Profile: Claudio Gienal, CEO of UK and Ireland, Axa

Claudio Gienal’s route to the UK insurance sector got off to an unusual start. Hailing from a remote village in the Swiss mountains with less than 2,000 people and within five minutes’ walk from a ski slope, he went to school in a monastery before moving to Zurich to study engineering at university.

After failing to find an engineering job he wanted he ended up working for Accenture. As a consultant he saw a lot of different businesses across a diverse set of industries including tobacco,