Sustainable Procurement Activities

This approach is articulated around two axes:

• Responsible people & processes: all the AXA professionals working in a procurement department, in addition to the Group’s Code of Professional Conduct, must sign a dedicated and reinforced Code of Ethics which promotes fairness and neutrality, confidentiality and transparency of our sourcing decisions. They are also aware of the AXA Sustainability strategy and the AXA Sustainable Procurement guidelines through awareness sessions conducted by the network of Sustainable Procurement ambassadors identified across our various entities. Procurement teams are upskilled on climate topics thanks to online training modules, such as the Procurement Academy, and activable toolkits to support them convey key climate messages to their suppliers.
• Sustainable vendors:
  - AXA implemented an ESG Risk assessment of its procurement categories, based on an internal ESG Risks Matrix. Suppliers are thus classified into procurement categories criticality (“high”, “medium”, “low”). Depending on procurement category criticality exposure and on spend threshold, eligible vendors are asked for an ESG assessment via EcoVadis,
  - An ESG criteria’ grid aiming at scoring individual vendors’ extra financial performance (including EcoVadis assessment), is shared across the Procurement teams and integrated into our calls for tenders, weighting a minimum of 5-10% of the total score, depending on procurement categories,
  - At the contracting phase, AXA requires from its vendors to include a mandatory Sustainability Clause. It includes, in particular, complying with the principles of the International Labour Organization (prohibiting the resort to child/forced labor, promoting employee health & safety and freedom of expression, and non-discrimination).
  - AXA ambitions to support its vendors decarbonization journey and provides them access to a library of climate resources, animated by a Vendor Climate Center of Excellence.
  Aware of the carbon emissions’ impact from AXA's activities, the teams are working to implement best practices to be in line with the Group's objective to reduce carbon emissions by -50% between 2019 and 2030 for its own operations*. This is part of the implementation of new sustainable ways of buying locally, e.g. greening of car fleets, purchases of green energy on offices and data centers, deployment of new measures for IT purchases (e.g. ask providers to communicate their services/ products’ carbon footprint link to AXA’s purchases). All these best practices applied to various locations are shared by the Responsible Sustainable Procurement Purchasing community to promote a wider deployment.

Detailed information on our responsible procurement policy and standard is elaborated in AXA’s Group Procurement Guidelines. The document is used for supplier selection and management purposes.

The AXA Group is pursuing its commitment in implementing these same principles and received a Silver score in its last EcoVadis evaluation (score date: June 2025). The different AXA Group’s ESG scores are available under the section “SRI ratings and ethical indexes”.

1.Scopes covered by the decarbonization targets are: Energy (scopes 1 and 2), Car fleet (scope 1) and Business Travels (scope 3.6).