Adrian Grace: Aegon's self-styled agitator CEO

Adrian Grace: Aegon's self-styled agitator CEO

Laura Miller
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Think three months is too long to wait for a pension transfer? So does Aegon CEO Adrian Grace, especially when its his pension. He talked to Laura Miller about disrupting the status quo in a 300-year-old British industry...

The way Adrian Grace told it (and I'm paraphrasing, Aegon, so don't sue me), most life companies are like Microsoft pre-2001. Big. Complacent. Short-sighted. Ripe to be routed by a competitor's small white digital music player no one knew they needed. Implicitly, Grace wanted Aegon to be the life industry's iPod inventor. Why? Because being disruptive can pay. Seventeen years after Bill Gates told Vanity Fair Steve Jobs "knows he can't win", Apple earned $18bn profit in its financial Q1 2015 – more than any company ever in a single quarter. Its market cap stands at $750bn, more than d...

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