Zurich Insurance expects to decide by Wednesday how many jobs it will cut under a restructure designed to turn around the beleaguered business.

The head office in Zurich declined to say whether executives in Australia will be affected, and the Australian office did not respond to queries from insuranceNEWS.com.au.

“The consultation process with employee representative bodies in the respective countries is under way and we expect it to be finalised by the end of August,” spokesman Sylvia Gaeumann, who is based in Zurich, told insuranceNEWS.com.au.

“We don’t provide any figures.”

The transformation plan, announced in June, involves combining the life and non-life businesses under one leadership team, which Zurich says will improve customer focus.

“This customer-orientation becomes particularly visible in that our general and life insurance businesses in the countries will be managed by one team… and we take a unified go-to-market approach,” Ms Gaeumann said.

“As a consequence, the former segment structure is eliminated at group level.

“Due to the reduction in complexity, fewer people are needed for the management and the co-ordination of the group.”

In May last year Zurich announced plans to achieve more than $US1 billion ($1.33 billion) in group-wide cost savings by the end of 2018.

“We aim to achieve that through a number of initiatives such as the application of new technologies, the simplification of our organisation and a systematic approach to ‘lean’ processes,” Ms Gaeumann said.

“Some examples of efficiency initiatives we have already implemented: we renegotiated more than 300 supplier contracts, streamlined our IT application environment and reduced the number of data centres.”

The insurer’s net income declined 53% to $US1.8 billion ($2.39 billion) last year.

As part of the push to reverse its flagging fortunes, unprofitable businesses in various markets have been sold.