Born into the business
Innovation and vision helped charismatic Van Santen reach the top
by Michael Bradford

If scientists ever decide to search for a strand of risk management DNA, the first place to look should be the genetics of Thierry van Santen.

With a grandfather who directed the French operations of a Dutch life insurer and a father who was head of international business at a commercial lines brokerage in Paris, Mr. Van Santen was almost born to the business. And, in fact, the 52-year-old executive vice president of business risk management at Groupe DANONE says his attraction to the profession did seem natural.

"I am from an insurance family," he said. "When I was a child, many of the personalities in the insurance business came to my home. After I earned my degree in law, I looked for a job; the family way was to look for an insurance job."

Thirty years after taking his first position with an insurance company, Mr. Van Santen reflected on his career in insurance and risk management. His accomplishments have taken him to the top risk management rung at DANONE and have earned him the honor of Business Insurance Europe's Risk Manager of the Year^TM .

Once on the insurance and risk management path, Mr. Van Santen stayed there, beginning in 1978 with his position as an account representative at Factory Mutual International in Paris, which now does business as FM Global. He left the insurer five years later as a senior account executive and joined Valeo Management Services, a Paris-based automobile supplier, as director of its risk and insurance department.

In 1993, DANONE hired Mr. Van Santen. Since then, the man with insurance in his blood has implemented an enterprise risk management program, assumed insurance-buying responsibilities, led safety and loss control efforts, and steered the course of the food manufacturer's captive insurer.

Outside his office, Mr. Van Santen has been an active supporter of risk management, most notably through his efforts that have helped reshape the Association pour le Management des Risques et des Assurance de l'Enterprise--the French risk management association--and the Federation of European Risk Management Associations.

Among the qualities that make him well-suited to risk management are a clear vision of what needs to be done and loyalty to his business partners, said Shereen Akad, who has worked with Mr. Van Santen for seven years as his broker at Aon France.

Foresight

"He saw that the market would change in 2001," even before the terrorist attacks in the United States that year caused a hardening in some lines, said Ms. Akad. "Because he had that feeling, he built three-year programs for his main insurance contracts," she said. "When the crisis happened, he was protected."

"What characterizes him is a lot of charisma and vision," said Marie-Astrid van Buuren, managing director at Marsh France S.A., another DANONE broker. "He is always innovating."

Mr. Van Santen has shown his innovative nature by arranging risk securitization deals years before they became popular, said Ms. Van Buuren. He has put together unusual coverage programs such as six-year policies to cover political risk exposures and was among the first to have insurers use policy wording that specified coverage for trade brands, goodwill and other such hard-to-identify risks, she said.

Carine Hebay-Bony, corporate insurance manager at DANONE, works closely with Mr. Van Santen. She agreed that his vision is a big part of his success in risk management.

"He really anticipates and identifies problems," she said. "He is very proactive, a good organizer and obtains the support he needs from the chief executive officer of the group."

Mr. Van Santen is not a risk manager who switches insurers because insurance may happen to be cheaper elsewhere, or who follows market trends, said Ms. Akad. "He has built long relationships, and people trust him."

"You have to demonstrate trust," said Ms. Van Buuren. But once a relationship is solidified, Mr. Van Santen remains loyal," she added.

Mr. Van Santen sums up his approach to risk management in the final line of his résumé, where he likens himself to an entrepreneur, a builder of programs and processes who is motivated more by the challenge that comes from the protection of his company's assets, than the routine duties of day-to-day management.

That philosophy began to take shape, Mr. Van Santen recalls, as soon as his career began.

In his first job with FM Global, Mr. Van Santen took to heart the insurer's motto of "insurance is not enough," he said. "Which means you have to manage your risk. I grew up with this philosophy. Step by step, my personal approach has been that we have to act on risks more than depend on insurance."

Responsibility

Mr. Van Santen moved through the ranks at FM Global where he eventually gained responsibility for large accounts and managed the Paris office. In 1988, an offer came from Valeo that would further shape his risk management philosophy and fuel his passion to build new programs.

The CEO was a tough boss who demanded results or asked for resignations, Mr. Van Santen recalled. "It was an opportunity to implement the first true risk management in this organization, and it was truly top-down, a big challenge because you do it or you leave" he said.

The risk management program was a success, said Mr. Van Santen, as was the company under its new direction.

"That was a really exhilarating experience of how you can improve a company through strong management," said Mr. Van Santen. And it was an opportunity to extend risk management from a traditional framework, which mainly concentrated on protecting property, to a more global vision of risk, he said.

Mr. Van Santen arrived at DANONE, then called BSN-Gervais Danone S.A., in 1993 with the task of implementing risk management policies. "At that time, the company had some risk management, but it was focused mainly on insurance," he said. The company's name changed the following year to Groupe DANONE.

More diversified

For five years, Mr. Van Santen concentrated on loss prevention and other traditional risk management functions. The company was more diversified than DANONE is today. At the time it manufactured bottles, brewed beer, produced pastas, sauces, biscuits, frozen food, water, yogurt and baby food. While some of those products are still made by DANONE, other operations have been sold.

In a replay of his experience at Valeo, a new CEO introduced a vision for the company. His idea was to make it an international player that focused on a core group of products while ranking first or second among its competitors in worldwide sales of those products.

That product core eventually came to consist of dairy products, bottled water, biscuits and baby food. "And we became number one or two in those categories," he said. Last year DANONE sold its biscuit division to Kraft Foods Inc. and purchased Koninklijke Numico N.V., a Netherlands-based baby food and medical nutrition company.

"We are now in more than 60 countries," said Mr. Van Santen. "And we are number one or two in most of the categories."

In 1997, with DANONE a far more global company than when he joined, Mr. Van Santen's instincts as a builder told him the time was right to transform his company's risk management program into one with worldwide reach. At the time, such an idea was a risk in itself.

"I went to my chief financial officer and said that I thought we should launch a global approach to risk management," Mr. Van Santen said. "This was very, very new for everybody and this kind of concept was puzzling to them. It took more than a year before I got the green light."

After two years of risk mapping that led to a business model, Mr. Van Santen and his team unveiled Vestalis, a new enterprise risk management approach that involved the global DANONE organization.

Mr. Van Santen stresses that Vestalis is not a standardized approach that each business unit must follow. While the corporate risk management department helps in the implementation, it is up to each unit to assess their risks and apply procedures to mitigate them.

"My role is to help them cross the road," said Mr. Van Santen. "It is up to them to look right and left."

With the ERM process embedded in DANONE's operations, "I need to find a new challenge and something else to build," Mr. Van Santen said. "I have a few ideas about other challenges where I will be able to build something," he remarked. "Maybe in risk management, maybe on the insurance side."