AXA slashes marketing and distribution jobs
AXAwill lose about 50 jobs in the process of streamlining its marketing and distribution into three groupings — wealth management, financial protection and distribution and advice.
Wealth management is to be headed up by AXA head of superannuation Steve Burgess, with this team covering the superannuation, retirement income, investment product management and platform operations.
Burgess says the move is to form a single, highly focussed wealth-management product group to drive value within the group.
The move has seen the head of Summit, Annette King, being moved to AXA Singapore and three new people to head up the divisions in wealth management.
The head of superannuation, replacing Burgess, will be Andrew Barnett who has been working in AXA’s group strategy division. Head of platforms will be David Frost who joined AXA fromAsgardabout 18 months ago, and the new head of investments will be Elizabeth Foley, who joined AXA six months ago after working for Prudential,MLCandING.
The chief investment officer Mick O’Brien will remain in his current role.
Burgess says the company is building specialist teams to centralise and streamline product development, marketing and administration.
Frost will be required to merge the various AXA platforms into Summit, a process Burgess says is ongoing.
“We are now pulling all the strings together to focus on marketing and developing the platform business. As we move forward, platforms dominate markets and clearly that will be the focus of increasing business through Summit,” he says.
Burgess believes planners will be looking for tried and tested platforms in the future, rather than the latest offering.
“Summit has been around for more than 10 years and has a high level of acceptance but new platforms have lifted the bar and that will be the challenge for us to respond.”
Administration will now be centralised in Melbourne, with the administration operations of AXA’s financial protection based in Sydney relocated south, and six functional teams will be created in financial protection.
Burgess says the moves will streamline the various businesses to bring efficiencies and focus.
“All the changes have the common aim of improving AXA’s marketing and distribution capabilities, operating and cost efficiencies,” he says.
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