Zurich has announced a "resilience solutions" unit and a number of senior appointments in Australia and Switzerland.

The new unit will be led by Melbourne-based Mervyn Rea in Australia and New Zealand, while Hanno Mijer takes the global role, based in Switzerland.

In 2018, Mr Mijer relocated to Sydney to become CEO at Cover-More after Zurich acquired the travel insurance business the previous year. He left Australia to become Head of Commercial Insurance Services in July, which was a newly established role reporting to then Global CEO of Commercial Insurance James Shea.

Mr Shea has decided to pursue opportunities outside the company, Zurich said earlier this month, and Group Underwriting head Sierra Signorelli has now replaced Mr Shea.

The new Zurich Resilience Services advisory unit taps into the expertise of more than 750 risk engineers at the insurer and will take advantage of technology and new tools, leveraging data and analytics as well as third-party partnerships.

Zurich has already launched Climate Change Resilience Services, Zurich Cyber Security Services and Supply Chain Risk Management Services and says it will further invest in proprietary services and external collaborations.

“This new unit is an exciting development which allows us to expand our offering beyond Zurich’s insurance customers,” Mr Rea said.

“We want to leverage wealth of experience, along with insights from rich pools of data and digital capabilities.”

Mr Rea has more than 30 years’ experience with the Swiss insurer and has been head of risk engineering in Melbourne since October 2015.