AXA's Kevin Murray Steals a March on Crisis
It's impossible to refute Kevin Murray's suggestion that the luck of the Irish influenced the way he has weathered the financial storm as CIO of AXA Equitable, the U.S. subsidiary of Paris-based AXA Group (US$134 billion in gross 2008 revenue). However, it's also impossible to deny that Murray's proactive approach to systems investment helped put New York-based AXA Equitable in a better position to deal with the post-crisis business environment, particularly with regard to the annuities market.
After becoming CIO at AXA in 2005, Murray developed an IT strategy that aligned systems to a business reorganization along lines of product, distribution and service. He says he sought to support each of those areas with state-of-the-art rules-based systems and recalls flying with AXA Equitable CEO Kip Condron to Paris to make the case for investing in the technology. "In today's environment it would be more of a challenge to get that meeting scheduled and to make that case," Murray reflects.
Competitive Imperative
While Murray never anticipated that a historic financial crisis might stand between him and strategic systems investment, he was determined to move quickly to implement a strategy that would prepare AXA Equitable for a changing marketplace. "Instead of having code spread out, as in most legacy environments, it's in three repositories [corresponding to product, distribution and service] that speak to a new rules-driven, table-based administration platform," he explains. "That will take us into the future, and I don't believe anybody is going to be competitive in our businesses within the next three to five years without this rules-based technology."
The product engine implementation was preceded by the December 2007 launch of AXA Equitable's distribution engine. The company has yet to select the vendor for its service engine, according to Murray, but he says he expects to be in pilot with a solution by December of this year.
While focusing on implementing new technology platforms, Murray relates, he emphasizes the necessity of taking a different approach to legacy systems from what might be considered within a P&C context, owing to the "long tail" of the life and annuity offerings that are AXA Equitable's mainstay products. Murray, whose experience includes executive positions at J.P. Morgan (New York) and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield (Newark, N.J.), was recognized in 2000 as one of Insurance & Technology's Elite 8 for his work at AIG (New York), where he held the position of SVP and group CIO of the company's Domestic Brokerage Group and Personal Lines companies. "Compared with my previous experience [at AIG], the strategy here is more one of integrating the legacy world from a customer service perspective," he explains. "We decided that any strategic platform we implemented would provide a single view of the customer across all product lines."
Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio
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