Lucie Urvalkova: Uniqa CFO among Czechia's most influential women

Lucie Urválková, chief financial officer and deputy chair of the board at the Uniqa financial group in Czechia and Slovakia, is summing up a record year: the company's pre-tax profit topped 2.6 billion crowns, while assets under management reached 228 billion crowns. The manager, who has worked at the company for almost twenty years, is convinced that the success of the Czech-Slovak division is setting the tone for the entire international group.

Uniqa operates in fourteen countries, but it's Austria, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland that provide the main contribution to the group's key indicators — profit and dividend growth. According to Urválková, colleagues from the Vienna headquarters often tell her at international meetings: “Hi, Lucie, how are things? Good? If things are good with you, they're good with us too.”

The company's total gross written premium exceeded 23 billion crowns, with profit growing by about half a billion crowns over the year. Urválková stresses that Uniqa stopped being just an insurer long ago — today it's a financial house resting on three equally important pillars: life insurance, non-life insurance and pension and investment services.

“We manage it as a single whole, we don't have a divided management structure, and that lets us operate as one organism, which gives us strength and speed,” the CFO explains. According to her, last year's sharp growth wasn't a one-off achievement: this year the company intends to grow even faster, increase assets under management, and not just hold its position but keep moving forward.

Urválková sees the key to growth in personalizing services. Uniqa, which currently has about three million customers in Czechia and Slovakia, commissioned a large-scale study of Czech families — their fears, their attitudes toward artificial intelligence, the influence of social media, and their financial habits.

The results debunked some myths about Czechs' financial illiteracy: 49% of the population actively save for the future through pension savings or new long-term investment products. At the same time, 75% of Czechs keep reserves in savings accounts, and 35% still keep cash at home. Urválková sees this data as an important signal for developing the company's products — for example, insurance against unexpected expenses, which many Czechs currently cover by borrowing money from relatives.