AXA is one of the world’s largest insurers with 104 million clients worldwide in over 60 countries.
As a well-established company with over 200 years of history, transformation has been fundamental to its continued relevance with its consumers.
Let us highlight 4 key elements that have laid down the foundation for its business transformation success.
1.A Vertically-Integrated Innovation Ecosystem
AXA recognises that there are multiple opportunities to discover new businesses that can enable AXA to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Hence they have built up an end-to-end ecosystem that allows them to collaborate on new products and services both internally and externally.
An overview of AXA’s innovation ecosystem
At the organisational level, they have AXA Labs to identify innovation at its source in the West (Silicon Valley) and East (Shanghai, China).
Outside of the organisation, AXA works with partners of varying maturity to explore new business opportunities from startups (Kamet and AXA Strategic Ventures) to other corporates (AXA Partners and AXA Digital Partnerships).
Internally, AXA has its own digital agency to build up digital assets as well as a data innovation lab to utilise its massive amounts of data to improve and build on new and existing products and services. This is also complemented by AXA Next which explores new business models for the organisation and AXA Tech Engineering Lab which enables the testing and creation of these new concepts.
2.Enabling a data-driven organisation
At the Group level, AXA has integrated all its data into one common database, serving several functions:
i. It removes conflicts between business units about who has the “right” data
ii. Automates certain processes to give teams access to granular insights such as how their business unit is doing
This has impacted the way teams work by empowering them to begin resolving challenges by checking the data themselves.
Externally, AXA also launches data partnerships with businesses that have access to large amounts of customer data.
AXA’s “Pay-as-You-Go” policy with Grab offers them a new business opportunity via a shift from regular fixed pricing to per-kilometre pricing that is more relevant for ad-hoc drivers on Grab’s ride-hailing platform.
A key success has been AXA’s “Pay-as-you-go” policy with ride-hailing platform Grab. Through this platform, drivers can pay motor insurance premiums that are calculated on a ‘per kilometre’ basis, saving up to 30% off commercial auto insurance base premiums.
It marked a shift in AXA’s business model from regular fixed pricing to per-KM pricing (“Pay-as-You-Go”). Eventually, AXA hopes that to leverage on new data sources and technologies to transition to behavioural pricing (“Pay-as-You-Drive”) in the future. To do so, it will use anonymised driving data such as distance, speed, braking and driving patterns, to mine insights into driving patterns and develop ways to incentivise safe driving habits on the road.
3.Driving a tech-enabled organisation
Recognising the disruptive impact of new technologies, AXA has also invested in its own IT capabilities in 2 key initiatives:
i. Launching Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to open up its data to startups.
- It manages the issue of startups failing by connecting with startups indirectly
- And enables AXA to see how startups can leverage on their data and build on those opportunities
ii. AXA Tech, the Group’s infrastructure and application service provider, experiments with technologies directly.
- Led to the creation of fizzy, a blockchain-based insurance.
- 100% automated and 100% secure, it is a smart contract connected to global air traffic databases.
- With any delay of more than two hours, compensation is automatically triggered.
- The pilot is underway for flights between Charles de Gaulle and the United States with plans to expand the service worldwide in 2018.
4.Developing a self-learning organisation
AXA has recognised that by 2020, over a third of the core skill sets required for most occupations will rely on proficiencies which are not essential to performing that same job today.
Hence to build up the abilities of their employees, they launched a partnership with Coursera, the leader in online education and provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to give employees access to courses from some of the world’s top-notch universities.
It addresses development needs such as a wide range of soft skills, including personal development, change management, leadership & management via a ‘Click&Learn’ digital learning platform with 500 micro-learning modules (lasting 5-30 minutes each).
Impact : Over 10,028 courses have been launched with 85.4% of the salaried workforce have received at least one training course in 2016.
Conclusion
The integration of various elements has built up AXA’s business transformation capability, enabling its shift from “Payer to Partner” with its customers. Additionally, its combination of internal and external initiatives has generated impact for both employees and business units to generate lasting change.