The challenge

The Allianz Group is one of the world’s leading insurers and asset managers, with private and corporate customers in nearly 70 countries. Enabling cross-border remote work for private reasons is important to Allianz because it reflects changing priorities in today’s work environment and is particularly relevant to the well-being of our employees and future talents.  Working remotely from outside the country of employment is quite complex, being subject to different regulations and conventions between countries. The main issue that companies face when allowing employees to work remotely abroad is ensuring full compliance with both the country of employment and the chosen destination and avoid legal and financial risks for both the employer and the employee. Many organizations are not allowing abroad remote work simply because the required assessment of the regulatory implications, such as taxation, immigration, and social security aspects is too time-consuming or expensive. Allianz has over 156,000 employees globally. There are countless possible country combinations for cross-border work, and in addition to the country of employment and the destination, an employee’s nationality, job role, personal situation, and the duration of the stay are all additional factors affecting compliance.

The action taken

Allianz’s goal was to find a solution that would address the multiple risks of cross-border remote work and ensure full transborder compliance in an easy, fast, and cost-efficient way. 

Allianz decided to develop in-house a highly innovative, data-based, automated solution to solve this complex problem globally. The assessment tool pools all available data for a fully automated approval process, considering relevant taxation, social security, immigration, and other risks.

The tool features a self-service platform that determines employees’ eligibility to work from the country of their choice within minutes. By merely answering six basic questions, employees receive an immediate response. 

The simplicity and intuitiveness of the tool are unique in the industry. The Allianz Cross-Border Remote Work Tool cuts through the confusion of the wide variety of legal and tax requirements of different countries by instantly analysing the key inputs of employees and ensuring a compliant approval. The “future-readiness” of the solution rests on the tool's ability to grow its database with every employee request presenting new country combinations, job functions, regulatory changes, and other factors, thereby constantly increasing the processing automation of requests. 

“As our lives and the world around us become increasingly more international, many of us have friends, family, and previous life experience scattered across various parts of the world. Being able to work abroad for private reasons - from home or from anywhere - is highly appreciated by employees, and we are happy to have developed an innovative solution that makes this possible and easy to handle.” - Olaf Kliesow, Head of Global Reward, Performance and Mobility 

The outcome

While automation was easiest at first within the EU, it is progressively expanding to include the Americas and countries in Africa and Asia. Allianz is constantly improving the tool and making it even more user-friendly on the basis of employee feedback.

• Allianz has fully embraced the flexibility of hybrid working. It offers employees globally a minimum of 40% mobile working, and more – depending on local business needs, including the eligibility to work from abroad for private reasons for up to 25 working days per year.
• By the end of 2025, circa 60% of the workforce (circa 98,000 employees) had access to the tool, which is further being rolled out across the Allianz group.
• By the end of December 2025, 29,597 applications had been submitted, of which 24,391 were approved.
• In Germany, over 73% of requests are handled automatically by the tool, and a vast majority are instantly granted.

The Allianz Cross-Border Remote Work Tool received two EMEA Expatriate Management and Mobility Awards (one for ‘Best Employee Experience and Engagement’ and one for ‘Most Innovative Use of Technology in Global Mobility’) as well as the HR Excellence Award for ‘Hybrid & Remote Work’. 

The learnings

This outcome would not have been possible without the full backing of our Board of Management, who support the Allianz hybrid work model allowing a high degree of flexibility and evolving according to the changing needs of our international workforce.

• In order to be able to develop inhouse an efficient solution to a complex set of problems, it was essential to ensure the collaboration of experts of different departments.
• For a solution that is easy to use and saves time and capacity, it is important to maximize automation. This requires pooling all available data and ensuring the solution is dynamic, i.e., that the tool’s “brain” grows with every new employee request and country combination. And the data must be made available for regular internal and external audits.
• Our solution also requires a “back office” team that handles new cases not covered by automation (new country combinations and other factors) and feeds the tool with these new data to constantly increase automation for future requests.
• Ensuring simplicity and constantly improving user experience should be an integral part of the approach. It is also important to adapt the offer to changing employee needs.