Top 100 UK Insurers 2025: Axa

Q&A with Tara Foley, CEO of Axa UK & Ireland

What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced in 2025?

One of the biggest challenges Axa and the wider insurance sector faces today is the rapid pace of change. Risks are more interconnected, frequent and wide-ranging than ever before, requiring us to stay agile and forward-thinking.

As an insurer, our role is to be a vital safety net for our customers, and that means we must do more than just respond to risks, we have to proactively prevent them and prepare people for the future.

Resilience isn’t just a buzzword for us – it’s a core strategic focus. It requires us to be forward-thinking, to stay ahead of emerging risks, and to understand how they might impact our customers’ lives and livelihoods.

Society also faces a significant challenge in providing sustainable healthcare. The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts a £30bn increase in spending on sickness and disability benefits over the next five years.

Addressing this requires innovative, resilient solutions that support a healthier society.

Supporting the health of the workforce is an area we’re really focused on, especially at a time when high levels of economic inactivity driven by ill-health threaten the economy.

We work with both large corporates and SMEs to promote workforce health, and we commission economic analysis of workforce health policies to identify effective and sustainable solutions.

While new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence offer huge opportunities, they also bring risks that we must manage carefully.

We focus on balancing innovation that improves customer and colleague experience with robust security measures to protect both our business and our customers.

Additionally, attracting and retaining talented, diverse teams remains a key challenge for the insurance industry and we need to work harder to market the sector as an exciting, innovative and forward-thinking place to work.

At Axa UK, we’re investing heavily in this area because we believe that strong talent is essential to navigating the future and to continue making a real difference for our customers.

What has been your company’s greatest achievement in 2025?

In May 2025 we were delighted to announce our partnership with Lloyds Banking Group, becoming the sole provider of car insurance to their 28 million customers.

Our partnership is a great example of how we’re using innovation to make insurance simpler and better for customers.

The new partnership offers two fully comprehensive options with add-on extras such as breakdown cover, and customers have access to a 24-hour claims line plus online access to make changes to their insurance with no admin fees.

We hope this is just the beginning of an exciting partnership.

In June 2025 we announced that we will be working with charities Women’s Aid and Smart Works to offer support for domestic abuse survivors in the UK. 

The initiative helps Axa car and home insurance customers who are experiencing domestic abuse to access vital support services from both charities.

We are providing them with the resources and tools needed to navigate their circumstances, get out and stay out of an abusive situation and rebuild their lives with confidence.

We’re looking at expanding this initiative into our health and commercial business areas.

At Axa we have a clear ambition as to how AI, including generative AI, will transform our business over the coming years. The opportunity for customers and colleagues alike to benefit from the developments in AI is huge.

So far we already have more than 50% of UK colleagues regularly using GenAI solutions built within Axa. Many of these are in customer operations where our solutions help provide better and more consistent outcomes for customers.

We’re also continuing to develop online healthcare. Patients can be put in touch with clinicians anywhere across the UK providing greater choice and the ability to seek specialist knowledge and expertise.

Our online outpatient services help members get advice from a specialist in three working days rather than weeks. For MSK, our members can speak to a physio within one working day.

We’re working with Peppy, ProblemShared and OneBright to provide remote solutions around diagnosis and treatment for mental health, neurodiversity and life stage support.

This is just a snapshot of the many areas where we offer online solutions across our health pathways.

What is your plan to grow the business?

Looking ahead, our key priorities for Axa over the next five years are centred on growth, leadership and making a real difference for our customers, helping them feel confident, supported and protected.

We want to not only meet but anticipate and surpass our customers’ needs – staying ahead of the curve and ensuring we’re delivering relevant, innovative solutions.

Being technically brilliant is essential – we aim to be market movers, not followers, by harnessing data and technology to shape the future of insurance.

This includes offering market leading pricing, underwriting and claims capability and making customer journeys simpler with more digitally enabled claims.

