Interview: Claudio Gienal, CEO, Axa

“If you can keep your head when all about you, are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” starts the famous Rudyard Kipling poem. With UK insurance CEOs facing the uncertainly of Brexit; the impact of the Odgen discount changes; the regulator taking a stand on dual pricing; treatment of vulnerable customers coming to the fore; and the burden of a terrible reputation with the public, they might be expected to be losing their head a bit.

But not Claudio Gienal, CEO of Axa UK and Ireland. His frank response to the question of what keeps him awake at night is: “Nothing.”

He expands: “If I couldn’t sleep any more I would not be the person to do the job. It is important that I take all these things seriously, but if you cannot sleep basically you are in panic. Part of my job is to be the one that is consistent, thoughtful, and give some direction and support to my team.”

Rather than keeping him up at night he says insurance is what gets him out of bed each morning: “Insurance is relevant, it has an impact and is helpful to society. With all the uncertainty it’s even more important that we as organisations help our customers to think about how they can prevent things from happening. But then, when life hits them hard we help them. That still gets me out of the bed every day. There is enough uncertainty around and I need be the one that people can rely on.”

He has plenty of people relying on him: “We are huge company with 10,000 people. We have four business units and to change and shape such an organisation, it takes quite some time.”

But to shape the organisation was what he was tasked to do when he stepped into this role 15 months ago. Scott Wheway, chairman of Axa UK, said at the time: “Claudio is a leader who brings focus and collaboration, a strong and straight forward approach and an understanding of our UK business. I am confident he is the right person to take the UK and Ireland business forward, to deliver on our Ambition 2020 strategy, which remains unchanged, and to shape with the executive team our strategic focus up to 2025 and beyond.”  

Unique career

Gienal believes his unique career has helped give him different perspectives on the sector, despite not choosing insurance as his first career. After growing up in a remote Swiss village, he trained as an environmental engineer in Zurich and then after failing to find a job in that sector he joined Accenture, working on large IT programmes. His first touch of insurance came in his next role at McKinsey, where he spent time doing insurance work in the banking sector. He also consulted for almost a year with Nestlé. By this time he had lived and worked in several countries and was looking for less travelling and to start a family, so he joined Zurich in his home country of Switzerland.

He then spent nine years with Zurich working with both Steve Lewis [Zurich CEO] on Driving the Zurich Way programme across the globe and with Mario Greco [Zurich Global CEO] tasked with strategy for the group and overseeing technology, and as CEO of the life arm in Switzerland.

“Having spent five years growing up in IT initially has served me well because, although things have obviously evolved in the last 20 years, I have a basic understanding of how IT works. Understanding how that works in the basics, and not just hearing it or reading reports but really having done it, that’s helpful,” he explains.

“Also, my time at Nestlé gave me an operational focus. You can see the whole picture when you have a real production line. With the Kit-Kat production line, when the whole line goes down everybody actually runs to fix it. As a financial services company quite often the production line is not working, but nobody runs because it’s not visible. We have to think about how we can make some of the areas more visible so we can support our customers and get everyone running to help.”

Finally, his view of the UK market could be seen as a unique one: “Many people believe the UK market is the most advanced as an insurance market. I have a different perspective. It’s probably one of the most competitive markets I’ve seen. But I’m not sure how you classify advanced. If you take retail, in terms of pricing and precision requirements, then yes there isn’t any place where you have to be as good as we need to be here to be able to survive. But if you look at customer outcome, and how things are done – I’m not so sure. If I take my home market in Switzerland, where you still have agents, many consider it’s an antiquated model but that’s not true. They sit with the customers in their houses and think about how to really protect them, properly making sure they have covered all the angles. It’s much more embedded in society. I would, instead, qualify the markets as different.”

Starting point

His starting point for the overall strategy for such a large organisation was, therefore, clarity. He explains: “I would like to make sure that I have given this business clarity on how we want to compete. I feel responsible for all our employees and 10 million customers, and we must continue to deliver a good service to them. To do that we need to be clear on why they should work with us or our brokers, and not somebody else.”

On the Ambition 2020 strategy he adds: “We are on track to deliver most of the things we have promised. But the 2020 piece was set five years ago but I felt very strongly that I couldn’t wait another year to articulate what I need this business to be. I really believe that we must have the strategic direction clear, because that allows you to organise properly and make sure you have the right people.”

