Major ClientsNarrow moat

PZU writes around 30 billion złoty of gross premium a year across millions of individual policies¹, and no single customer comes close to mattering on its own. What matters is which of four very different relationships a premium arrived through, because they behave nothing alike.

The largest line is motor, at roughly 10,3 billion złoty. It is compulsory, standardised, renewed every twelve months, and increasingly bought from a sorted list of prices — the least loyal customer base in the company, and the subject of the moat's Commoditization of Insurance threat.

The stickiest is group and individually continued life, around 7,1 billion. Here the customer who signs is an employer rather than a person, and when the employee eventually leaves that employer the policy can follow them for the rest of their life. It is the nearest thing PZU has to an annuity.

The third is the Polish state and the companies it controls, which buy insurance from a company the State Treasury is the largest shareholder of. That is a relationship no rival can replicate and no board can be entirely comfortable with.

And the fourth arrives through Bank Pekao and Alior — millions of retail banking customers whom PZU reaches only because it owns their bank, and whose relationship still belongs to the branch rather than to the insurer. The Pekao merger, covered at length elsewhere in this file, is in large part an argument about who ends up owning that customer.

Four customer bases, four different loyalties, one balance sheet.