Andrew Bradley, Head of Group Risk Services Nestlé and member of SIRM, was the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award in the FERMA-CRE Excellence in Risk Management Awards 2017.
The judges felt that his commitment to the insurance and risk management community and pioneering achievements, within the industry and in his campaigning for road safety improvements externally, made him a worthy recipient for the lifetime achievement award.
Andrew started his career in the insurance industry and moved to Nestlé in 1979, initially as assistant to the regional insurance manager for the Americas. During Andrew’s time with the company, Nestlé has set up global programmes for all major lines of business and developed its reinsurance captive, of which he is the CEO. He talked to FERMA about his career and the award.
How did you feel about winning the award?
It was a great surprise and quite touching, making me realise how long I have been in the industry and how old I am! All together a very positive experience. I think anything we can do to raise awareness of the value of insurance and risk management is a good thing.
What are the high points of your career?
Changing the company from a decentralied insurance approach to a centralised global insurance programmes has been a milestone as well as diversifying the captive portfolio. Additionally, apart from having a great team in Vevey, one of the things I value most is the way that we have been able to move into loss prevention, especially using the captive, and broadening our role. We have “joined up the dots” of what we do and made it more meaningful to the rest of the company. I believe the insurance industry has a bigger role to play than people realise because we do not promote ourselves well. We need to state more clearly the value of risk finance to industry and to society in general.
How has your job changed over time?
When I started, we had 24 or 25 people working on insurance without global programmes or systems, and the only means of communicating were landlines and telex! We have made great efficiencies by moving to global programmes and systems. We focus on added value tasks. I think that is one of the biggest changes. Also, we closely collaborate with other departments. Insurance used to be isolated from legal, procurement, HR and so on. Now we have contacts with all these departments and try to have stakeholders in various parts of the business in order work closely with them on all manner of insurance related issues.
You have remained with Nestlé for almost all your career, when many risk managers move around. What difference has that made to you?
I think this is something that depends on the person and the company culture. For me, the job is about building relationships both internally and externally with your brokers and carriers. That is something you do over time. How we treat them and how we are seen in the market is important.
Why didn’t I move? I tried to “escape” a few times over the years but in the end Nestlé has been a good place to work for me, and Switzerland is a great place to live. I would bet that I have one of the best views in the world on Lake Geneva and the mountains from my office.
What sparked your interest in road safety?
It goes back to 2004 when we were putting together a global motor programme to run through the captive. I saw from the data that the claims and premiums were high. At that time, our health and safety focused on factory safety, but I tried to increase awareness about road safety within the group because I thought we had a role to play. We then funded the web-based training tools and piloted telematics through the captive. I admit it was a bit of a step in the dark for global programmes but has paid off long term.
We began with four or five companies and 10 000 vehicles and at one point had more than 40 countries involved with more than 25 000 vehicles. Now we can show that the accident frequency and amount claimed per loss have progressively reduced over time, while maintaining a positive combined ratio over 10 years. The programme can also improve other related aspects such as fuel consumption, CO2 emissions, driver retention and sustainability. Not only can you save money if you do this right, but it is really about keeping people safe.
