In this episode, I speak with Garance Wattez-Richard, CEO of AXA Emerging Customers. Garance set up the business in 2016 as part of AXA insurance company to reach customers not traditionally served by insurance. It now has over 18 million customers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Previously, Garance led AXA's strategic efforts to better serve women customers. If you've ever struggled to get senior management in your company to see the strategic opportunity of addressing women customers, then this episode is for you. Garance gives us a masterclass in creating practical change from the inside of a financial institution. Garance was awarded the Schwab Foundation award for Corporate Social Intrapreneur in 2019, and the Geneva Association's first Women in Insurance award in 2020.
01:23 Starting where insurance stops – the mandate for AXA Emerging Customers
(Find out more about AXA Emerging Customers here)
03:26 How COVID has exposed the vulnerabilities of emerging customers…
04:22 …and forced us all to take a crash course in health management
06:03 What is different about women’s insurance needs and preferences?
(You can read more in the brilliant “She for Shield” study from AXA, IFC and Accenture)
08:45 Debunking myths about women as insurance customers. Myth #1: Women are more loyal
09:50 Myth #2: Women are risk averse
10:29 Myth #3: Women are less fraudulent
10:54 What it means to serve women as decision-makers
14:13 The product changes that make a difference for women
16:19 Putting these lessons into practice to serve women in emerging markets
19:57 Insurance without a Chinese wall – making insurance work for women at the heads of families and businesses
21:41 How to get gender on the strategic map for a company
24:11 Success as an intrapreneur
Alice Merry (00:04):
Welcome to the podcast that takes a feminist look at the world of money. My name is Alice Merry, and this is the Feminist Finance podcast. Today's episode is with Garance Wattez-Richard, CEO of AXA Emerging Customers, which is part of AXA insurance company. Garance set up the business in 2016 to reach customers not traditionally served by insurance in emerging markets. And it now has over 18 million customers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Alice Merry (00:38):
Before that, Garance led AXA's strategic efforts to better serve women customers. She was awarded the Schwab Foundation award for Corporate Social Intrapreneur in 2019, and the Geneva Association's first Women in Insurance award in 2020. In this episode we talk about how Garance managed to persuade AXA to see the strategic importance of addressing women as decision-makers in purchasing insurance.
Alice Merry (01:04):
And we talk about how the company has gone about addressing women's needs in practical terms since then. If you've ever struggled to get senior management in your company to take issues around gender seriously, then keep listening for a masterclass in creating change from the inside.
Alice Merry (01:23):
Garance, you're the CEO of AXA Emerging Customers. Can you tell us a bit more about AXA Emerging Customers and the clients that you serve?
Garance Wattez-Richard (01:32):
With pleasure. AXA gave the green light and had the vision to mandate me to create AXA Emerging Customers in 2016, which honestly, I feel like it was both yesterday and about a 100 years ago. And the initial objective was really coined and summarized in one sentence. And it was, "Start where insurance stops." And we also realized that the low-income to mass market, even though they were starting to reach a certain socioeconomic status, that they were becoming the middle class, that they were starting to have a certain amount of revenue, even if it wasn't regular, it was not low. So we're not talking about $3 a day, but really above 10, 20, $30 a day. They were evolving and changing socioeconomic status and becoming intrapreneurs, auto-intrapreneurs, micro-intrapreneurs, school teachers, nurses, construction workers, policemen, et cetera, et cetera.
Garance Wattez-Richard (02:35):
They were still very much either unbanked because they still didn't tick the boxes of being able to open a bank account, and or still in the informal economy, which is not the shadow economy, it's just they don't have a work contract. And here's a parentheses, in emerging markets 70 to 85% of the active population does not have a formal work contract. And what's mind blowing is we know that social protection comes historically with a formal work contract. So it's a large part of the population that does have money, that is starting to have more, but remains very vulnerable. And so the population that we're looking to serve can be coined again in one sentence, it's those that are "too rich to be poor and too poor to be rich".
Alice Merry (03:26):
And in a way I suppose with what's happening at the moment with COVID-19, the vulnerability of that middle segment is really being exposed even more, isn't it? The informality, the precarity of their jobs, the many risks that they face.
