Driving Sustainable Partnerships: Mike Crane’s Perspective from AXA Commercial

I’m now nine months into my role as Director of SME, Schemes and Specialty at AXA Commercial and it’s been both rewarding and enjoyable, though I have to admit I didn’t pick the easiest time to join with the market conditions we’re currently navigating!

The business has a fantastic culture, which is so important. The culture and the passion that people show really set AXA UK apart – people give their time and opinions freely and are very supportive.

No-one can deny we’re in challenging times and there’s much talk about the impact of the softening market, but we take a long-term view on business and that makes a real difference. We’re not looking for quick gains, and that holds true through all the different market cycles – we always need to write the right business.

In the delegated authority space, it’s about partnering with those who share our view. We want to back people who have a long-term strategy for their business because that will help us all navigate our way through difficult times.

As a business, we’re in a strong position when market conditions change which gives us room to manoeuvre and negotiate. Protecting margins is important, so sometimes you have to be brave enough to walk away. If you compromise on price and quality, you very quickly get into a mess. It’s better to make the right decisions now than have painful conversations in 12 months’ time.

Most of the partnerships we have are long term by nature. And I’m confident that as long as we’re doing the right business with the right people, we’ll be able to trade through the current market conditions.

We also reflect on ourselves and whether we’re offering a good partnership for others. Being cost conscious and introducing efficiencies where possible is something we’re constantly doing, because every saving we implement will help with covering the cost of claims.

We operate in a lot of sectors and write a broad portfolio of business so that helps to balance things out. We are continually checking where we are, where the market is and whether we’re comfortable with margins.

We’re also bringing technology to bear in lots of areas where it has the potential to make a real difference to the business. It’s already helping with auto ingestion of bordereaux and managing referrals.

In underwriting, we can we use it to search documents and in areas such as claims there are opportunities for voice recognition to be used for call summarisation, ensuring we have really good records. This takes a lot of friction out of the painful manual typing of notes.

Looking to the future, we’re already thinking how technology can improve the customer journey. Customer expectations are changing and evolving, and our customers’ own use of AI will influence how they expect us to use it.

But importantly we’ll also figure out where AI isn’t beneficial, where our human value is and where it’s important to protect it. Sometimes nothing can beat that human touch.

Hear more from Mike Crane as he sits down with MGAA CEO Mike Keating on the MGAA Conversations podcast, available from 29 September here: https://mgaa.co.uk/podcasts