Helvetia Baloise presented its first half-year results as a combined group on Thursday morning, with management using the occasion to detail the accelerating pace of its integration and outline next-phase milestones.
CEO Fabian Rupprecht said the merger now prioritizes speed over polish. "Conducting the integration consistently and swiftly is better for our customers, our employees and ultimately for investors," he told reporters in Zurich. The cross-company Integration Office will progressively hand its responsibilities to the regular line organization.
"There is still a lot of work ahead," Rupprecht acknowledged. He assigned synergies realization—what the company calls "Value Capture"—to CFO Matthias Henni, while project-portfolio oversight moves to the technology division.
The legal restructuring has progressed faster than expected. In Switzerland, the operating companies in the life and non-life businesses were merged retroactively as of Jan. 1, 2026, following an earlier holding-company consolidation. Asset-management companies were also combined. Rupprecht praised the working relationship with the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma) as "excellent."
Harmonization of employment contracts across Switzerland and Germany has been completed, and joint commercial sales have launched in Germany, with a roll-out to corporate clients planned for October. The combined entity now operates at twice the business scale in Switzerland compared with each company's prior footprint separately, Rupprecht said.
Financially, the group has targeted annual synergies of roughly 350 million Swiss francs from the merger, plus an additional 300 million francs in efficiency savings driven partly by artificial-intelligence adoption, bringing the total cost-savings goal to about 650 million francs.
The integration is also reshaping the company's technology leadership. Helvetia Baloise created the role of AI Transformation Officer, bundling it with the chief-technology-officer position, in a move Rupprecht said would "even increase" the tempo of AI adoption.
Management cited the August hailstorm as an early example: a customer-service chatbot handled four times its normal message volume during peak periods, sending or responding to three to four messages per second per customer.
Rupprecht noted that each former company brought distinct strengths to the combined entity—Baloise contributed wealth management through its banking arm, while Helvetia's Specialty Markets business dominates that segment.
