Aviva
British insurance company

Aviva plc is a British multinational insurance company headquartered in London, England. It has about 25.2 million customers in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada. In the United Kingdom, Aviva is the largest general insurer and a leading life and pensions provider. Aviva is also the second-largest general insurer in Canada.
Aviva has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
Name
The name of the company upon its formation in May 2000 was CGNU plc and was created when Norwich Union merged with insurer CGU plc. In April 2002, the company's shareholders voted to change the company name to Aviva plc, an invented palindrome word derived from "viva", the Latin for 'alive' and designed to be short, memorable and work worldwide. The new company's logo incorporated a triangle, which is based on the spire of Norwich Cathedral. The Norwich Union brand was retained for the UK long-term savings and general insurance business.
In April 2008, Aviva announced that it would adopt the Aviva name as its worldwide consumer-facing brand, and that the Norwich Union brand would be phased out in the United Kingdom.
The public source identifies “Aviva” as british insurance company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Aviva, British and insurance.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q791179. VIAF identifies the subject as 140977162. The Library of Congress control number is nb2007004401. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2002 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aviva” 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.