The end of 2025 marks the retirement of insurance industry stalwart Dougie Barnett, here’s the word from AXA Commercial CEO Jon Walker;
“Dougie has been an integral part of AXA Commercial’s success and has provided clear and effective leadership for our Customer Risk Management function for almost 25 years. More recently Dougie has led the development of AI solutions to extract and utilise information at speed from risk engineering reports and spearheaded the roll-out of the AXA Climate School to our broking partners and customers. Dougie’s foresight, expertise and experience has touched so many areas of our Commercial business and the wider industry and he’ll be greatly missed. He will be leaving AXA with our thanks and best wishes, and we wish him well for a very happy retirement from full time leadership.”
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Having joined Sun Alliance’s underwriting team in Glasgow straight from school in 1982, Dougie’s insurance career progressed and in 1987 he moved to New Zealand Insurance (NZI) to specialise in risk management.
He joined AXA UK in July 2001 as a risk surveyor in Glasgow and in December of that year was promoted to UK Property Risk Technical Manager. He led the AXA UK response to the food sector insurance crisis following the collapse of Independent Insurance in 2001, creating an innovative and market-leading risk matrix to open capacity.
Dougie has represented AXA UK on Association of British Insurers (ABI) strategic programmes, conversing with government and regulators on critical issues like composite panels in the food sector and the economic costs of fire and flood and their mortgage market impacts.
He launched the first building valuation service for customers in association with Cunningham Lindsay in 2004 to respond to inadequate building insurance in larger property risk and was promoted to lead the AXA UK risk management team in 2006.
More recently, Dougie established AXA’s global loss prevention board, developed specialisms in green buildings and wider sustainability considerations for property risks and led AXA UK’s engagement on electric vehicles and sustainable transport including liaison with the motor industry and regulators.
A founder member of the AXA Group Global Risk Management Board, he has helped shape strategy, policy and deployment worldwide and designed talent development programmes in Europe and Asia.
Dougie has also been a prominent AXA UK spokesperson with trade and national media, appearing in print and on radio and TV news many times on a variety of topics.
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