Case Study: Zurich Insurance achieves on-time SAP S/4HANA migration and 98% reconciliation automation with BlackLine

Zurich North America Uses BlackLine Solutions for Automation & Control During Transformation

Zurich North America, a major insurance provider serving industries across the continent, faced a complex finance transformation driven by the move from SAP R/3/ECC to SAP S/4HANA and the need to support parallel ledgers for IFRS17 across 170 entities. Leadership anticipated more than a 160% increase in monthly account reconciliations and risked massive manual rework while needing to maintain control, compliance, and visibility during the migration.

Zurich leveraged its existing BlackLine deployment as a control center and automation platform to map legacy to new account structures, preserve reconciliation history, and avoid duplicate data entry. The solution enabled a two‑year, on‑time/on‑budget S/4HANA migration, automated 98% of reconciliations in non‑leading ledgers, absorbed the increased workload without adding staff, preserved audit transparency, and opened the door to further automation such as transaction matching.

Zurich Insurance

Doug Tramp

Director, Finance Systems