AXA'a CEO Thomas Buberl descibes, in the linked HBR article,  how under his leadership the insurer chose between two different strategies.

“One path for our industry could be to become an exclusion machine—refusing, for example, to insure against hurricanes and wildfires, or chronic diseases and epidemics, or war and cyberattacks—thereby narrowing our client base and our relevance. But another option was to use the power of our underwriting and investments to promote individual and corporate behaviors that drive collective resilience in the face of the world’s most pressing environmental and social issues.”

AXA chose the latter which meant transforming business models, structures and infrastructure, divesting itself of unstrategic business units, and focussing on fewer markets to perform better in the remaining business. That process started with listening.

"When I stepped into the CEO role, in June 2016, my first priority was to visit each of our businesses and listen to what the people running and working in them, and their customers, had to tell me. I asked about strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and challenges. I also organized two simultaneous workshops—one with senior leaders and one with junior talent—and tasked each group with discussing what we should change in the company to improve it. My goal was to draw on their collective wisdom.

Next we made the aforementioned key changes: transitioning to higher-return, higher-impact businesses and geographies; partnering more effectively with our customers; and emphasizing entrepreneurialism in our ranks."

Buberl clarified AXA's vision and intention: to move from payer to trusted partner. To do so AXA would deliver new services and build new business models to increase customer protection.

Claims paying is still a core function for AXA, but we also want to help people and companies avoid or minimize risk and thus claims and high costs.

AXA identified huge opportunities for innovation and growth in creating ecosystems of data and services to support risk prevention and mitigation for its customers.

In recent years AXA launched two initiatives to help us deepen our partnerships with different types of customers. 

1. Our Digital Commercial Platform integrates information from across AXA’s entities and insured properties, including real-time analytics via networks of satellites, drones, and sensors. It has created a repository of data to help customers better assess, monitor, predict, and prevent risks.
2.  AXA Climate, a startup inside the company, is working with an in-house team of scientists to better understand the economic risks of global warming and with large companies on their adaptation to climate-change strategy and internal training.

Eventually AXA plans to scale up both platforms so that network participants can collaborate on solutions to the problems they share. That will allow us to become orchestrators and facilitators of a community of customers that help one another build stronger, more sustainable businesses; lead better, healthier lives; and see more potential than risk in their collective future.

Buberl has ensured that accountability moved  more towards the people running AXA's various entities. The people with direct customer engagement and knowledge of real-world challenges that must be overcome. 

“Managers have been told to focus less on driving incremental performance and more on creating an environment that allows their teams to be creative and successful. ”

AXA's 'Emerging Customers Group" is one such outcome addressing a pressing societal need: insurance for mass-market and low-income customers in the developing world who can’t afford traditional policies but earn too much to fall into social safety nets. 

AXa created simpler, more flexible products and new modes of distribution, including nonprofits and NGOs, mobile operators, postal services, digital financial services, e-commerce platforms, small-merchant networks, remittance companies, local banks, and agricultural cooperatives. AXA now insures 14 million customers in this business line; we want that number to be 20 million by 2026.

Emerging Customers is a model that can be adapted for other areas of what we call “inclusive insurance”: coverage for health conditions such as chronic diseases and for people and businesses that are typically underinsured even in more-mature economies, such as contract and gig workers and micro-enterprises.

Buberl concludes by saying:

"It took significant work to rebalance our portfolio, cultivate partnerships and influence with customers, and build entrepreneurial capabilities within our organization. But the work has paid off by both reviving growth across our businesses and making a difference in our customers’ lives at a time of great crises and uncertainty.

Too often, technology vendors focus much on the functionality of their products and promote them as easy ways to transform business. This ignores the tremendous amount of work that insurers must undertake to plan for the future, anticipate unmet needs, change cultures, and train and resource people to focus on customers. 

Such customer centricity will be hampered, or worse still fail, without the right technologies but the latter are a means to an end and not the end itself. Technology partners must be collaborative, understand the current and future markets that each insurer must succeed in. And put skin in the game alongside the insurers' own people. 

Risk patterns and data for this new economy are not yet fully known, but it also represents a great opportunity for AXA, other insurers and their clients.

Buberl knows the importance of data and like other insurers AXA is experimenting with AI.

“We’re already using artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate the more routine aspects of our work, such as evaluating new customers and claims, so that we can focus on bigger challenges.”

These bigger challenges require a new business model set on new data fluid foundations, built around a customer, and highly adaptable. I discuss this in :

AI, systems infrastructure, and Three Little Pigs

Too many technology vendors have chained insurers with inflexible, complex,  largely hard-coded core systems of record. Whilst they will survive for some time they will not be able to deliver the vision that Buberl has for AXA. 

Some CEOs with the support of their stakeholders and buy-in from their peoplehave taken the plunge and re-platformed with modern MACH-architected core platforms and point applications. David MacMillan CEO of esure in the UK is one such example. 

It takes bravery, vision, foresight and careful planning. Insurers deserve technology partners with the same values and relevant products and services. To read the hype of many Generative AI and Agentic AI start-ups you would think they have leapfrogged that stage. 

That hype will splatter over pilot purgatory as projects fail to deliver. Luckily, some technology partners are willing to put the hard yards in and collaborate with insurers like AXA and esure reimagining insurance to deliver the protection that customers need. 

I have plenty of these in mind; contact me here. 

Further Reading

Are Cloud-Native Platforms the Answer We Need?

The 5 Cardinal Sins of Outdated Insurance Management Software

Prioritising outcome goals leveraging AI- productivity/cost-cutting, increasing revenue, transformative competitive advantage, or all of these?

Insurers Can Parlay Technology into a Competitive Edge- but too many don't!