Two years ago, AXA was the first insurance company named to Interbrand’s Best Global Brands report—and that was before its forward-looking transformation had started to impact its bottom line and expression of its values. The Paris-based multinational insurance firm’s half-year 2017 financial results released in August show that it’s well on its way to achieving its Ambition 2020 targets—and that’s a transformation plans that’s not only measured in money.
“Our teams and distributors continued their engagement and commitment to our vision to empower people to live a better life,” AXA CEO Thomas Buberl stated about the first half of 2017. “AXA has proved once again its ability to respond to profound environmental and economic change, notably by pledging to use 100% sustainable electricity and providing better protection to independent workers in the digital sector.”
“We are on track on the headline targets of our Ambition 2020 plan, focusing on the execution of clear management levers, and pursuing the transformation of the Group towards becoming the innovation leader in insurance and empowering people to live a better life.”
Its brand is at the heart of its transformation, as Buberl notes in the video above. “It is important that the AXA brand remains the flagship of the new AXA and what we stand for. We need to create a unique emotional experience with our customers and if we want to engage differently with our customers, we need to have a brand that is closer to the people, warmer, more modern and certainly far more of a human touch in everything we say and we do.”
As Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer Alice Steenland noted in May, “Better Lives, Better Growth” is more than a tagline for its 2020 Better Lives partnership because responsible business matters. AXA’s new five-year sustainability plan aims “to deliver true impact, which will leverage our products, services and investments to help build better lives”:
This is not an easy time for insurers. A combination of historically low interest rates and the rise of new “Insurtech” entrants makes for a tough operating environment by all accounts. The latter are leveraging the fact that consumers’ expectations have changed: a simple, seamless digital interaction with a company they can trust is now a “must”. This is already a tall order for the insurance industry, where legacy systems and regulation increase complexity, and where scores in “trust” rankings versus other industries tend to be low.
That’s why AXA’s 2020 Ambition aims to move the company from being “a payer of bills” for corporate responsibility to “offering more services to customers that have a direct, positive impact on their health, safety and wellbeing,” Steenland added. The concept “is drawn from the oldest, most fundamental alignment of interests between insurance and its customers: the safer and healthier they are, the better off everyone is.”
The insurer has also committed to using only renewable energy by 2025 by buying clean energy directly and compensating for electricity that doesn’t come from renewable sources. AXA’s commitment helped the Climate Group reach its goal of convincing 100 companies to source all electricity from renewables three years ahead of target.
AXA also earned a perfect score of 100 percent in the 2017 Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, following moves such as introducing a global parental leave policy, and has won consecutive DEI Best Place to Work awards from the Disability Equality Index. And putting its money where some consumers’ mouths are on the healthcare front, AXA has stopped investing in tobacco shares and bonds and is divesting its portfolio of tobacco-related bonds.
AXA’s storied history of strategic mergers has built the company into the global powerhouse it is today. Founded just over a century ago in 1816 as Mutuelle de L’assurance contre L’incendie (the Ancienne Mutuelle), the company rebranded as AXA in 1985 as the name is easy to pronounce in any language.
In 1991 it acquired American insurance company The Equitable, and five years later acquired France’s largest insurer, Union des Assurances De Paris (UAP). And in 2006, AXA acquired the leading Swiss insurance company Winterthur Group from Credit Suisse for €9 billion. Now it’s focused on 2020 as it’s in the middle of a transformation to make it a leader well into its second century.
As Benoît Claveranne, AXA Group Chief Transformation Officer, notes in the video below, “Transformation is first and foremost a people story.”
The post Ambition 2020: Inside AXA’s People-Centric Transformation Plan appeared first on brandchannel:.
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