Generali Switzerland
How one of Switzerland's leading insurers, part of the global Generali Group founded in 1831, built a two-decade compliance partnership with Prospero, moving from customer onboarding checks to real-time payment screening at scale.
Two phases, seventeen years apart
Generali Switzerland is a subsidiary of the global Generali Group and one of the country's leading insurance providers, offering life, health, property and business insurance. What began in 2007 as work on customer onboarding checks now screens every outgoing payment before it leaves.
At a glance
- Sector
- Insurance
- Location
- Switzerland
- Solution
- DetectX® Name Screening and Transaction Filter
- Website
- generali.com
The story, as Prospero publishes it
Starting position
New directives, and manual checks that could not keep up
- In the mid-2000s, new EU directives expanded anti-money-laundering obligations across financial institutions, insurers among them, with greater emphasis on customer due diligence, ongoing monitoring and the screening of politically exposed persons and sanctioned individuals. One-off onboarding checks no longer met the expectation. Generali needed to automate name screening while maintaining high accuracy, so analysts could work real threats rather than low-quality alerts, and needed the screening repeated continuously in batch rather than only at onboarding.
Phase one, from 2007
Name screening as the foundation
- Generali deployed DetectX® as a SaaS platform to screen individuals and legal entities against international sanctions lists, including those issued by the European Union, the United Nations and OFAC, and against internal watchlists, the Generali Blacklisted and GAV lists. Merging internal and external sources let Generali hold to international obligations while tuning screening to its own thresholds and risk appetite. Fuzzy string matching, configurable similarity scoring and multilingual natural language processing improved match accuracy across languages, spelling variations and transliterations.
Phase two, from 2024
Real-time filtering inside the payment infrastructure
- By 2024 the onboarding and batch processes were a strong foundation but were not designed to detect risk at the moment of payment execution. Generali embedded the DetectX® Transaction Filter directly into its payment infrastructure, screening counterparties instantly before execution against international sanctions lists, the Generali Blacklist and the Generali GAV list. Where a match or a close similarity is found the payment is paused and the case is routed automatically to the DetectX® Alert Viewer, where the compliance team reviews it in context and takes action within Generali's existing real-time, daily and weekly review cycles.
Where it is applied
Payments, claims, internal lists, vendors and alert handling
- The live case study names six applications. Real-time transaction filtering screens every outgoing payment. Claims disbursement control screens claims payouts before release, which matters most during seasonal peaks. Internal watchlist enforcement applies custom rule logic and list prioritisation to Generali's own lists. Integrated alert management centralises alerts in the Alert Viewer for review, documentation and escalation. Vendor and third-party screening extends the same checks into accounts payable. High-concurrency screening keeps all of it running under load, supporting hundreds of concurrent requests during peaks such as summer claim surges or end-of-year contract processing.
Result
Five benefits, as the source lists them
- Regulatory alignment with evolving European and global financial crime regulation. Operational efficiency, through fewer false positives, faster investigations and fully auditable decision-making. Scalability, handling spikes in claim volumes or onboarding surges without disruption. Risk reduction, through identification and prevention of high-risk customers and transactions. Transparency, through a traceable record of every screening event across both customer onboarding and real-time payments.
What Generali also said
- Albert Vendrami, Head Sales Services, Generali
- The professional services provided by Prospero were a key factor for fast and successful implementation.
What Generali runs today
Volume, throughput and duration, carried exactly as Prospero states them. None of the figures is footnoted and none names a measuring period.
Published result
27 million name checks a year
Names screened annually across batch and real-time workflows, as the source states it.
5,000 claims a day
Daily claims screened, each involving multiple names, at a throughput of five requests per second at full load and a capacity plan of 2.7 million high-priority screenings a year.
Two decades
A continuous compliance relationship since 2007, moving from batch screening to real-time integration without replacing the surrounding systems.
DetectX® has empowered us to maintain compliance seamlessly while ensuring that our processes remain efficient and scalable.
Every figure above is Prospero's own, carried from the case study it publishes. None is footnoted, audited or independently verified, and none of it should be read as a benchmark.
Where to look next
The two modules this deployment runs on, the sector page behind it, and the other insurance story.
- Name Screening
- The module phase one runs on, and how a screening alert is evidenced.
- Transaction Filtering
- The module phase two runs on, screening a counterparty before the payment leaves.
- Insurance
- What insurers answer to, and which modules answer it.
- Helvetia
- The other named insurer, screening names across five European markets.
Prospero also publishes this case study as a PDF. That file is not held in this site's assets, so there is no download here yet, and nothing above is taken from it.