The Versicherungs-Verein of 1872 and the turn to accident insurance

A reinsurer for a marine insurer

The prehistory of Zurich Insurance begins with Swiss exports. In the decades after 1848 the textile, silk and machinery manufacturers of north-eastern Switzerland shipped their goods across the Alps and the Atlantic and needed cover for goods in transit. A marine insurer called the Schweiz, formally the Switzerland Transport Insurance Company, was established in Zurich to meet that demand. The sources differ on the year of its foundation: the company’s own history gives 1869, while the account in the International Directory of Company Histories speaks of 1870.¹ What is not in doubt is the problem the new insurer faced. The risks it accepted were large in relation to its capital, and reinsurance capacity was scarce in a country whose first professional reinsurer, Swiss Re, had only been founded in 1863. The founders of the Schweiz therefore created a companion company whose task was to take over part of the risks written by the parent.

That companion was the Versicherungs-Verein, the Insurance Association, constituted on 16 November 1872. Its first president was John Syz-Landis, a Zurich merchant. The same account records that the licensing document was signed by Gottfried Keller, the poet, who then served as first state clerk (Staatsschreiber) of the canton of Zurich.² Keller held that office from 1861 to 1876. The anecdote is more than a curiosity. It places the foundation of the company within the same cantonal administration that approved the railway companies, the Kreditanstalt and the other creations of the liberal era described in Part D, at the moment when the democratic movement was transforming the canton’s constitution.³ The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland summarises the beginning in a single sentence: the company was founded in 1872 as a reinsurance company under the name Versicherungs-Verein.⁴

Reinsurance of marine risks did not prove profitable. The Swiss marine market was small, the risks were volatile and a new company without a portfolio of its own had little room to spread them. Records nevertheless show that the association’s accounts reached as far as New York as early as 1874, which suggests how naturally an insurer serving export trade looked beyond Swiss borders from the outset.⁵

The discovery of accident insurance, 1875

In 1875 the founders took the decision that defined the company. They added direct accident insurance to the association’s business and changed its name to Transport- und Unfall-Versicherungs-Aktiengesellschaft Zürich. The account in the International Directory calls the step “a sign of the times” and adds that Zurich’s growth as a separate company only began with the introduction of accident insurance.⁶ The timing was not accidental. In the same year a group of Winterthur industrialists around the textile merchant Carl Abegg-Arter and Heinrich Rieter-Ziegler founded the Schweizerische Unfallversicherungs-Aktiengesellschaft in Winterthur, the company that later became the Winterthur group and, since 2006, AXA Switzerland.⁷ Two accident insurers were thus created within months of each other in two industrial towns of the canton, each answering the same new demand.

That demand came from Germany at least as much as from Switzerland. The German Reich had adopted its Imperial Liability Act (Reichshaftpflichtgesetz) in 1871, which made railway operators strictly liable for personal injury and made factory owners, mine owners and quarry operators liable for the fault of their managers and supervisors.⁸ When German employers who faced these claims looked for insurance, the new Zurich company went to meet them where they were. In 1875 it opened agencies in Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Reutlingen and extended its business within a few years to Austria-Hungary, Denmark and France.⁹ The Historical Dictionary notes that the first European branch offices opened in the same year as the entry into accident insurance and that, until the move to America in 1912, premium income came mainly from France, Germany and Switzerland.¹⁰ The figures for 1881 show how far the centre of gravity lay outside Switzerland. Germany produced 53 per cent of the company’s premium income that year, France 21 per cent and Switzerland only 19 per cent.¹¹

Heinrich Müller, underwriting discipline and the name of 1894

The years around 1880 were a test. Heavy losses in marine business led the board to leave that line altogether in 1880. Heinrich Müller, who became chief executive in that year, turned the company into a specialised casualty insurer, and under his management gross premium income passed one million francs for the first time. A principle formulated in 1879 captured the approach that Zurich would later present as its founding creed: “No business without a sufficient premium but, on the other hand, far reaching goodwill in claims regulation.”¹² The sentence joins the two sides of an insurer’s promise. Adequate pricing protects the balance sheet, and generous claims handling protects the reputation on which the next contract depends. It is still a useful summary of what a commercial client expects of a lead insurer on a large programme.

