Alexandre Appfel, a centralist (Lyon), who had been a senior consultant at Ares for 4 years, has just settled down at Axa. He comes to the strategy department. He joins several other tenured alumni there who also landed there after their time at the firm. Like Xavier Lasserre, who 2 years after leaving his consulting duties and after a stint at Groupama is strategic project manager at the insurance company; ditto by Ali Jabry, an Edhec who had joined Ares & Co after 1 year at the general inspection of Société Générale, who has been head of strategy at Axa since 2021.
Ares & Co is not the only strategy firm that places its former employees with the insurance company: there are also examples of former McKinsey employees (Georges Desvaux in Axa’s management committee, Étienne Lacourt, who became strategy director of Axa France or Serge Raffard at MetLife) or BCG (Élise Bert-Leduc, CEO of Direct Assurance, and Emmanuel Wehry, Marketing Director of Direct Assurance.
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Insurance hides its game well. If the topic seems unsexy at first glance, it actually covers a wide range of issues and missions. Digital, marketing, customer relations, international development… At the start of their career, consultants specializing in insurance must be jack-of-all-trades.
“Insurance is wrongly lacking in attractiveness,” notes Christophe Angoulvant, domain manager at Roland Berger. This is actually a sector that touches on a number of extremely interesting issues for a consultant. »
However, due to Ares & Co’s financial services positioning, moves of its consultants to client insurance companies has tended to intensify in recent months.
There was Sofiane Chouayakh, a senior now director of strategy and acquisitions at Coface since April 2022; but also Joséphine Deronchaine, Gaspard Jallat or Thibaut Le Mons, those left to Groupama’s strategy; or even Mehdi Letaief as director of strategy at Direct Assurance.
Nothing but very traditional in a sector that sees a significant percentage of its teams leave clients every year.
But for its part, Ares & Co sees this as an encouraging sign of its solid positioning with insurers. Although these departures also do turnover to compensate.