Hello everyone and welcome to At Barrens. I'm Andy Surwer and welcome to our guest, Thomas Bubell,

CEO of the French insurance company AXA. Thomas, nice to see you. Good to see you, Andy.

So let's talk about AXA, multi-line insurance company or break it down for us? Yes, so we are 50% B2B, 50% B2C in all kinds of

businesses, so from ensuring a nuclear power plant to ensuring your travel across the entire world.

So is it life insurance also or you're not in that business?

Yeah, we have 20% of our business is life insurance, but we are more focused today than we used to be.

How unusual is it for an insurance company to have both P&C and life under one roof like that then?

I think it's quite unusual for all the Anglo-Saxon markets.

It's very usual for all the European markets because the multi-liner and offering everything

out of one hand has been a tradition because mostly in Europe you are distributing

through agents that are selling both.

Right. And talk to us about the history of the company. It's based in France, the French

company, and the name AXA. What does that mean? Where does it come from?

So, the origin of the company used to be a very small mutual in Rouen, which is in the north of France.

And what is also interesting, I'm only the third CEO in next year, 40 years of Axa.

So we had long cycles of CEOs.

The founder, Club BBA, he said that he won, his ambition was, and he's achieved it,

to take the small mutual and build it into the biggest insurer worldwide.

And he did with some amazing transactions that he used to do.

Then my predecessor, his task was, you know,

before the global financial crisis, but also afterwards, to structure this empire of

insurance participations into a global financial services company, which he did.

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