Vincent Tizzio is President and CEO of AXIS Capital, a specialty insurance and reinsurance company delivering customized solutions to organizations across the globe. Since taking on the role in May 2023, he has led AXIS on an ambitious transformation journey—drawing on his leadership experience at large and mid-size insurance carriers, a deep understanding of the specialty space, and focus on building a strong organizational culture.
In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, his conversation with McKinsey Senior Partner and North America Chair Eric Kutcher spans a number of topics, from what it means to take on a CEO role and leading through significant change with conviction and care, to the kind of exposures companies should be considering in today’s complex risk landscape, and being deliberate about investment in technology and AI.
This is an edited transcript of their conversation. For more discussions on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.
Eric Kutcher: Can you tell us a bit about AXIS?
Vincent Tizzio: AXIS is a 24-year-old public company. It was formed in the aftermath of the first attack here in New York City, by an entrepreneur, with the aim of bringing what is called terrorism and catastrophe property insurance to the world. We operate in effectively 19 different offices around the world, and we’ve had quite a bit of success in the last two years at repositioning the company. However, fundamentally, we’re a specialist underwriter. We cover unique exposures in a customized way that is fit for the risks of individual companies.
Eric Kutcher: Companies have a whole host of different risks today—what advice do you have for CEOs who are not used to thinking about this?
Vincent Tizzio: If you’re a CEO today anywhere in the world, and you’re not thinking about the cyber environment, the energy environment, and the natural catastrophe environment, it’s really difficult to lead that company without saying, “We should buy something called Directors and Officers Liability Insurance.” This is designed to protect the board of directors and the executive leadership of that company to help make the best-informed decisions.
Let’s take cyber first. Cyber today affects any kind of any industry, of any size, anywhere in the world—from the obvious things, for example emails being reviewed by employees that say, “Eric has asked that you transfer $25 million, $5 million, $1 million to Vince Tizzio. And here’s wiring instruction.”—that’s a perfect illustration of something that’s going on at epic proportions around the world. And more broadly, how companies are protecting their data, and the exchange of that data, involves huge privacy issues.
Second, how do you protect your manufacturing plants, your hard assets against a risk landscape in the arena of natural catastrophes? Whether it be storms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, are you taking proper steps and measures to protect those assets? Because if you’re not, the board of directors is liable for not ensuring that the business standards the company is being run by are in breach. And you have to protect those instances.
Or, it could be energy resilience. We’re one of the largest energy insurance underwriters in the world. Or it could be supply chain. It could be the ability to think about the concurrency of these risks all occurring at the same time. All these risks are things that I talk about with contemporaries, whether they’re inside the industry or outside of the industry.
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Eric Kutcher: How do you think about customization across these industries, for different business contexts?
Vincent Tizzio: We exist as a specialist underwriter to serve the needs that are created through the gaps that the primary markets create in their change of underwriting appetite, in their inability to customize solutions that are tailored to companies in whatever industry. How do we think about it? It’s pretty broad, and it can be pretty daunting. We try and size the prioritization of industries most in need, where we can bring our capability of specialization or customization—for example, in the provision of property insurance, cyber insurance, energy insurance, or marine insurance. We have some very dedicated capabilities.
First, we try to recognize, “What are the exposures that can create loss to the business concerns that we’re underwriting? Do we have the underwriting intellect to bring terms and conditions that meet that customer’s desire to transfer their risk?” Second, we consider how we could support that through a distribution channel. We’re not a direct B2B insurance company, we go through intermediaries. We choose channels of distribution that recognize the value add that we provide.
And third, and this is critically important, those are just words. The true success is bringing the kind of intellectual capital in the form of our people, third-party capabilities of data and analytics, AI, and subject matter experts in the engineering arena that together, customize our solutions for our customers’ needs.
Eric Kutcher: You talk about bringing in third-party capability, and specifically AI. How do you approach that, and what are some of the most interesting things you have done with AI so far?
Vincent Tizzio: There are many things in a transformation that you could expend coveted capital on—we were very prudent about the choices we made with AI. We prioritized efficiencies and productivity gains first, over risk-selection gains.
Early on, we contracted a couple of AI firms to assist us at the very front end of our process. We receive submissions from intermediaries, and historically each submission was registered by a human operator that would type the name of the insured and route it to an underwriter. We believed we could do more in the context of this process, and in perfecting the insights of that submission. Now we use bots to register that submission, and we use AI to help us in a variety of diagnostics that tell us, among other things: How do we perform when we bring a submission of this description into our organization? Do we have the technical acumen that suggests we know how to underwrite it? How do we perform with the intermediary that brought that submission in? What risk insights can we deduce from that submission?
So that’s one example, but AXIS has close to a dozen AI use cases going on that range from helping us in our administrative expenses to bill review from our vendors. And now we’re working on an area that I have a lot of conviction and excitement for, and that’s our lower-middle-market business model. It has incredible potential but it’s probably one of the most inefficient transition customer segments in the insurance industry. Without AI and other forms of data and analytics, we just can’t afford to be in that customer segment, despite it holding out amongst the best profitability and what we call “stickiness,” the ability to retain those customers for the long term. We’re working hard on strengthening our value proposition for that customer segment to continue to build what was just an idea in June 2022 and ended up being about 6 percent of our revenue in the fourth quarter of 2024 in our insurance business.
Eric Kutcher: You’ve done a lot to change the company in a short period. Maybe tell us a little bit about the journey you’ve been on.
Vincent Tizzio: First, I would acknowledge that it’s been a “we” effort, and a Herculean effort. I was appointed in May of 2023, and the first thing that I grounded myself in was the recognition that there were a number of learnings around our underperformance to take stock of. How did we create the inability to manage volatility risks in our portfolio? How did we lose the ability to gain market share in previously announced chosen market spaces? And how did we think about performance management in our company?
