AXA: Building and Refocusing a Global Insurance Giant

AXA grew from an obscure regional French mutual into a global insurance giant by buying rivals for three decades — and is now deliberately simplifying what it built. Its recent strategy reverses the sprawl, concentrating on the insurance risks it understands best and shedding exposure to financial markets. This article explains how AXA makes money, why it is refocusing, and what still threatens it.

The reinvention matters because insurance is one of the oldest and most essential industries in the economy, and how a leader like AXA chooses to compete — chasing scale, or chasing quality of earnings — shapes an entire sector. AXA’s answer has been to choose quality, and the market has rewarded it.

What is AXA and what does it do?

AXA is a French multinational insurer that protects individuals and businesses against risk across three main activities. Property & casualty (P&C) insurance covers homes, cars, businesses and specialty risks; life & health insurance covers mortality, savings and medical costs; and asset management invests the premiums it collects. P&C is the largest and most important engine.

The scale is global: AXA serves more than 95 million clients in around 50 countries, from personal motor policies in Europe to complex corporate risks written through its AXA XL commercial arm. In 2024 it collected roughly €110 billion in premiums and other revenues, making it one of the largest insurance groups on earth.

An insurer’s business model is deceptively simple: collect premiums today, invest them, and pay claims later. The art lies in pricing risk accurately so that premiums exceed claims and costs — and in investing the ‘float’ of collected premiums wisely in the meantime. AXA’s history is the story of getting better and more disciplined at exactly that.

How did AXA grow from a small mutual into a giant?

AXA was built through relentless acquisition, transforming a small French mutual insurer into a global leader in barely three decades. Under long-time leader Claude Bébéar — nicknamed the ‘godfather’ of French capitalism — the company swallowed a series of larger and older rivals, culminating in landmark deals for the American insurer The Equitable and Britain’s Guardian Royal Exchange.

Each acquisition added scale, geography and expertise, and AXA imposed a common brand and management discipline across the sprawling empire it assembled. By the 2000s it had become a household name in insurance across Europe, North America and Asia — a remarkable outcome for a group that had started from modest regional roots in France.

This acquisitive history explains both AXA’s strength and its recent strategy. Decades of deals created a vast but complex organisation spanning many kinds of risk, and the current leadership’s task has been to simplify that empire — keeping the profitable, technical insurance businesses and shedding the parts that added volatility rather than value.

Why is AXA refocusing on technical insurance?

Under CEO Thomas Buberl, AXA has spent years deliberately shifting away from capital-markets risk and toward ‘technical’ insurance — lines like commercial property & casualty and health, where profit comes from underwriting skill rather than from betting on financial markets. The strategy, now branded ‘Unlock the Future,’ prizes predictable, capital-light earnings.

The reasoning is that traditional life-insurance savings products, which guarantee returns to policyholders, expose an insurer to interest-rate and market swings that can be volatile and capital-intensive. Underwriting a factory’s fire risk or a family’s health cover, by contrast, depends on the insurer’s own expertise in pricing risk — a more controllable, higher-quality source of profit.

So AXA sold capital-heavy legacy businesses, exited or reduced volatile lines, and doubled down on commercial P&C (notably through AXA XL) and health. In 2024 P&C premiums rose to around €56 billion and health grew strongly, validating the shift. The move mirrors a broader industry trend toward ‘capital-light’ insurance that markets reward with higher valuations.

What was the AXA XL acquisition about?

AXA’s 2018 acquisition of the Bermuda-based commercial insurer XL Group was its biggest bet on the technical-insurance strategy. AXA XL made the group a major force in large-corporate and specialty property & casualty insurance and reinsurance — covering complex risks like natural catastrophes, cyber and aviation for businesses worldwide.

The deal was initially digested with some difficulty, as catastrophe losses tested the new unit, but by 2024 AXA XL had become a strong performer, with an improving combined ratio (a key measure of underwriting profitability) and solid premium growth. It sits at the heart of AXA’s identity as a commercial-lines specialist rather than a mass-market life insurer.