Garance Wattez-Richard (03:43):
Oh, it's massive. And it's actually, it's goosebump provoking to even think of the numbers, because a lot of the people that are represented in this middle segment will have very physically face-to-face driven jobs. They are at the heads of retail merchant networks, and even very much at the forefront on the frontline of handling COVID in the form of being healthcare workers, of being garbage picker uppers, they are policeman. So they're really at the forefront, and on top of it they're still losing their jobs.
Garance Wattez-Richard (04:22):
And I have to say that I think that the entire world, so to speak, has taken a crash course with COVID-19 in health and health management, and health protection. One thing that has massively exploded in the insurance world and in AXA in particular is something that have started before, but in a sad way has been given the opportunity to grow, "thanks to" or because of COVID, is the provision of telemedicine services. And what does that mean? It means that people can call or dial in, or click on a link, to have access to a nurse or a doctor, or a healthcare worker, who will either through a digital tool or through voice go through a form of symptom checker for COVID, reassure them, tell them what the next moves should be, which has enabled them to not have to go to crowded waiting rooms, not take extra risks, not worry unnecessarily. And be in a position to, for example, know where to get tests, to know whether to isolate and confine, and to know where they should be looking for in the next 14 to 21 days. And that has exploded.
Garance Wattez-Richard (05:39):
So, what we've been seeing is there has been a transition to telemedicine and it's been accompanied by a transition to digital money. Now, can we avoid the human touch? No. But as we see in the industry, the phygital equilibrium, so really the cursor, where you put the cursor between physical and digital is going to change following COVID.
Alice Merry (06:03):
Explicitly addressing women's access to insurance has really been key to AXA Emerging Customers. And I know that that came out of some research that you did back in 2015, where you looked into women's different preferences, different needs for insurance, in the SheforShield report with IFC. I'd be interested to hear what you found about women's different needs when it came to insurance?
Garance Wattez-Richard (06:30):
Through this IFC, and Accenture actually, collaboration, that gave birth to so to speak the SheforShield report, one thing we really discovered in this report is that women, and this is beyond their level of income, but on average let's say, women will have an approach to life that's very cyclical. And so there are going to be moments, key moments, in their lives, what we've called life's big moments, and their preferences as to how they organize their life with regards to risk management and financial services and beyond -- the holistic protection of their household and of themselves -- will be quite different by lifecycle moment. And as you can imagine, they're like, I think I seem to remember, let's say they're five or six. And so it's, what is it going to be? It's going to be the moment where they get married, where they start working, for a lot of them have children. And then when life is such they either get a divorce or they lose their husband, and they retire.
Garance Wattez-Richard (07:42):
And so really very key moments and they're viewed as cyclical. And so for every one of their moments, they're going to take time, the time and sit down and say, "What do I need? What do I need for myself to not be a burden?" It sounds stupid what I'm saying, but it's simple, "What do I need to not be a burden?" That's really the first answer that came out of the mouth of every single woman we interviewed. For my parents, actually, for my children and my husband and my community, because it is that they are the sandwich segment, the time poor segment.
Garance Wattez-Richard (08:17):
So they are going to say, "Okay, for this moment in my life, this is the type of insurance I need." And so it's going to be enough compared to, relative to, what I'm going to do in my day and what I'm going to need for my children for protection and vis-a-vis my relationship with my husband and what my parents will need. They're not going to go around and shop. They're going to find what they need and stick with it.
Garance Wattez-Richard (08:45):
And this is, it's really interesting because a lot of people say, when they do marketing and you say, "Well, the women's segment, oh, it's a very loyal segment." And that really makes me laugh a lot, because it's as if we were this sort of very basic segment where we stick with whatever, whatever we're offered, even if the service isn't great, we'll just stick with it because that's what we do...
Garance Wattez-Richard (09:06):
No, it's linked to, we find what we need and we actually take the time to find what we need. But we don't have time to then go and say, "Let's look for a better yield on my life insurance. Let me be a bit more competitive and then I can go and tell my girlfriends that I got 2%, a 2% increase in my life insurance. Because I went and I shopped and I went through the whole procedure of changing administratively the papers and my name on my new life insurance. And I changed my provider."
