Scott Gunter: Adapt to differentiate
AXA XL’s new CEO took the wheel just as the COVID-19 lockdown began – and both he and the industry faced a steep learning curve.
AXA XL’s new CEO Scott Gunter had a baptism of fire when he took over as head of the global insurer: he started just as the COVID-19 lockdown began. “When I assumed my new role with AXA XL in February, a global pandemic was certainly not in my 90-day plan,” he writes in Reactions CEO Risk Forum 2020. “New to the job, I had plans to physically visit offices to meet my new global colleagues when COVID-19 put a halt to that. Fortunately, we did not allow it to stop much else.”
In some ways, the lockdown freed up executives’ productive time, he says. “Fortunately, with travel restrictions, the hours that my leadership team and I saved not sitting in airports were invested elsewhere, meeting virtually with our key business partners and each other to continue to serve our clients and design a new operating model.”
Some team members devised shortcuts that will persist beyond the lockdown. In London, as a workaround to make amendments to line slips that previously would have been made in ink, in person, one colleague developed an electronic stamp and scratch to enable underwriters to do this onscreen.
During the pandemic, few operations remained in business-as-usual mode, Gunter writes, and most of AXA XL’s clients had to do business in a new way.
“Now we’re helping clients adjust to their ‘new norm’ of operating, often having to adapt our operations to do so. When our risk engineers couldn’t be on-site for risk assessments, we launched remote capabilities. Thus far, they have performed more than 600 remote consultations to help clients adjust for social distancing and other changes,” he says. “We helped many clients adjust their operations so that they could pivot. For example, a coat manufacturer switching to make hospital gowns, or a distillery shifting its operations to make hand sanitiser.”
Check out Reactions’ CEO Risk Forum 2020 in our September issue, here.
