Rampaging vandals, a glacier collapsing on a village in Switzerland. Valencia under water a few months ago. Can we still insure certain risks? This morning, my guest will speak at the MEDF about inclusion. Inclusive insurance, what is it? I'm going to ask him. He is the CEO of one of the largest insurance groups in the world. Hello Thomas Buberl. Hello David. Thank you for being with us. You are the CEO of the AXA Group. 95 million clients in 50 countries served by 154,000 employees. You were born in Germany near Cologne and you took the reins of AXA at age 42. You are now 10 years older. When you look at the world today, Thomas Buberl, in Spain you see Valencia under water, in Switzerland, a country you know well, a glacier collapses on a village, in France no major football match escapes vandalism. What do you tell yourself?
The world has clearly become more complex. We live in a world where every day we have surprises and we must now get used to managing that because I think it's not going to stop. And managing that means we need to plan more, we need to think more to protect ourselves for tomorrow, to increase our resilience against these dangers.
Could we say that your job is not to be surprised?
We are also always surprised even if we always try to think ahead, but there are things of course that happen that we didn't see. In this business, it is absolutely important to be diversified. That means having your fingers everywhere but not too deep.
Your job is risk. The last few years in France, but also in the world, have shown us that the world is increasingly unpredictable. Could that one day lead to no longer insuring certain risks?
I am obviously thinking of certain climate risks, certain unforeseen events that would mean some clients would no longer be insurable. It's always a big discussion on the issue of insurability. I don't believe it at all. Risks remain insurable, but we need to change the way we manage risks. In the past, we always focused our business on reimbursing claims. For it to remain insurable, we need to plan more. That means investing more in prevention, accompanying the client or clients so that the next claim does not happen. And that's where our business is moving towards prevention. And it is through prevention that risk remains insurable.
You have opened a platform to raise awareness among the insured and those who are not, about climate risk, for their health, their immediate environment, their housing. Do we need to train and raise awareness among the French and Europeans about what can happen to them? A tree falling on the roof of the house, new diseases linked to global warming, the house cracking because of a violent temperature change during a summer. If we don't do this prevention, do you think we will miss the boat?
No. If we don't do prevention, what will happen? The number of risks increases. We talked about the price of risk increasing, meaning at some point it will be difficult to finance insurance. The only way to finance, to keep insurability, is to do more prevention, which requires giving more education. So, we must not, I mean, make the lives of our citizens horrible because we are always thinking about risks, we must also think about opportunities, but being aware of major risks, of disease, of natural disasters, all that is very important.
Will insurance soon become a luxury? Is insurance for some households an expense, expensive, costly? There's also inflation, even if it's falling today. Are we moving towards luxury insurance for some households?
We can't because the insurance system is based on social cohesion. That means insuring a few and not the majority only makes the insurance mechanism stop working. We need a large population to insure because how did it work? In a village, you have 10 people, one person falls ill, the other nine help the person who falls ill. If you only have one left, it becomes very difficult.
Thomas Buberl, you are speaking at the MEDF this morning on the theme of inclusive insurance. Do you estimate at AXA that the middle class is less well insured than before, that the poor are poorly insured, and that in a way, the insurance sector has moved away from its primary vocation, that is, collective solidarity, the establishment of solidarity and insurance systems, those of the pioneers in a way, the mutuals, the insurance companies. What do you want to do? What is behind this word 'inclusive insurance'? Because the word inclusion is used in all sorts of ways today.
So, first of all, we are suffering from a huge social divide in our country but also elsewhere. And this social divide is going to threaten our country. We said to ourselves, we can't wait for the state to solve the issues. We must contribute ourselves as a company and responsible actor in this state to solve this problem. And that's why we ask ourselves what we can do for the approximately 20% of French people who today have difficulty getting insured, either because it's too expensive or they are excluded. And there, we launched a year ago, a new range of products that works very well and addresses exactly this need.
Thomas Buberl, you are the president of AXA, you are a boss, you have 154,000 agents worldwide. Can you guarantee these people that they do not have to fear artificial intelligence and that it will not harm employment at AXA?