The company also developed early what would today be called risk engineering. In 1882 it published a brochure on safety in factories and introduced accident cover for mountain guides. When a fire in a French textile factory in 1883 killed eleven workers and injured eighteen, the prompt settlement of the claims was used as proof of the company’s reliability. From 1886 Zurich wrote liability insurance in Germany for factories, homeowners, medical practitioners, hunters and horse owners, a range that anticipates the modern general liability policy. The same year brought the first decline in premium income in the company’s history, because Germany had begun to transfer workers’ accident cover to the statutory trade associations (Berufsgenossenschaften) created under Bismarck’s social insurance legislation. In 1887 an agreement with the Swiss military administration gave the company the accident insurance of soldiers during their annual training.¹³

By 1894 the transformation was complete. The company now adopted a name that described its actual business: Zürich Allgemeine Unfall- und Haftpflicht-Versicherungs-Aktiengesellschaft, Zurich General Accident and Liability Insurance Company. The name was kept until 1955.¹⁴ Staff numbers illustrate the growth that lay behind it. The company employed 27 people in 1880 and 140 in 1900, when premium income reached 15.4 million francs, of which 3.7 million came from Switzerland, 5.5 million from France and 5 million from Germany. In 1900 Fritz Meyer succeeded Müller at the head of the company. His insistence on financial strength earned him the nickname “Reserves Meyer”. By 1909 the ratio of reserves to premiums exceeded 150 per cent for the first time.¹⁵ The move into the palace at Mythenquai in 1901 gave that strength a visible form on the lakefront.

Notes

1. Zurich Insurance Group, “History and Heritage”, entry for 1872, https://www.zurich.com/about-us/history-and-heritage (Schweiz Marine Insurance Company “established in 1869”), and “Zurich Financial Services”, International Directory of Company Histories, reproduced on Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/zurich-financial-services (Switzerland Transport Insurance Company “established in 1870”). The discrepancy is noted here without resolving it. ↩
2. “Zurich Financial Services”, International Directory of Company Histories, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/zurich-financial-services. The company’s Swiss history page likewise states that “Gottfried Keller signs the Versicherungs-Verein’s articles of association”: Zurich Switzerland, “History of Zurich”, https://www.zurich.ch/en/about-us/zurich-at-a-glance/history. ↩
3. Zürich Tourismus, “Gottfried Keller (1819 – 1890) – Weltbekannt und in Zürich zuhause”, https://www.zuerich.com/de/gottfried-keller: “Gottfried Keller war 1861 bis 1876 als Staatsschreiber im Rathaus Zürich tätig.” ↩
4. Elena Folini, “Zürich Versicherungen”, Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), version of 19 December 2013, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/041840/. ↩
5. Zurich Insurance Group, “History and Heritage”, entry for 1874, https://www.zurich.com/about-us/history-and-heritage. ↩
6. “Zurich Financial Services”, International Directory of Company Histories, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/zurich-financial-services. ↩
7. Swiss Re, Geschichte der Versicherung in der Schweiz, brochure, https://www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:c24c1c66-3045-47d5-a4ca-4829f67c59dd/Markt_Broschuere_Schweiz_DE_web.pdf, section on accident and liability insurance. For the later history of the Winterthur company see AXA Switzerland, “Unternehmensgeschichte der AXA Schweiz”, https://www.axa.ch/de/ueber-axa/unternehmen/portraet/axa-schweiz/unternehmensgeschichte-axa-schweiz.html, which records the takeover by AXA in 2006 and the removal of the Winterthur name in 2018. ↩
8. Bernard Degen, “Haftpflicht”, HLS, version of 2004, edited 12.08.2010, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/016585/2010-08-12/: “In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts lag das Schwergewicht nach Vorbild des deutschen Reichshaftpflichtgesetzes von 1871 auf Eisenbahnen und Fabriken.” The structure of the German Act survives in the present Haftpflichtgesetz, which combines strict liability of railway operators with liability of the operators of mines, quarries and factories for the fault of their managers and supervisors: German Wikipedia, “Reichshaftpflichtgesetz”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichshaftpflichtgesetz. ↩
9. “Zurich Financial Services”, International Directory of Company Histories, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/zurich-financial-services. The company’s own timeline adds Sweden and Norway for 1875, Belgium for 1877 and Paris and Almelo in the Netherlands for 1878: Zurich Insurance Group, “History and Heritage”, https://www.zurich.com/about-us/history-and-heritage. ↩
10. Folini, “Zürich Versicherungen”, HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/041840/. ↩
11. Zurich Insurance Group, “History and Heritage”, entry for 1881, https://www.zurich.com/about-us/history-and-heritage. ↩
12. Zurich Insurance Group, “History and Heritage”, entries for 1879 and 1880, https://www.zurich.com/about-us/history-and-heritage. ↩
13. Zurich Insurance Group, “History and Heritage”, entries for 1882, 1883, 1886 and 1887, https://www.zurich.com/about-us/history-and-heritage. ↩
14. “Zurich Financial Services”, International Directory of Company Histories, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/zurich-financial-services. The Swiss history page of the company confirms the 1894 name: Zurich Switzerland, “History of Zurich”, https://www.zurich.ch/en/about-us/zurich-at-a-glance/history. ↩
15. Zurich Insurance Group, “History and Heritage”, entry for 1900, https://www.zurich.com/about-us/history-and-heritage. The staff and premium figures for 1880 and 1900 are taken from “Zurich Financial Services”, International Directory of Company Histories, via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/zurich-financial-services. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.