20 / 01 / 2012 Source : L'Argus de l'Assurance

How is the Europ Assistance Group currently faring?

The Group has undergone some deep-seated changes over the last few years and has been a catalyst of change in the assistance sector. When our strategic Columbus 2005-2010 plan was underway, Europ Assistance re-affirmed its role as leader in the assistance sector. Its turnover more than doubled and the Group diversified both its geographical locations and its business. In 2004, barely 10% of our business stemmed from health and personal care assistance services. Today, these two services account for a quarter of our turnover. This strategy of diversification is still being applied with these new profitable growth vectors but the economic and financial environment, very unstable for the last few months, has forced us to be even more pragmatic in our dealings. Assistance companies are part of a larger world - that of insurance - which has been heavily impacted by the crisis, although we can pride ourselves on the fact that our shareholder Generali is one of the most powerful and solid companies in the sector.

Is this diversification with regard to health and personal care services the operational manifestation of the care revolution concept you formalised as early as 2008 in your book?

Absolutely. The assistance sector has been undergoing deep-seated changes over the past few years. The service we provide is no longer just the emergency aid it was when the Europ Assistance Group invented the assistance concept in 1963. Today, we accompany our customers as a service provider on a daily basis. The health and family service professions are currently experiencing a true Care Revolution, one that is going to extend into coming years with the emergence of a new technological and scientific context (nanotechnology, genomics, robotics etc.), providing consumers with a wider palette of services to simplify their daily lives.  Our new slogan “you live, we care” is a perfect illustration of this conceptualised change.

Martine Aubry developed the notion of a “society of care”. Are we talking about the same concept here?

No. Besides, I have noticed that there is currently no more talk of this “society of care”. I understood it to be a political concept applied to society as a whole. That is not the case for the Care Revolution which I applied to a revolution of the personal care services sector, a revolution brought about by wide-ranging demographic, economic and social trends and changes in consumer behaviour in the four corners of the globe.

Doesn’t the postponement of the planned French reform of elderly-care policies mean a temporary halt in Europ Assistance’s progress in this market segment?

Life expectancy is continuing to increase. The Care Revolution has only just begun. Independently of legislation and financing applicable to this sector, Europ Assistance has already begun working with local authorities, welfare institutions and insurance companies in several European countries to offer elderly-care services. In France, we recently acquired a small company offering remote assistance directly to the elderly and whose service content is going to rapidly expand to cover the needs of dependent persons at home.

What are your ambitions for 2012 and subsequent years?

Our ambitions are going to reflect the changes in the crisis which is set to intensify in Western Europe in 2012 through the dual effect of the “credit crunch” and the simultaneous austerity plans that all European countries have decided to adopt. Our key accounts - car manufacturers, tour operators, banks and insurance companies - have all been hard hit by the crisis, with inevitable repercussions for service providers like ourselves.

In this uncertain climate, we are exercising extreme caution and are very selective when deciding on short-term projects and investments in Europe so as to remain in step with market trends. Our absolute priority is to secure our profitability in this period of severe recession in Europe. Outside of Europe, we are continuing to invest in development projects in very buoyant economies such as Brazil.

In the longer term, Europ Assistance plans to pursue the expansion of its new businesses (health and home and family), strengthen its geographic presence in high-potential countries and continue to rethink its distribution models to increase the share of B2C sales and optional offers where our services are packaged with products sold by our major partners (B2B to C).

At any rate, this crisis provides further proof of the relevancy of our positioning in the new health and daily living services, with a foreseeable continued increase in needs throughout the world.

Why is this such a deep-seated, lasting crisis?

The crisis cannot be summed up as a debt problem experienced by peripheral euro zone countries. Its origins are far more complex. The symbiosis of four different factors resulted in this major crisis. Firstly, for over thirty years, particularly in the financial sphere, there had been unprecedented deregulation. This manifested as a sort of “privatisation” and inflationary finance with securitisation and the explosion of derivative financial instruments, beyond the control of the central banks and major international financial institutions. The latter subsequently saw their role as market regulators considerably diminish. The second factor - which is more geostrategic in nature - was Asia’s becoming the world economic centre of gravity with a concomitant relative weakening of “Old Europe” and the United States. The third factor was the massive transfer of private debt to States, which first took place in the USA in 2008. As a result, State macroeconomic policy became sustainably overly dependent on debt reduction. Lastly, this crisis comes against the backdrop of a wider moral crisis in society where individual financial success has often become the benchmark in many fields, to the detriment of ethical behaviour, common sense and civic values.