AXA XL exemplifies the strategy: commercial P&C rewards deep underwriting expertise and global scale, exactly the durable competitive advantages AXA wants to build, in contrast to the interest-rate-driven savings business it has been running down.

Why did AXA sell its asset manager to BNP Paribas?

In 2024 AXA agreed to sell AXA Investment Managers, its large asset-management arm, to BNP Paribas, a move that at first looks odd for a company that collects vast sums to invest. The logic follows directly from the focus strategy: AXA decided its edge lies in underwriting insurance risk, not in competing as a standalone asset manager against giants of scale.

Rather than run a sub-scale in-house manager, AXA chose to hand its investment operations to a larger specialist — BNP Paribas, now one of Europe’s biggest asset managers — while entering a long-term partnership for BNP to manage AXA’s insurance assets. This freed capital, sharpened AXA’s focus on pure insurance, and let a scaled partner handle the investing.

The deal neatly illustrates the discipline of ‘focus’: AXA is willing to exit even a large, respectable business if it is not core to the company’s central competitive advantage. It is the same simplify-and-concentrate logic that runs through the whole ‘Unlock the Future’ plan.

Why is health insurance a growth priority?

Health insurance has become one of AXA’s most important growth areas, and for good reason: ageing populations, rising medical costs and stretched public health systems are driving structural, long-term demand for private health cover across the world. AXA health premiums grew strongly in 2024, and the group has made health a strategic pillar.

Health suits AXA’s technical-insurance strategy well. It is a recurring, protection-oriented business driven by underwriting and claims management rather than by financial-market bets, and it deepens AXA’s relationships with both individual and corporate customers who increasingly expect health benefits. By expanding in health across Europe, Asia and beyond, AXA taps a demographic trend that is only strengthening, adding a durable growth engine alongside its commercial P&C franchise. Delivering record underlying earnings per share — up around 8% in 2024 — has come partly from exactly this kind of steady, technical growth.

How is AXA owned and governed?

AXA is a widely held public company listed in Paris on the CAC 40, with no controlling family or state shareholder — though it retains cultural roots in the mutualist tradition from which it grew. It is led by CEO Thomas Buberl and chaired by Antoine Gosset-Grainville, and governed to the demanding standards of a systemically important global insurer.

Like all large insurers, AXA is regulated on its solvency — its ability to pay claims even under stress — measured by the Solvency II ratio, which stood at a strong 216% at the end of 2024. Maintaining a robust solvency buffer while returning cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks is a constant balancing act, and a core measure of management discipline in insurance.

What are the risks facing AXA?

The defining risk in insurance is that claims exceed expectations. Natural catastrophes — hurricanes, floods, wildfires — can produce huge, unpredictable losses, and climate change is making these events more frequent and severe, directly threatening AXA’s large property and reinsurance book.

AXA is also exposed to financial-market and interest-rate swings on its investment portfolio, to the risk of mispricing complex risks like cyber, and to the pricing cycle in commercial insurance, where periods of soft pricing squeeze margins. Regulatory change, reserve adequacy on long-tail liabilities, and the operational complexity of a group spanning 50 countries all add further risk.

What can founders learn from AXA?

AXA offers two lessons in sequence. First, it shows how disciplined, relentless acquisition can build a global champion from modest beginnings — Bébéar’s decades of dealmaking turned a small mutual into a worldwide brand. Second, and more instructively, it shows the maturity to reverse course: once the empire was built, AXA had the discipline to simplify it, shedding even large businesses that did not fit its core edge.

The deeper lesson is knowing what your real competitive advantage is. AXA decided its edge is underwriting risk, not managing money or chasing market returns, and it restructured a giant company around that conviction. For anyone studying the France Company Stories hub, AXA is the case study in strategic focus — the courage to build big, then the wisdom to build deliberately narrow. See how its peers balance the same choices across the Banking, Insurance & Asset Management pillar.

Frequently Asked Questions