Tara Foley, Axa

Foley has a wealth of experience in transformational growth and operational efficiency, and prior to joining Axa she was at Lloyds Banking Group where she spent 12 years senior executive roles including managing director of Bank of Scotland.

She previously worked at Deutsche Bank and Accenture and throughout her career, has shown her commitment to fostering diverse and inclusive cultures and developing talent, which she has continued to do since taking on the top job at Axa. 

In September, she led a prestigious event that brought together C-suite business leaders to visit communities in London to understand the challenges facing young people looking for work. 

The event, part of Business in the Community’s flagship Seeing Is Believing programme, was designed to help business leaders understand the role they play in addressing societal issues. 

Axa is a founding member of BITC and has been working for more than 40 years to help grow the responsible business movement and support other businesses and organisations. 

Foley has also shown her commitment to addressing the challenge of climate change and in January 2023, she joined a special roundtable event in Parliament focused on the importance of flood prevention and increasing resilience within the levelling up agenda. 

This coincided with Axa signing up to Flood Re’s Build Back Better scheme that enables insurers to support homeowners and businesses to improve flood protection when they make a claim for flood damage. 

In September 2023, under her leadership, Axa announced plans to give brokers access to the Axa Climate School to share with their employees and clients. 

This extensive suite of bitesize videos delivered via LinkedIn Learning helps people better understand the complex issues affecting our planet and what actions they can take that will have a tangible impact. 

The programme has been rolled out globally to all Axa employees and four training modules are now available free of charge to brokers: the great climate system, the overexploitation of natural resources, acting on your company’s carbon footprint and acting on your own carbon footprint.

In November 2023, she was also at the helm when Axa published a report that explored potential solutions to the UK’s housing crisis, including repurposing commercial buildings into residential properties.

Foley clearly wants to improve the roofs over the nation’s ahead and, if she pushes on with this work, she is bound to wield even greater influence in the coming years.

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