hard on one piece, you pull too hard on the customer side to try and always settle in the favour of the customer and be very generous; then that really messes up your indemnity.
“It’s the same on the operation side. If you pull too hard on operational efficiency, you can get poorer customer outcome.”
Cox says Allianz has implemented a balance scorecard for every initiative.
“It needs to make one of those points in the triangle better without making any others worse,” Cox says, adding Allianz is taking the same approach with suppliers.
“Everyone within our claims ecosystem cannot just be shooting for one thing, because that really distorts the model,” Cox says. “It has to be balanced and that’s how we want to be.”
Gracechurch
Despite all this change, Allianz has been able to keep claims standards consistent, as is evidenced by Gracechurch’s recent commercial lines claims marquee.
Gracechurch’s latest data has put Allianz as one of only three regional market insurers to demonstrate exceptional claims service, with an NPS score of 27 – a one-point improvement on the year before.
Allianz has held the award since 2017, the only UK regional market insurer to do so, and Cox says it is a “massive” achievement to keep that level up.
“That’s a really good example where I told the team: ‘This is the consequence of the good work you do’, he says.
“They [brokers] ranked us as number two. Our NPS has increased, while the gross dropped in the rest of the market. We saw similar on the personal lines side.
“Improvements are coming through. It’s hard, but it does really make a difference.”
Cox says being able to have regular conversations with brokers about what they want has led to some tangible differences in Allianz’s claims service.
“What we did really effectively last year, for the first time, was actually send some of our team out to sit down with the brokers in their offices, looking at what our business looks like through the eyes of the broker,” he says.
“From that, we had a list of 10 different things that the brokers wanted changed around our broker portal. We wouldn’t have ever spotted [these] ourselves because we weren’t sitting in their shoes looking at it through their eyes.
“I found little things like that to be super, super effective. That’s what the brokers want. They want it to be a partnership.”
He points to speed, and certainty of cover as huge elements needed, but says technological improvements are also vital.
“We recently had a broker forum where we were talking about the trends we are seeing. What they are seeing. How we use the information around the types of claims that are coming through, in terms of how they then approach the customers about the types of cover they might need. That relationship has to be so close because we’re sort of selling each other.”
Technology
Allianz wants to be “digital first as a business with the human touch where it matters”, according to Cox.
While it has been investing in artificial intelligence, Cox is cautious about how the technology will transform claims.
“AI is great, but it doesn’t really do empathy very well,” he says.
Echoing what CEO Holmes said earlier this year, Cox wants to give customers a choice of how to interact with Allianz during a claim.
“I’m sure there’ll be a large portion of our customers who want to engage with us digitally," he says.
“So last year we released ENOL for single vehicle. We just launched it earlier this year for multi-vehicle.
“If a customer wants to, they can have a totally contactless journey through getting their car repaired, but many customers want to be able to talk to us.
“There are many situations where that has to happen if there is a vulnerability or some complexity.”
But even so, AI has a part to play.
“One of the things we introduced quite recently was a tool which does ‘next best step’ on a casualty claim, to help the handler understand the complexity and make suggestions about what the next best step might be,” he says.
“It’s not replacing the handler. The handler is still responsible for the claim, but they’re much better able to synthesise a huge volume of data. This allows them to know how best to help the customer.”
He outlines how AI is helping on the volume side, also.
“What we’re doing is around: ‘How do we overlay AI to make sure the customer gets to the right handler first time?’
“One of the things that frustrates customers a lot is that they phone up and are then passed around departments.
“So how do you get to the right person first time? Then how does that person capture the information in the most effective way?”
Fraud
The other area AI is being utilised is around fraud, which Cox calls “an arms race”.
“Our aim is to make the environment as hostile as possible to someone who’s trying to commit fraud,” he says, outlining the partnership with Clearspeed to aid in this process.
“Some of the stuff around images, for example. The human eye is pretty good, but it’s getting to the point now where it can’t spot these things without the tool helping them,” he says.
“It’s a real challenge. That’s probably the only area where we’re using AI to do something that currently humans just can’t do.”
He says there are weeks where it feels the industry is winning the arms race, but in other areas, help is needed.
“Some of the stuff around ghost broking is more difficult because that requires more of what’s not wholly within our control to address that business model they’ve got,” he says.
“I think we need tech firms and maybe broader government intervention.”
Claims as asset
Overall, Cox sees an insurer’s claims offering as an asset that needs to be sold more.
“It’s about the scale of it and how it fits together,” he says. “Thinking through the complexity of making this change here, and what that means in terms of the consequences across the business.”
He says he has learnt the real value of a claims proposition.
“We’re not just here to manage the claim,” he says. “Obviously, that’s really important, but we are fundamental to how you design and market your product. How you price it when you write it, through to how you reserve through to capital management.”
He says the claims part of the business has been siloed somewhat in the past but effort has been made to change that.
“In the past, we’ve played too much just in the space of managing the claim part,” he says. “What I’ve been doing is to educate the organisation on actually we are a strategic asset, and that they need to be using us.
“If you think about the stuff we do with brokers, brokers are buying the claim service. They’re not buying the price, because everyone can flex their price depending on different things.
“What you can’t flex is how good your claim service is. I sit down with my colleagues in the marketing distribution teams saying they should be prioritising selling the claim service.
“It’s the thing that differentiates us and sets apart.”
Read the original article on the Insurance Post here.
