Aviva’s Six-Year Turnaround Puts Growth — and What Comes Next — in Focus

Aviva spent much of the first two decades after its creation in 2000 struggling with complexity, inconsistent earnings growth and shareholder frustration. The combination of several historic insurance businesses left the group with a sprawling portfolio that successive management teams struggled to simplify.

The turning point came when Amanda Blanc took over as CEO in July 2020. She quickly accelerated Aviva’s restructuring, raising around £8 billion by selling eight businesses and exiting markets including France, Italy and Poland.

Much of the proceeds went back to shareholders. Since Blanc became CEO, Aviva has returned roughly £10 billion to investors through capital distributions and dividends, while concentrating the company around three core markets: the U.K., Canada and Ireland.

With the restructuring largely complete, Aviva shifted from simplification to expansion. One of its biggest moves was the £3.7 billion acquisition of Direct Line, which gave the insurer around one-fifth of the U.K. motor insurance market.

Aviva has also expanded into commercial insurance. Its £242 million acquisition of Probitas in 2024 marked the company's return to the Lloyd’s of London insurance market after an absence of roughly two decades.

The next major growth engine could be wealth management. Aviva estimates the U.K. wealth market could grow from around £2.7 trillion today to more than £4 trillion by 2030, creating an increasingly important opportunity alongside its traditional insurance operations.

A key part of the strategy is keeping more customer assets within Aviva. The company previously estimated that around £6 billion of pension and heritage assets left its ecosystem each year, prompting it to strengthen its financial advice capabilities through acquisitions such as Succession Wealth.

Wealth is now expected to account for roughly 10% of Aviva’s earnings, potentially giving the company another source of growth as its core insurance operations mature. The strategy also allows Aviva to deepen relationships with millions of existing customers rather than relying solely on attracting new ones.

Investors will get another test of the turnaround when Aviva reports its half-year results. Analysts expect operating profit of around £1.3 billion, approximately 17.5% higher than a year earlier, with its U.K. and Ireland general insurance operations expected to benefit from the Direct Line acquisition.

Still, new risks are emerging. Performance across some Aviva Investors funds has been uneven, while longer-term technological changes such as autonomous vehicles could eventually reshape the economics of motor insurance.

There is also a strategic question over whether Aviva is once again becoming too broad. Its combination of life insurance, general insurance, wealth management and investment activities increasingly resembles large European composite insurers such as Allianz and Axa, raising concerns that complexity could eventually reintroduce the valuation discount the company spent years trying to eliminate.

For now, however, shareholders have been strongly rewarded. Aviva shares have risen roughly 150% since Blanc took charge, transforming a company once associated with repeated disappointments into one of the more notable turnaround stories in corporate Britain.

With nearly 22 million U.K. customers and around 500,000 retail shareholders, Aviva has also become one of the country's most widely held and systemically important financial businesses. Having successfully answered the question of whether it could be fixed, the challenge now is demonstrating how far the revitalized company can grow.