Case Study: Zurich Insurance achieves automated reconciliations and streamlined financial close with BlackLine

How Zurich in North America Automated Account Reconciliations and Increased Transparency

Zurich in North America, a commercial property and casualty insurer operating across more than 100 legal entities, struggled with a fragmented, manual close and account-reconciliation process. Teams relied on Excel and disparate tools to manage thousands of general ledger accounts, creating time-consuming reviews, limited visibility into outstanding items, and challenges meeting compliance and audit requirements.

Zurich implemented BlackLine’s SaaS financial-governance suite on top of SAP ERP—deploying task management, account reconciliation, transaction matching, and auto-certification modules. The solution standardized templates and workflows, automated matching and approvals (auto-certifying 40–50% of accounts and saving roughly 10–15 minutes per zero-balance reconciliation), produced paperless audit trails, improved transparency and reporting, and has since been rolled out more broadly, including to global finance centers.

Zurich Insurance

Laura Darbro

Vice President of Close Operations and General Accounting