Iordanou Seeks To Make Zurich's Global Operations More Efficient

In the newly created position of senior executive vice president-group operations and business development at Zurich Financial Services Group (Schaumburg, IL), Constantine "Dinos" Iordanou will focus on "creating effective teams that cross the boundaries of the organization and meld the different cultures across the world with the aim of creating greater efficiency," Iordanou says.

Most recently, Iordanou was CEO of Zurich's North America Corporate Region. "I had the opportunity to consolidate a lot of the businesses in North America, each with their own infrastructure, into one group," he says. "We have learned a lot from that, mainly how to gain in cost and efficiency. Moving forward, I believe our experience will allow us to extract cost from the global operations," Iordanou adds. "Technology in financial services is a driver for what we do for our customers. It changes the way we deal with customer groups. Customer relationship management and the relationship with our distributors is critical, both in B2C and B2B. To be more cost effective, we have to look at how we can unite the 9,000-plus technology people and optimize the output of the group across the globe."

Iordanou is also a member of Zurich's Group Management Board, comprised of the top executives in the company. His participation in the board helps the IT and systems side of the company immensely, he says. "Once you get agreement at that level, at the end of the day, I don't have to sell the leaders of other areas," or departments. "As a result, implementation is a lot easier to achieve." In his new position, Iordanou will oversee strategy implementation and corporate leadership in group operations and business development functions. Iordanou will be responsible for the group's customer segment practices and technical support (consumer, small business, wholesale, commercial and corporate), IT/e-business/manufacturing and services, group capabilities, group operational planning and performance management, group internal reinsurance and head-office operations.

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio