Generali, What a vital experience!
After 27 years, I am proud to belong to Generali. I have had the opportunity to manage very different functions. I started as a Technician in my region, Valencia, but I rapidly moved to Madrid and very soon to our HO in Barcelona. This was a very relevant moment in my life. My family, I was just married and with my little baby, moving to the HO in Barcelona. The challenge was accepted even being aware of the poor situation of the P&C business in the European market at that time. I mean, the insurance sector was in the deepest crisis it has ever lived in the recent history.
From that moment, I was promoted to different functions. The creation of transversal profiles has been always the main challenge of any Company and Generali has been investing in these profiles for many years. At that point, the main advice to new talents is to be prepared for welcome this opportunity.
Today, I am responsible for GC&C in Iberia and Latin America. We lead the main lines of business within P&C in Spain and we have in front of us a great opportunity in Portugal and all the LatAm countries. We manage a large and diverse portfolio and we must be aware of every business opportunity in order to keep our profitable growth. At the same time, we need to be a challenging player in these LoBs or geographies where we are not relevant enough. As a market leader, we should lead the trends in P&C acting actively in different initiatives focusing on growth and profitability.
Taking into consideration the high market competition, the main challenge is to keep up our profitability. In parallel to this, another relevant challenge is the retention of our talents. Nowadays, the labor market is very active, mainly in our specialized segment of professionals. The third challenge is efficiency. We need to work on innovation in order to be prepared for this challenging world. Indeed, in reference to what I mentioned earlier, we will be focusing on:
- The optimal way to manage our portfolio, both new business and renewals,
- Foster the strategy of empowerment and engagement of our team,
- Think out of the box in order to speed up the transformation of our operating model.
As I like to tell to our new collaborators, our job implies to take decision, and this is an important process which you learn from the experience. Obviously, I took some wrong decisions, and everybody has to be concerned about the implications, the consequences, the side effects. In this particular moment, we need to understand any mistake made, get your take away from it and learn for the future.
I think about when I made the right choice to work in Generali, I must admit the moment when I was appointed for managing my first team, it made me realized how important is acting as a leader. Obviously, I was not already a leader and I needed years to get used of leading people. It is amazing when you become acting as a conductor of your team. Team management and coordination is key in our big organization.
Team makes the difference, this is very important to understand. We can work as a group or as a team, and the result is totally different. Let me put an example, you can handle a claim, you can work with your brokers and you can renew your business; you are doing well in all the tasks but you can end up paying the claim, arguing with the broker and the client and not renewing the policy. Acting as a team means a full collaboration and coordination between claims, underwriting, clients & brokers staff or multinational program management. It’s tough and difficult, but the result of a proper coordination is the best example of what life time partner means.
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Generali, What a vital experience!
I was a very young engineer working as a professor in a University when Generali called me. Can you imagine what an engineer can do in an insurance company? This question makes me laugh because it was formulated by another engineer to me during my recruitment process. I can remember my first days at Generali, the complete recruitment process, my training stage in our Barcelona HO or my first day in Alicante Branch, where I started my Generali journey.
After 27 years, I am proud to belong to Generali. I have had the opportunity to manage very different functions. I started as a Technician in my region, Valencia, but I rapidly moved to Madrid and very soon to our HO in Barcelona. This was a very relevant moment in my life. My family, I was just married and with my little baby, moving to the HO in Barcelona. The challenge was accepted even being aware of the poor situation of the P&C business in the European market at that time. I mean, the insurance sector was in the deepest crisis it has ever lived in the recent history.
From that moment, I was promoted to different functions. The creation of transversal profiles has been always the main challenge of any Company and Generali has been investing in these profiles for many years. At that point, the main advice to new talents is to be prepared for welcome this opportunity.
Today, I am responsible for GC&C in Iberia and Latin America. We lead the main lines of business within P&C in Spain and we have in front of us a great opportunity in Portugal and all the LatAm countries. We manage a large and diverse portfolio and we must be aware of every business opportunity in order to keep our profitable growth. At the same time, we need to be a challenging player in these LoBs or geographies where we are not relevant enough. As a market leader, we should lead the trends in P&C acting actively in different initiatives focusing on growth and profitability.
Taking into consideration the high market competition, the main challenge is to keep up our profitability. In parallel to this, another relevant challenge is the retention of our talents. Nowadays, the labor market is very active, mainly in our specialized segment of professionals. The third challenge is efficiency. We need to work on innovation in order to be prepared for this challenging world. Indeed, in reference to what I mentioned earlier, we will be focusing on:
- The optimal way to manage our portfolio, both new business and renewals,
- Foster the strategy of empowerment and engagement of our team,
- Think out of the box in order to speed up the transformation of our operating model.
As I like to tell to our new collaborators, our job implies to take decision, and this is an important process which you learn from the experience. Obviously, I took some wrong decisions, and everybody has to be concerned about the implications, the consequences, the side effects. In this particular moment, we need to understand any mistake made, get your take away from it and learn for the future.
I think about when I made the right choice to work in Generali, I must admit the moment when I was appointed for managing my first team, it made me realized how important is acting as a leader. Obviously, I was not already a leader and I needed years to get used of leading people. It is amazing when you become acting as a conductor of your team. Team management and coordination is key in our big organization.
Team makes the difference, this is very important to understand. We can work as a group or as a team, and the result is totally different. Let me put an example, you can handle a claim, you can work with your brokers and you can renew your business; you are doing well in all the tasks but you can end up paying the claim, arguing with the broker and the client and not renewing the policy. Acting as a team means a full collaboration and coordination between claims, underwriting, clients & brokers staff or multinational program management. It’s tough and difficult, but the result of a proper coordination is the best example of what life time partner means.