Axa
French multinational insurance firm
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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Axa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.