Q&A with Axa's Matt Reeves

Strategic Risk: What services are you offering?

Matt Reeves, AXA: Our focus is on the traditional covers of property and casualty, as well as motor fleet. We also have a strong appetite for marine business, which is a strategic line of business within AXA Corporate Solutions, and we have one of the largest marine teams in the market. However we also have a broader focus on innovative insurance programmes, such as cyber and parametric covers.

There are synergies to purchasing corporate insurance on a package basis, and our clients are able to benefit from these economies of scale. We find this not only delivers higher levels of value to our clients, but also provides us with greater long-term stability.

SR: What other options come with the programme?

MR: We also have risk financing solutions. This is one of the more innovative part of RP. Customers who are not able to dedicate resource to researching Risk Financing ideas may not have discovered some of the options available. We want to offer them, at the very least, options that are less transactional and more beneficial in the longer term.

Risk financing is co-ordinated with our colleagues in Paris, who have extensive experience in this area.

SR: What about the claims and international services?

MR: With regards to claims, the level of engagement is again at the option of the customer. Engagement levels have to be tailored to the individual you are ultimately working with. For example, if it is a Finance Director or Company Secretary, they have a full time job with significant pressures already, and insurance is likely further down the priority list. They don’t necessarily have the time for the full engagement that you get with a traditional relationship model, but still require up to date information that they know is accurate and well managed. We are offering them all the benefits of a fully managed programme, but with the level of engagement they want.

For international programmes, we’re finding customers can become global businesses overnight, especially through M&A activity We’re flexible in our approach and response and can quite easily put things together. Worldwide we’re in 150 countries. If they were to call up and say ‘we’ve decided to go European’ – can you help?’ Of course we can, quickly.

Our Global Programme focus is to provide solutions to challenges as and when they come up, but without expecting our customers to do unnecessary work.

Finally we have risk consultancy, which includes risk management. It is run by AXA Matrix, who are a separate company but still part of AXA Group. Again, we are happy to manage the entire risk management process, so we’ll put together risk surveys based on our experience of high-risk sites, and take care of any consultancy and follow up work. The customer can be involved but they don’t have to be. Our guys will go out and do the Surveys and we will remain happy to provide thought leadership, so deciding the level of engagement is entirely with the customer once again.

We can identify sites that may require additional attention; we can look at loss trending and analysis, and we can provide insight from within our customer’s industry. It can be included within the premium (i.e. a ‘bundled’ solution) or it could be a specific fee based services, costed separately – again depending on which option works best for our customer.

SR: So is this effectively outsourcing of insurance?

MR: Pretty much. We’ve got the expertise. Some of these businesses are billion dollar business and don’t have risk management function. Possibly because they’ve decided strategically to outsource it, or perhaps because they’ve evolved so quickly that they haven’t been able to build a risk management concept. Either way, they still require support from their Insurer.

SR: There is a huge amount of breadth here. Which areas, if any, are clients most interested in. What about cyber?

MR: It depends on the client and the industry. Cyber should be a concern for everyone. If you’re a logistics firm, marine will be a big area. Construction companies could show greater attention to employers liability as another example. The benefit of Risk Pilot being a truly bespoke service is that we will ensure it is tailored appropriately for our customer and their industry.

What we want to do is let our customers know the full range. It’s a wishlist in that sense. It might only be one line of business, but they might still want to talk about integrated risk financing. It might be property, but they want us to risk manage the process. It may be that they want to start talking specifically about Parametric policies, if non-damage weather related business interruption is a great concern; but they don’t know where to begin. We want to provide these solutions.