Garance Wattez-Richard (09:36):
Of course, we'd like to be able to do that, but because we're in the middle of an appointment with the pediatrician while being on a conf call, before going to the retirement home, well, you know what, we just don't do it. So we stay loyal. Of course there's a form of loyalty, but there's also a form of prioritization. And it makes me think of the two other characteristics of women with regards to their purchasing decisions and the way they behave that I think are really a little bit exaggerated. One is about the fact that we are risk averse, which always makes me laugh a lot. It's not risk aversion, it's risk awareness.
Garance Wattez-Richard (10:14):
I think we're totally capable of taking as much risk as men, and even sometimes more. It's not a risk aversion. It's just that we're very aware of the wide variety of risks that we're confronted to every day. So I wanted to make that point.
Garance Wattez-Richard (10:29):
And then the last point people say, "Oh, women are much less fraudulent." That's just not true. We're just as fraudulent as the next guy. The only problem is that we don't have time to be. So we don't have the time to say, "Okay, how could I work around the system? How could I really see, oh, is there a gap here?" We just don't have time.
Alice Merry (10:54):
I'd love to hear more about how you as AXA Emerging Customers, what did you concretely do with all this information? So we have women customers who seem very appealing: they don't have time to make fraud, they're very risk aware, they also have these cyclical moments in their life that are particularly important for insurers to address. How did AXA Emerging Customers start to address this female segment?
Garance Wattez-Richard (11:24):
Well, to be fair, it wasn't only AXA Emerging Customers. It was really AXA overall that became aware that they had completely ignored one of the most, the strongest revolutions of all time, yet the most specific one, which was a rebalancing act from an educational, workforce, an asset ownership, et cetera, et cetera, perspective with regards to gender. And so across the board we started realizing that again, the industry had blatantly ignored women and had blatantly ignored women in a very particular way, in the sense that it had considered women as a segment, but only women as women, and not as decision-makers.
Garance Wattez-Richard (12:15):
And so I remember very well going to pitch the idea to the CEO of, "We should be addressing the segment that we're completely ignoring it." His first reaction was, "Of course we're not ignoring it, because we didn't make our products for men."
Garance Wattez-Richard (12:32):
And on the face of it, that's a very logical sentence. And you feel like saying, "Are you kidding me? I mean, really? Did you just say that?" And of course, because he was someone who was, and this is Henri de Castries, was the most visionary person I've met in a long time. He really believed that and I understood really where he was coming from. And so at the time I was so taken aback and I hadn't really thought about it well, and I probably gave him quite stupid answers or at least unconvincing. And so he ended up saying, or maybe this was Denis Duverne who was the deputy CEO at the time and who is now chairman. He said, "Thanks very much for your pitch. And just maybe you could do a blog on the company's intranet."
Garance Wattez-Richard (13:10):
And I thought, "Oh, okay. So that was a failure." So I'm going to have to come back, because saying to someone, "Why don't you do a blog on the intranet equates to "thanks very much, but go away." And it took me time to think about what I had really done wrong, because I was so convinced of it. And so that's why I realized that he had said, "They're gender neutral at worst. At best we offer maternity products and breast cancer." I kept thinking to myself, "But what is he talking about?" And we were missing each other. Like we were missing each other's points and almost speaking two different languages. And so it took me time to go back and really understand what I had missed. And so when I realized that the point was to say, "But it's not only women as women, it's women as decision-makers, as asset owners, as head of households, as drivers of discretionary spending and of the holistic protection of their household. And as heads of companies, et cetera. I'm not talking about women and their childbearing moments only."
Garance Wattez-Richard (14:13):
And so that's where AXA started realizing that we had completely missed that opportunity. And it wasn't about reinventing products per se. It's about, of course the risk is the same, right? But what's interesting is that, let me take a concrete example. So you start from the hypothesis of time poor sandwich segment, right? If you are a woman who breaks down in the middle of the night in a desert ally, would you be ready to pay an extra three euros for a service that guarantees you that before actually repairing your car, it will send you a taxi to where you are in less than two minutes. I would imagine your answer is yes. And you know, and that's the difference, and that's probably a difference between men and women. Women will feel, and rightly so, more in danger in that situation.
