Versicherungs-Verein, 1872.

The company that became Zurich did not start with the name. It was founded in 1872 as a reinsurance company called the Versicherungs-Verein, set up at the request of the “Schweiz” transport insurance company, and its founders also sat on the board of that marine insurer, according to Wikipedia. The group’s own history page dates the founding to 22 October 1872, and Wikipedia says business began on 1 May 1873.

The city’s name arrived quickly. In 1875 the company added accident insurance and was renamed Transport- und Unfall-Versicherungs-Actiengesellschaft “Zurich”, Wikipedia says. The long German legal title carried the short word in quotation marks, and it was that short word, the name of the city on the lake where the business was based, that would last.

The early years were not smooth. In 1880, after major losses in transport insurance, the company left the marine business, Wikipedia and the group’s Swiss history page both say. The company history credits Heinrich Müller, who became chief executive that year, with putting it back on track, partly by cutting dividend payments. In 1881, the company says, it introduced accident insurance for mountain guides together with the Swiss Alpine Club, a relationship it describes as continuing to this day.

The legal name changed again as the business changed. In 1894, fourteen years after leaving transport insurance, the company became Zürich Allgemeine Unfall- und Haftpflicht-Versicherungs-Aktiengesellschaft, or Zurich General Accident and Liability Insurance Company Limited, the group’s history says. In 1901 it completed a new head office at Mythenquai in Zurich, on the lakeshore, and the company quotes a local weekly of 27 April 1901 praising the building’s location.

Through all of these renamings the constant was the city. Each new title described a new line of business, but each kept “Zurich” as its anchor, and in 1955 the company finally shed the descriptive clauses and became simply Zurich Insurance Company, or «Zürich» Versicherungs-Gesellschaft, Wikipedia and the group’s history both say.

From a long name to one letter.

The city name travelled abroad early. Wikipedia says that in 1912 the company entered the United States, starting in New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Massachusetts, and in 1915 acquired Hispania of Barcelona. In 1922 it founded a life insurance subsidiary called Vita and opened a branch in the United Kingdom, Wikipedia says.

Vita gave the group a second, separate brand for decades. It sponsored the launch of the Vita Parcours fitness trails in Switzerland in 1968, according to the company’s history and Wikipedia. Then, as part of a new brand strategy, Vita was renamed Zurich Life in 1993, operating in Switzerland as “Zürich Leben”, Wikipedia says. The name Vita survived only on the trails, through a foundation spun off in 1994.

The same pattern repeated with other names the group owned. The company says its Swiss direct insurer, launched in 1994 as Zuritel, became Zurich Connect in 2007, and that from spring 2016 the online offer of Zurich Connect was brought under the Zurich brand so that customers had a uniform experience. Over time, more and more of the business answered to the single city name.

That name, in turn, has been compressed into a mark built on its initial. Wikipedia describes the group’s logo as containing an encircled “Z”. In 2022 that letter took on another meaning in the news.

On 30 March 2022, Carrier Management reported that Zurich had removed the letter “Z” from its social media branding, citing the letter’s use in the war in Ukraine. The insurer said in a statement, quoted by the publication, that the Zurich brand had been around for 150 years and that it was “temporarily removing the use of the letter ‘Z’ from social channels where it appears in isolation and could be misinterpreted.” The change applied to the letter in isolation; the name itself stayed.

Insurance names, symbols and colours.

Insurance identities have an unusual job: they sell a promise that may not be called on for decades, so the visual language tends to signal permanence rather than novelty. Many of the long-established houses reach for heraldry — eagles, lions, shields and robed allegorical figures — borrowing the vocabulary of civic seals and coats of arms to suggest that the company will still be standing when a policy matures. Over time, many of those emblems have been simplified, flattened and redrawn for screens, often keeping a single recognisable silhouette while losing the fine engraving of the originals.

A second family of marks reduces the name to a single letter or a short set of initials, which travels across languages and reads at small sizes on an app icon. Blue recurs across the sector because it is widely read as calm and dependable, though reds and deep greens also appear. Sponsorship adds another layer: stadium and arena naming rights, shirt deals and long-running mascot or character campaigns have put insurance names in front of audiences who never read a policy document, and the end of such a deal can be as visible as its start.

Financial services, then insurance again.

For fourteen years the city name was paired with a broader description. In September 1998, Zurich merged with the financial services division of British American Tobacco to form Zurich Financial Services, a dual-listed structure made up of the Swiss company Zurich Allied AG and the British company Allied Zurich plc, Wikipedia says. The group’s Swiss history page says the merger, timed to its 125th anniversary, also brought the British insurer Eagle Star and the US Farmers Insurance Group into the group. In 2000 the structure was reorganised under a single Swiss holding company, Wikipedia says.

The wording was reversed in April 2012, when Zurich Financial Services Ltd changed its name to Zurich Insurance Group Ltd. Wikipedia quotes the group’s explanation that, in recognition of its strategic focus, the reference to financial services in the name had been replaced by one indicating its insurance activity. The company’s history lists the same change for 2012, alongside the centenary of its arrival in the United States.

Local names have also been brought under the umbrella. In Chile, for example, Wikipedia says the business long traded under the Chilena Consolidada brand after the group acquired it in 1991. Elsewhere, Zurich’s own history records a series of Swiss companies, among them Alpina, Altstadt and Genevoise, whose businesses were merged into Zurich between the 1960s and the 2000s.

Anniversaries have been treated as brand moments. On 22 October 2022, the group’s 150th anniversary, the company says it offered a day of free public transport in the canton of Zurich and brought the exhibition Amazônia by the photographer Sebastião Salgado to the city as one of its sponsors. The statement it gave in March of that year, about a brand that had been around for 150 years, framed the temporary removal of the “Z” in the same historical terms.

For a design guide, Zurich shows how a company can live for a century and a half under the name of a place, shed one descriptive clause after another, and end up leaning on a single letter — and what happened in 2022 when that letter took on another meaning. Compare UBS, another Swiss financial brand whose name is the result of mergers, and Allianz, a European insurer whose emblem comes from heraldry rather than a letter. For this guide we use a lake blue, a deep blue and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Zurich Insurance’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.