After revealing a year of growth despite ‘external challenges,’ AXA’s Group CEO for the UK & Ireland says the firm anticipates a continued challenging environment in 2018, and says that brokers remain key to the firm.
In its 2017 results issued this morning, AXA UK & Ireland reported a climb in revenues from £4.39 billion in 2016 to £4.53 billion last year, and overall growth of 3%.
Commercial lines and health led the charge with revenues increasing in both areas, but personal lines revenues stayed flat at £1.64 billion.
“2017 was a particularly challenging year for personal lines, because of the Ogden discount rate changes,” chief executive Amanda Blanc told Insurance Business today.
While a host of external pressures continue to affect all insurers – including Brexit, the impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) – AXA’s lack of growth in personal lines last year was attributed to the business adjusting pricing following the discount rate changes, Blanc explained.
“Therefore, we sacrificed some top-line to get the pricing right post-Ogden,” she said.
“This is the most challenging insurance market in the world, so I think we would expect a continuing challenging environment across all of the lines of business. As far as the personal lines business is concerned, we would expect that to return to growth this year.”
Brokers remain vital for the business looking ahead, which has an “extremely well diversified book in terms of both insurance lines and the way they are distributed,” Blanc said.
“The broker business is really important to us, it’s a really important part of our commercial lines business and it’s a really important part of our health business,” she stated. “It is more balanced in personal lines, because we have a significant direct business there, but overall brokers play a key role.”
In the face of a range of continued external pressures in the UK, the CEO said AXA would be treating them as “business as usual,” with opportunities in the digital space taking up the focus.
“We see huge opportunity there in both health and general insurance to work with some of the start-ups and our own innovative initiatives to develop products and services that we believe are going to be pretty transformational for us.”