I put forward to our board of directors a fairly comprehensive plan that aimed at solving three essential outcomes. The first was to restore the underwriting culture that formed the very beginning of what AXIS was—we were an underwriting company, led by a strong underwriting orthodoxy. The second was to bring performance management, not only as a concept, but to permeate it through all of what we did. The third was to make certain that we attracted the best possible team, and support the existing team, and do so with a shared ambition.
And so you fast-forward and you think about our company now performing exceedingly well, taking very strong action in the repositioning of our company. Our operating models are undergoing substantial change. The quality of our performance management culture, the measurement mindset that we brought into the company is alive and well. And, maybe as important as anything else for a public CEO, the recognition in our share price, which is beginning to launch what I call a needed reset. We’re far from done, but we’ve made some really good ground, and I’m proud of what our company has achieved together.
Eric Kutcher: What was the board’s reaction? What did you have to do to bring the board along on that journey?
Vincent Tizzio: The board’s reaction was, “This sounds unattainable, Vince, it’s overly ambitious. But we’re going to believe in you, and we want you to bring us on the journey.” So, bringing the board on the journey, and seeking their advice and counsel on what kind of people we wanted to bring into the company from a skills and capability perspective, the journey surrounding performance management mindset, and then the enablers, in the form of data and analytics, forming the underpinnings of many of our decisions.
And also, having the EQ, the mindfulness that people were going through a substantive change, and that their value system was being uprooted. And finally, the consistent voice of the customer experience, listening to our intermediaries, listening to the actual insureds around the provision of how we go to market. All this, taken together, enabled us to pursue this journey, and we’ve had a board that has just been incredibly supportive.
Eric Kutcher: And how do you bring everyone in the organization along on that journey of substantial change? How do you get people to start to believe in what’s possible, and take on an owner’s mindset?
Vincent Tizzio: First, it’s having the humility to acknowledge that many people may not know what they don't know. My company had earnest, really caring people that simply did not know how far our financial performance had degraded against the competitive landscape. And the first thing that we committed ourselves to was having a straight-spoken, transparent leadership approach for me to speak truth to the ambition that we held for our company. To bring awareness of the journey that we had been on, and to bring encouragement that together, yes, what we were about to embark upon was going to be incredibly hard.
The second was painting a vision around what I thought we could achieve, and more importantly, why, why I thought we could achieve it. And, finally, to bring examples of just incredible sacrifice of our teammates, incredible accomplishments by our teams and by individuals, and show people that we could do what we said we would do.
It was best reflected for me late last year when we made every employee in this company a shareholder of AXIS Capital. I had been speaking about the voice of the shareholder in our journey in 2023 and 2024. We have a company-wide mailbox where people can ask questions or put forward recommendations, both on the operating model or quality of life within the AXIS house. And people were asking, “Why do you always talk about the shareholder?” And we said, “Let’s put our money where our mouth is and let’s make everyone a shareholder.” And you want to talk about discretionary effort tangibly being shown? Boy, what a moment.
Eric Kutcher: You talked about EQ and mindfulness—on mental health more broadly, why is this so important to you and what are you doing about it at AXIS?
Vincent Tizzio: It’s incredibly important to me, both as an individual and as the CEO of a company in the middle of a transformation, to have the hearts, minds, and the sense of safety and welfare of my employee base being accounted for.
It starts with our medical benefits. It starts with the ability to have forums where people can speak to the challenges that they’re facing, and evidence that to our employee resource groups. It’s also the affiliations and associations that we form. At AXIS, we formed a partnership with Project Healthy Minds, a not-for-profit that has essentially brought a supermarket of choice for our people to deal with their mental health challenges—they can have sessions with an online therapist, or in person, they can raise questions around where to find the right help. And then, it’s making sure that we create an environment where we can provide that support when a colleague needs it.
I don’t think it crosses the boundaries of what my role is, as the public CEO of AXIS, because I think everyone is working hard at creating the best environments for their people to maximize productivity. I look to the example set by Chris Swift in the context of bringing mental health awareness to the public arena and I’m hopeful that we’ll have more commentators speaking to this. Certainly, at engagements there isn’t a conversation where CEOs aren’t saying, “There’s something to this, Vince. It’s not just reflected in absenteeism, it’s reflected in a variety of lost productivity gains.”
Eric Kutcher: If you think about your “pre-season” to becoming the CEO, what was the most valuable advice you were given?
Vincent Tizzio: So the best advice I took from Vik Malhotra and others was, one—make sure you really have a rigorous, well-thought-out plan, and you have conviction for that plan, and two—find those culture carriers, alongside you those people you could trust that have the same ambition in the aggregate. And then, finally, lead with integrity, lead with consistency, be the same person that shows up for all seasons of this role. How we, as a company, face those challenges requires a sense of confidence and stability in that leader to guide them through it. That’s the kind of hand that I want to weave throughout our company as we face, in my industry, a changing market dynamic.
Eric Kutcher: Finally, you’ve now been a CEO for a little bit, what do you wish someone had told you that you would now pass to the next generation of CEOs?
Vincent Tizzio: Two things. First, you’re not a line manager anymore. There are instances where I have to caution myself from engaging as a division leader of an underwriting business. So, it’s about the anchoring in the notion, “You’re the CEO. You’d better focus on the right things at the right time, and you have teams to focus on other stuff.” The second is, you really are accountable to everything, and you don’t realize what those words mean until you’re in the job. At times you’re like, “Wow.” It’s a fairly broad remit.
