Axa S.A. (styled AXA) is a French multinational insurance company whose registered office is in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. It ranks among the largest insurers in the world by revenue and also sells assistance and related services through its subsidiaries. For 2025 the group reported gross written premiums and other revenues of €115.5 billion, more than 92 million customers in 52 countries and a workforce of about 156,000.
The company grew out of a small mutual insurance society set up at Rouen, in Normandy, in 1817 to insure against fire. It remained a regional mutual group, known for most of that time as Ancienne Mutuelle, until it took the name Mutuelles Unies in 1978. Between 1982 and 1989 Claude Bébéar turned it into the largest private insurance group in France winning contested takeovers of Drouot, of Présence and of Compagnie du Midi. The enlarged business took the Axa name in July 1985. Expansion abroad followed quickly. Axa took control of The Equitable in the United States in 1992 and of National Mutual in Australia in 1995, merged with UAP in 1996–97 in what was then the largest transaction French insurance had seen, and bought Guardian Royal Exchange in 1999 and Winterthur in 2006.
Under Thomas Buberl, chief executive since 2016, the group has moved away from capital-intensive savings business and towards property and casualty, commercial and health insurance. The purchase of the Bermudian insurer XL Group for $15.3 billion in 2018 gave Axa the leading global platform in property and casualty commercial lines, and was paid for in part by floating and then disposing of the American life business, Axa Equitable Holdings. The asset manager Axa Investment Managers was sold to BNP Paribas in 2025.
Axa S.A. is listed on Euronext Paris and is a constituent of the CAC 40 and Euro Stoxx 50 indices. Its largest shareholders are two French mutual insurers, together called the Mutuelles AXA, which at the end of 2025 held 15.64% of the capital and 25.78% of the voting rights.
As of 2024, it is the fourth largest financial services company by revenue in France, and the eighth largest French company. In 2023, the company was ranked 48th in the Forbes Global 2000.
Name Although the company writes it in capitals, "AXA" is not an acronym and stands for nothing. After the Drouot group was taken over in 1982, chairman and chief executive Claude Bébéar commissioned a computer-assisted search for a short name that would be pronounced the same way in any language, in keeping with the group's international ambitions. The first choice, "Elan", was abandoned when Canadian executives pointed out that is the French word for moose.
Bébéar later recalled that the name had come out of nowhere, and that it appealed to him because the group wanted to be first and the word began with the first letter of the alphabet. It was also short, it was easy to remember and it read the same backwards. The brand was launched in July 1985, when Mutuelles Unies and Drouot began trading under it together. Ownership of the trademark passed to the listed company only in 2005, when FINAXA, the holding company that legally held the brand, was absorbed into Axa S.A.
Interbrand rated Axa the most valuable insurance brand in the world for nine years running, a run the company last claimed in 2017, when it put the brand's value above $11 billion. In Interbrand's 2025 ranking it placed 43rd overall and second among insurers, behind Allianz.
History
Origins in Normandy (1817–1945) The oldest ancestor of Axa was the , set up at Rouen in 1817 by the architect Jacques-Théodore Le Carpentier and seventeen fellow property owners. The first claim it paid, in 1819, came to 7.5 francs and prompted the company to build up a reserve fund. Its manager Adolphe Lanne split the business in 1847 into and ; the two came back together in 1881 as Ancienne Mutuelle, alongside a newly formed life company, Mutuelle Vie.
The group gathered all its offices in Rouen in 1902 and began writing motor insurance in 1922 through Ancienne Mutuelle Accidents. Its chairman, Gaston Payenneville, was killed in the Allied bombing of Rouen in 1944.
The Ancienne Mutuelle group (1946–1974) André Sahut d'Izarn took charge in 1946 and put together the : Ancienne Mutuelle du Calvados was absorbed that year, the Mutuelle d'Orléans merged in 1950 and La Participation was bought in 1954. By 1955 the group held eight mutual companies and a number of subsidiaries, and had made its first move abroad, into Quebec. A new head office of opened at Belbeuf, outside Rouen, in 1968, and a reinsurance arm, Ancienne Mutuelle de Réassurance, later Axa RE, was set up in 1977.
After buying the and the , the group renamed itself Mutuelles Unies in 1978. Turnover then stood at the equivalent of some €160 million and it employed 1,850 people.
Bébéar and the creation of Axa (1975–1989) Claude Bébéar, a graduate of the École Polytechnique who had joined Ancienne Mutuelle de Rouen in 1958, was made general manager in 1974 and chairman the following year, aged 40. Over the next fifteen years he turned a provincial mutual into the largest private insurance group in France by winning three contested takeovers in a row.
The first was Drouot, then the leading French private insurer, with 6 billion francs of premiums, left vulnerable by the death of the man who had run it for decades. Francis Bouygues tried to take control, the Hottinguer and Aaron families, who held 60% of the key holding company, took him to court, and Bébéar stepped in as a white knight, won over the shareholders and took Drouot in 1982. Axa's own official history admits the operation was carried through by force rather than by agreement. Within two years Drouot's annual losses of about $40 million had turned into a profit of $10 million.