Equally important is our commitment to making an impact and acting purposefully for our customers, our people and our communities.

That means building a strong culture, investing in skills and developing capabilities.

We give our colleagues three volunteering days a year, which we encourage them to use individually or as teams, and we are actively involved in initiatives across the country where we can make a real difference.

We believe that by staying bold, innovative and compassionate, we can lead the industry and create lasting positive change.

What is your strategy for attracting and retaining top talent in the insurance sector?

At Axa, we know that offering people the right opportunities encourages them both to join an organisation and to carve out a career for themselves within it.

We need to work harder to market the insurance industry as an exciting, innovative and forward-thinking place to work. Insurance is at the forefront of addressing some of the world’s most pressing issues.

The work we do is purposeful, it really matters – we’re there for people when they need us most, often when the worst has happened. That’s really powerful and we should use this narrative to inspire future generations to consider insurance as a career.

It’s really important that as an industry we aim to recruit a diverse mix of talented people and continue investing in giving them the skills they need to drive innovation in the insurance industry and support its ongoing transformation journey.

Through our early careers strategy, we demonstrate the career paths available in insurance and encourage students to explore the industry as a potential career option.

We also have links to some of the best training providers in the UK so we can offer government approved apprenticeship programmes in various departments including actuarial, underwriting, finance, HR, customer service, IT, data and marketing.

Additionally, it’s important for us to push boundaries when it comes to innovation and encourage our employees to explore new ways of working.

We have introduced our own generative AI platform for colleagues called SecureGPT and are actively encouraging people to test out how it can be used for the benefit of themselves, their teams and our customers.

Offering opportunities for new joiners and existing employees to flourish and develop their careers with Axa is an important element of attracting and retaining talent.

It’s essential that we develop people’s skills, creating a pipeline of employees who are ready to take on more senior roles when they arise.

Axa Commercial launched an Underwriting Academy last year to help build people’s careers in underwriting and we have launched a Data and AI Academy to upskill all our people in this vital area.

We also need to acknowledge that the industry is still facing a significant gender gap, which is why we need to ensure that we recruit and retain our female talent. As a female leader this is something I am incredibly passionate about.

When it comes to retaining talent, doing everything we can to help our colleagues navigate the challenges of life such as returning to work after having children is so important.

I’m proud that we increased our maternity leave from 16 to 26 weeks in March 2025 and also doubled the amount of paternity leave that we give.

We’re aware that returning to work can be daunting for new parents and that’s why we phase their time spent in the office, enabling them to build new routines during those early days.

We also have a fantastic network of employee champions who have made great strides in supporting our working parents – hosting speed mentoring events for returning mothers.

We’re a menopause-friendly accredited employer and hold regular virtual and face-to-face meet-ups to connect people across the business.

We set up our carers’ network in 2022 as a result of research showing that 50% of our colleagues had caring responsibilities. Carers can take up to five days’ dependants’ leave annually to support with things like illness and hospital appointments.

What recent technology investment has had the biggest impact on your operations?

The most impactful technology investment we have made in recent years is the adoption of AI-driven solutions across various operational areas such as underwriting, claims, fraud, risk assessment and customer service.

These AI tools have transformed our operations by enabling our staff to reduce the time and effort they spend on mundane tasks and focus more on projects that make an impact on our customers, as well as on our business. This allows us to maintain our competitive edge, anticipate future trends and minimise risks.

This strategic investment in AI not only improves operational agility but also supports our goal of delivering faster, fairer and more personalised experiences for our customers.

With the development of technology, we have the opportunity to collect more data than ever before and AI algorithms can help us analyse data to tailor insurance products to individual needs, preferences and risk profiles.

We also believe that agentic AI has great potential and we have started to build our first AI agents in claims operations with the strategic ambition to move fast and embed this new way of working into our processes.

However, we ensure that human oversight is maintained at the decision-making point, and in customer service we provide the opportunity to choose whether customers would like to be served by AI or one of our human agents.