AIG rebuilt underwriting and handed 6,000 staff to Accenture to escape its post-2008 rut
Zaffino found underwriters' names weren't even linked to policies; the fix ran through a 6,000-employee transfer to Accenture and a new tech core.
What was changed
AIG was America's biggest insurer until the 2008 crisis: it had sold huge volumes of credit default swaps, needed a US$180 billion government rescue — the largest corporate bailout in US history — and lost 98% of its value by the end of 2008. Some 20,000 employees departed or were laid off, top recruits avoided the tainted brand, and Peter Zaffino, promoted from COO to CEO in March 2021, was the company's eighth chief executive in 16 years.
The turnaround began with a shock: in 2017, as new COO, Zaffino asked for a list of underwriters and their performance, and the systems could not answer it — underwriters' names were not linked to policies. Claims sat on paper, data systems were described as the industry's worst, and General Insurance, the biggest business, was floundering. Zaffino rebuilt the executive team (nine of twelve senior executives are his appointments) and turned underwriting itself around.
The structural move came out of a December 2019 lunch with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet. Zaffino planned a shared-services centre; Sweet argued AIG lacked the in-house experts and the time, and proposed converting some 6,000 AIG employees at data centres in Malaysia and elsewhere into Accenture employees en masse — the largest intake Accenture had ever taken.
State insurance commissioners and foreign governments approved the transfer in nine months, and the handover closed in January 2021, turning the former AIG sites into Accenture offices. Accenture also led the technology transformation, built new digital workflows, and gave AIG the underwriting platform it had never had.
Why it worked
The opening finding — no link between underwriters and policies in the systems — gave the programme a concrete, undeniable problem to fix first.
Transferring 6,000 staff en masse bought speed: Accenture already knew how to run shared services and data centres; AIG would have had to learn.
Dedicating joint teams rather than a client-vendor split kept execution fast enough to clear regulators in nine months.
The partnership committed Accenture to outcomes rather than advice, which is how Sweet framed the difference from consulting.
What can be applied
When the core skill has no data — you can't even say who underwrote what — fix the foundation first and hand non-core operations to a partner who already runs them.
Aftermath
Accenture reports 17% of the transferred employees have been promoted and about 76% have trained in digital technologies including machine learning and automation. Analysts turned positive — KBW gave an outperform rating and Barclays cited AIG's 'strong underwriting acumen' — though retail investors remained wary of the still-volatile stock. Zaffino: 'People need to see it. It just takes time.'