Garance Wattez-Richard (15:20):
But if you break down in the middle of the day in a very crowded street on your way, again, to the pediatricians, having come from the retirement home, and again, I'm caricaturing, would you be ready to pay three euros for a service that will guarantee you a taxi in less than two minutes? Again, yes. In both circumstances men say, "No." Now did we build a product? Did we say, "Okay, so we're going to build a product for women that offers that service?" No, we said, "We're going to build a product that offers that service. If men want to take that product, we're not going to stop them." So it's really about taking into account a woman's situation, but not not offering it to men. And to be honest, this is a service, for example, that was launched in France a couple of years ago. And today we have 30% men taking it up.
Alice Merry (16:19):
Do you think, could you give us an example of one of these kinds of changes that you've been talking about that AXA Emerging Customers made to a product or a service that it had, specifically to help women within the emerging customers segment?
Garance Wattez-Richard (16:36):
Yeah, I have two that I thought were actually really very interesting. One is linked to women as women in the sense that usually health products do not cover maternity costs, for the simple reason that maternity is not an uncertainty and therefore is not a risk. It's a certainty normally. And this is, I wish upon everyone when you become pregnant, it's to have a baby. And that's the certain outcome. And therefore covering costs linked to maternity is not, is complicated to ensure, because we know that those costs are going to be incurred. And so usually to be able to include those benefits in any insurance or health-related insurance product, it's very expensive. And it's part of employee benefits and things that are offered to women as employees. Again, back to the social protection that comes with the formal of work contract.
Garance Wattez-Richard (17:31):
What we've managed to do is to include an emerging customer hospital cash product. And so for these hospital cash products, what we've managed to do, and this is only because we've managed to lock up our actuaries without food or water, is that we've included maternity benefits, but from an emergency point of view. So we've included in our protection products costs linked to things that went wrong in the maternity process. So this links back to this is an uncertainty. Normally nothing goes wrong. So if something goes wrong, so if it's not part of the regular journey of maternity, of having an echo every three months, and your usual journey, if it's something that's exceptional or out of the ordinary, then that we will cover. So that's one example.
Garance Wattez-Richard (18:25):
The other example is that we surveyed a lot of women in Asia. And what was interesting is their main concern was when they died. It was relating to life insurance, where it was the life insurance on them, so where their husband would become the beneficiary. And when they're concerned, they always start their sentences with, and this is funny because you see the certain elements of the gender relationship are universal. They start by saying, "A man cannot live alone. When I die, my husband will at first go back to his mother and then he will get remarried. And when he does get remarried, my children will be abandoned or ignored. So how can I guarantee that my children have access to the education they would have gotten had I been around?" And so what we've tried to put in place and have started doing is to say, "Okay, we take your point. So you pay a little bit every month. And then if something happens to you and actually it can be death or invalidity, we will pay directly the school or the university until a certain age, until 16, until 18, until 21."
Garance Wattez-Richard (19:35):
And so the money does not transit either through the beneficiary, I.e. the husband, or through the husband's family. So I think those are two quite telling concrete examples of things we've tried to put in place to take into account women as women, and women as the holistic protectors of the household.
Garance Wattez-Richard (19:57):
Actually another example, maybe this will interest you also is that women do not have a Chinese wall. And what's funny is I discovered this by looking at China, so no pun intended, but women do not have a Chinese wall between their professional life and their personal life, much less at least than men. So for example, in China 75% of entrepreneurs at the head of micro SMEs are women. It's a mindblowing number. It's a very entrepreneurial population. It's really, it's small micro-enterprises that are based on services.
Garance Wattez-Richard (20:36):
And so I think it's 90% of them in the first two years will set up their structure in their home, because they're the time poor, the segment that has to take care of their children and parents, the same thing comes over and over again. Which kind of comforts you in your analysis. So, 90% of them in the first two years set up their company at home. And in a room, in a separate room, or in the basement, or in a room next door, what have you. And so what they've said to us is, "What would interest me is a group insurance policy, which covers my husband, my children, my parents, and my employees."
Garance Wattez-Richard (21:14):
This is unheard of, you know? Can we offer employee benefits or family benefits that cover both? Actually, yes, we can actually, yes. It's just slightly more complicated to price it, but it's only women who not only have asked that, but, now that we've started developing that, are interested in buying it. Men would rather have a very competitive insurance at work and a very competitive insurance at home.