The second contest came in 1986, when Bernard Pagezy of Compagnie du Midi bid for the Présence group, made up of La Providence and Le Secours and carrying 4 billion francs of premiums. Bébéar counter-bid in Drouot Assurances shares and won once Paribas, which held 25%, came down on his side in March 1986. Présence became an Axa company on 15 December 1986, and by the end of that year Axa was the third-largest insurance group in France, with 18 billion francs of premiums.
The third operation moved Axa inside a former rival. Under a protocol agreed with Assurances du Groupe de Paris in April 1988, Axa transferred its insurance business into the listed Compagnie du Midi, which then took the Axa name, which is why the modern listed company is, in law, the former Compagnie du Midi, incorporated in 1957. Generali, under Antoine Bernheim, had meanwhile built a stake in Midi; on 25 January 1989 Pagezy and Bébéar offered it two board seats in return for capping that stake at 20%, and at the shareholders' meeting of 28 February 1989 Bébéar carried a majority, Generali's votes included, and became president. Axa by then brought together 42 companies worldwide, 4,000 general agents and 16,000 employees, against 700 agents and 2,300 employees in 1980.
Bébéar built a shared culture across the assembled group through large corporate expeditions, among them a seminar in the Ténéré desert in November 1986 and the "AXA Europe Express" train journey across northern and eastern Europe in October 1988, used to bring the management of Assurances du Groupe de Paris together. He called his method managing by opportunity, and took the AIG standard of a 15% return on equity as the group's target.
Global expansion (1990–1999) A reorganisation in October 1990 put a listed financial holding company, FINAXA, above the operating company Axa S.A.
Axa moved into the United States in July 1991, agreeing to put $1 billion into the ailing Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, a deal that also brought it the asset manager Alliance Capital and the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. The Equitable demutualised on 22 July 1992 and became a subsidiary of The Equitable Companies Incorporated, in which Axa held 49% of the common stock at first and 60.6% by the end of 1995. The holding company was renamed Axa Financial in 1999. In 1995 Axa took majority control of the demutualised Australian life insurer National Mutual Holdings, renamed Axa Asia Pacific Holdings in 1999; Forbes Global reported a price of $840 million, while Axa's own account gives A$1 billion for 40% of the company, rising to 51% once it was listed.
The decade's biggest deal was the merger with Compagnie UAP, the largest insurer in France, settled on 11 November 1996 and announced the next day as an exchange offer between equals. It created the leading French insurer and the second-largest insurance and asset management group in the world. Forbes Global put the price at $8 billion in Axa stock, and the target as much the weaker of the two: $42 billion of revenues in 1996 on a return on equity of 5%, a loss of 2 billion francs in 1995 and twice as many staff as Axa. Jacques Friedmann chaired the supervisory board of the merged group and Bébéar the management board, and the name Axa-UAP stayed in use until the last subsidiaries had been rebranded at the end of 1999. The merger also brought in the German insurer Colonia, which UAP had controlled since 1993 and which became Axa Colonia Konzern in 1997 and Axa Konzern in September 2001.
On 2 February 1999 Axa agreed a recommended offer of £3.4 billion for Guardian Royal Exchange, made through Sun Life & Provincial Holdings, the British subsidiary in which it held 71.6%. GRE was broken up at once: Sun Life & Provincial kept the British and Irish business, GRE Overseas went to Axa for £972 million, the German operations to Axa Colonia for DM 1.66 billion and the American ones to Liberty Mutual for $1.465 billion. That November Axa also agreed to buy the Japanese life insurer Nippon Dantai; the resulting company, Axa Nichidan, was formed in March 2000 and described by Axa as the first foreign-owned holding company in Japan since the Second World War.
Consolidation under Henri de Castries (2000–2016) Henri de Castries took over the chairmanship of the management board from Bébéar in May 2000, when the group had revenues of roughly €80 billion and 50 million customers. Bébéar moved to the supervisory board and was made honorary chairman on 22 April 2008. He died in November 2025, aged 90.
The minority shareholders of Sun Life & Provincial Holdings were bought out in 2000. That same year Alliance Capital paid about $3.5 billion in cash and partnership units for the American research and asset management house Sanford C. Bernstein, producing a manager with $477 billion of assets. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was sold on to Credit Suisse for $8 billion, and in 2001 the September 11 attacks cost Axa €650 million.
An agreement to buy the MONY Group for about $1.5 billion was reached by Axa Financial in September 2003. The offer was lifted from $29.50 to $31.00 a share. A proxy campaign against it by the hedge fund Highfields Capital Management collapsed when the Second Circuit overturned a favourable district court ruling on 1 April 2004, and 53.4% of the outstanding shares approved the merger on 18 May 2004. It closed on 8 July.
On 16 December 2005 FINAXA was absorbed into Axa at a ratio of fifteen Axa shares for four FINAXA shares. The merger shortened the ownership chain, widened the free float and brought the Axa brand into the listed company. The Mutuelles AXA, which until then had controlled Axa through FINAXA, were left with roughly 14.3% of the shares and 23.3% of the votes.