AXA aims to hit 100M customers in Asia

AXA sees Asia as a “key growth pillar,” as the French insurance giant aims to have a customer base of 100 million in the continent by 2030.

From just 14 million customers in Asia to date, the region presents growth opportunities that the French insurer wants a big slice of, said Jean-Louis Laurent Josi, chief executive of AXA Asia.

In a recent presentation before Asian and European journalists flown to Shanghai, China, Josi noted that Asia’s population was seen reaching 4.9 billion in 2030 or seven times bigger than that of Europe, while the Asian economy would expand to $38 trillion by 2030—1.7 times larger than the projected European gross domestic product.

Another growth opportunity for insurers like AXA is the region’s rising middle class, even as there remain huge protection gaps that can be covered by insurance products and services, Josi said.

The protection gap, defined by AXA as the missing income to maintain living standard for dependents, in Asia stood at $32 trillion in 2012, he said, citing Swiss Re data.

Also, insurance markets in the region remain “very small,” with insurance penetration in emerging Asian countries only at about 2 percent of the population in 2013.

In this regard, Josi said AXA would tap e-commerce, mobile technologies, social networking sites as well as “big data” to attract more customers.

Separately, AXA said in a statement issued earlier that it would ramp up its investments in Asia, specifically via three innovation hubs, namely: the “AXA Lab Asia” in Shanghai; an office of AXA strategic ventures in Hong Kong; as well as a data innovation lab in Singapore.

“Asia is a major strategic focus for the AXA Group, and our ambition is to have 100 million clients in the region by 2030. We are already very present from a business standpoint and we are now looking to seize the opportunities offered by the region. This is why we are announcing a series of initiatives in Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong. We are confident that these new structures will prove decisive in identifying untapped opportunities to accelerate our digital transformation and ultimately better serve and protect our clients,” chairman and chief executive Henri de Castries said.

AXA said these three structures would “better connect the group to the region’s rapidly developing entrepreneurs, talents and new business models.”