Alice Merry (21:41):
Absolutely. I wanted to ask you a bit more, we talked a little bit earlier about how you started off this process of AXA taking the women's segment seriously as a strategic segment, seeing women as decision makers and not just products for women as women. And I think AXA seems to be taking this very seriously, but it's certainly not the case in all companies. And I wonder what advice you could give to people who are keen that their own companies target women customers better and offer better value for women customers, and really put women on the strategic map for their company. How would you bring about that kind of change inside of a company?
Garance Wattez-Richard (22:23):
Well, I have to admit that's a very good question, it's a hard one. The first, I think sine qua non condition, essential condition is that the managers have to have a conviction. And when I say managers, I mean the CEO, in the sense that, or the deputy CEO, in the sense that if there isn't a strong, almost emotional conviction in what you're trying to do, then you won't get the excessive support you need, the almost irrational, explicit, vocal, loud support that you need in the beginning. I think once you have that, it's just the beginning of the journey. You have to go through a business case. And really it's why we wrote this report with the IFC and Accenture is to say, to be able to reach the conclusion that in the insurance industry the women's market is a trillion dollar opportunity. Now, there is nothing that is more of a convincing argument to a CEO than that, right?
Garance Wattez-Richard (23:27):
Even though you know that it's going to be a journey, you're not saying that in the next six to 12 months, that's what's going to happen. But you're saying, "Have the vision, look in the future. This is what it can represent. This is all of the upside. And this is zero of the downside." Because what was the worst thing that was going to happen? It was that there was much less of an uptake than we thought there would be, but there was still an uptake. So I think that some of the key success factors, so are going to be the CEO's commitment and engagement and vision and beliefs. It's going to be about making a quantitative argument.
Garance Wattez-Richard (24:11):
And it's, I think to some extent, I was asked the question recently by ... I was really, really lucky and I got this award by the Geneva Association, Woman of the Year. And one of the questions I was asked was, "What would be your advice to younger women?" First of all, it made me feel old, but to younger women in the industry, which is still quite a male dominated industry so far as the senior positions are, to advance in their career? Initially I was slightly annoyed by that question, because if a man had won the award, would we have said, "What advice do you give other men?" But anyway, then I understood what they were trying to say, you know. And one of the first things that I answered was, "A, if you don't ask, you don't get." So sometimes we create our own bottlenecks. So we do with the questions and the answers, and often the answers are negative. And so we stop ourselves a lot I find. And we have a tendency of thinking that because we do things so well, and we do things 120% that somebody will notice, that they will notice that we deserve a reward and that that person will then come and deposit that reward on our laps. And unfortunately that doesn't happen. So if you don't ask, you don't get, that's one thing.
Garance Wattez-Richard (25:23):
And I think the other thing is really, stop asking for permission. And if things don't go well, ask for forgiveness. And the problem is that now that I've said that my motto is, "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission." Now my whole team in the last four years keeps coming into my office and goes, "I'm really sorry." But then, you can't do that more than once a week. The rest of you have to ask me once in a while if it's okay. But I really believe in that. And we have a tendency of being good students, which I think is great, but I'm very convinced by, "If you don't ask, you don't get." "Ask for forgiveness more than permission".
Garance Wattez-Richard (26:04):
And in French we say, "pour vivre heureux vivons caché". I think in the beginning, don't make noise. Just put your head down, do the Nike thing, the Nike thing, "Just do it." Stay hidden. If you stay hidden, you stay happy. And then once you've done it, once you've proven it, once you've done your pilot and it's taken and it's growing, then you make noise.
Alice Merry (26:34):
It was fascinating to speak with Garance about what it took to change AXA's strategic approach to women customers. Particularly how, when she raised the topic initially, she came up against the all too common arguments that the products and processes are already considered gender neutral. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know that I'm very much a believer that there is no such thing as a gender neutral product or process in finance, but what was really valuable about this episode was that Garance laid out how she changed that perception and gave us a kind of blueprint for how we could think about doing the same thing from the inside of a company. Focus on getting the support of the most influential figures in the company that you can, persuade them with a solid business case, put together the numbers, present the business opportunity. And if you're struggling to get that support, then start small, run a pilot, generate evidence. And then, and only then, make noise about it.
Garance Wattez-Richard (27:32):
Thank you to Garance. And thank you for joining us. Do let me know about your experience creating change on the inside of financial institutions. And please share this episode with your favorite feminist intrapreneur.