This is somewhere else Gienal was clear headed and he refused to rush in to set the agenda: “We took a lot of time to do the strategy – seven months. Having been an ex-McKinsey everybody thought I would do it in one and a half months. We chose to involve the board, the shareholder and the top 100 employees of the organisation. Then we also we went out to find 20 colleagues across the business that held no senior management position to help us, and they have been with us throughout the whole process. That has been extremely helpful, because they don’t have the political lens and they just want the best for this company.”

He explains the approach: “We have been very consciously challenging ourselves about how and why should we be here in five years for our customers and why would they not go to any of the competitors. We are very large but being big in itself doesn’t add any value. We have four big customer segments – UK Retail, UK Commercial, UK Health and Ireland. These are different customer segments, they will have different requirements. We need to be clear that if we want to have them with us in five years, we need to do different things. Once we identified these segments, we needed to ask what is the value of being together?”

“We were then able to frame this around five pillars for our strategy – people and culture, stronger foundations, data-driven insights, new propositions and closer to the customer.

Gienal explains the pillars with passion: “To be a place that can compete in the future, we must be a place where people bring their best to the debate and we allow that to happen in a respectful way. The first part of our strategy then is people and culture, and within this we really want to empower people to lead better lives.”

He adds: “There’s so much talk about diversity, but I believe in going back to the very basics. What I want is to have a company and a culture where we can trust each other. Trusting each other makes us much more efficient because you don’t have to double check work, and this creates an environment that is very worthwhile and enjoyable to work in. Also, we want to be a trusted partner for customers. The second piece of this pillar is respect – I want everyone to treat every colleague with respect. And finally, on people and culture, because we are ultimately a company with a shareholder, everyone must add value.

“Talent and expertise will be even more scarce in the future.  If we cannot attract the best, we will have an issue. Also, it is important to have staff working on things that matter most. Basically, we are asking our people to work on things that makes the biggest difference, which will absolutely give us the advantage.”

Gienal has already made a start on changing the diversity of the board with appointments including Amelie Breitburd, as its chief financial officer in October 2018, Tracy Garrad, as Axa PPP CEO in November 2018, and Shali Vasudeva, as chief operating officer (from Hiscox) in Jan 2019.

He explains: “We have signed up for the Women in Finance Charter, but there are a lot of things that cannot be influenced directly. However, what I can influence directly is the people who work for me. I want people who add value, so they need to be good at what they do. I need people around me who can challenge me properly and bring in diverse perspectives. I enjoy having the mix of views and experiences.”

Back to the strategy he says: “The second pillar is stronger foundations. We need rock solid foundations in terms of processes and IT. A lot of these things are not specific to a customer segment. We’re here to make sure we give a good service to customers every day, to do that you need the basic foundation to be strong, and often today that is the technology.

“Our third pillar is data – as an insurer we have a lot of data. We haven’t been thoughtful enough and engineered it so we can access it whenever and however we want in the future. There are a lot of considerations on data protection, but having infrastructure that means even on an anonymous basis we understand our customer base better will be key.”

Looking to the future

Pillar four brings Gienal to the future: “Next we thought about new propositions. People want to do new stuff straight away, but we looked at where the customer struggles and said we should build solutions there.

“For example, in Ireland, we are bundling some offerings because maybe that customer’s requirement is out of the risk appetite of the commercial business but it is within a specialty area and so we can bring those two together for discussions and create more holistic solutions to meet our customers’ needs.”

Gienal explained Axa is still keen to support its brokers and has recommended keeping all its branches: “This is an important commitment to this country; the UK is more than just London. We need to make sure that regional brokers can survive and are well served. Now we have specialties that we never had the appetite to work on before and making them available to smaller brokers and other customers out there, is an opportunity we need to work on. We will open up the toolkit we have – for example through XL we can do cyber and terrorism.”

Last but not least the fifth pillar is the customer. Gienal adds: “Finally, getting closer to our customer. The creation of the business units was driven by which customer segments we want to serve. We ask people to think ‘what is the right customer journey, what is the right outcome and the right service?’”

The strategy has been well received internally and Gienal says he’ll know if it’s a success in 18 months if: “I go in to any of my operations and sit down with one of my colleagues and they are able to articulate why we are here: the purpose and how they contribute to achieve that.”

Of the strategy overall, Gienal hopes his biggest legacy would be: “If that allows this company to be a place where people want to be but also a place where every person can bring his or her best to work.  And if I can achieve these two things – clarity on what we want to achieve and why we are here, and having a culture where we have this in place. That would be a very good starting point.”