José Manuel da Fonseca is the number one at MDS, Portugal’s largest insurance broker. And there’s no doubt about it, he’s a man of many facets, who likes to take risks, but with safe steps. A well-travelled man, he was born into a «comfortably off» family in a black and white Portugal, but soon discovered a whole other world in colour. He refuses to settle down, because there is always so much to do, so much to see, search for, get to know and, above all, build. A man who is in love with words, with the smell of bookshops, with life’s melodies and will the stories of the locals, he surrendered himself to the economy because there he also saw an opportunity to add value to the world, to distinguish himself, as is the case with any artistic creation. And he’s been doing this for 25 years, at MDS with no biggest plans, but always on the lookout for opportunities.
Tell us a little bit
about your childhood and the memories you have of that time.
I was born in
Matosinhos in 1956, where I went to secondary school and primary school, in a
very black and white country. It was a happy childhood, in a family that at the
time was considered to be‘comfortably off’. My father was a fish merchant. It
was a difficult, hard life, but I had the good fortune to have an uncle who
pursued a different life and who was a great Portuguese intellectual, a
professor of physics and chemistry and my godfather. From a very young age, I
spent a lot of time with him and with the likes of Eugénio de Andrade, Jorge de
Sena, Óscar Lopes and Lopes da Graça. We listened to music a lot, talked about
visual arts and books. I absorbed everything, which gave me a great insight
into the fact that Portugal was a very closed, backward and poor country, but
that there was a lot of colour in the world beyond the Pyrenees. So I started
travelling very early on. At the age of 14, with a friend in 1971, I travelled
to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. Then, in 72, I travelled a lot with my uncle,
to Vienna in Austria, Venice, Switzerland... I travelled all around Europe.
Travelling was always accompanied by a very strong cultural exploration and was
a very important aspect of my life.
You are a man of
culture, music, books and travelling. How did you get into economics?
Indeed, it’s not the
most obvious thing. The thing I was most interested in was archaeology, history
– I loved it and I love it – but my father didn’t really think it was ideal. He
understood who I was, but he thought economics was also a related to it all.
Without being forced to, I agreed to go to the Faculty of Economics in Oporto.
It was a fabulous course and my father turned out to be right, without knowing
it. It was a very wide-ranging course that gave us very strong tools enabling
us to do a little of everything. It gave me the instruments to an economist,a
manager and much more. Afterwards, I had my
first job at the Coordination Commission of the North Region, right after
leaving university. I then went on to work for BPA, I was chairman of an
insurance company and I spent a while in municipal politics. And finally, Mr Belmiro
de Azevedo invited me to work with him.
And precisely for that reason, you have held a variety
of positions. You’ve been in banking, then in insurance, you’ve also been in
politics... Tell us about your career and the experiences you’d like to
highlight.
Beginning by simplifying matters, I was very lucky,
because when I finished my degree, there were three big organisations where
everyone wanted to work: Coordination Commission of the North Region, headed by
Professor Valente de Oliveira and which was a kind of government for the North;
BPA, the most extraordinary bank; and Sonae. These were the three very strong
symbols of Oporto and, in a way, of the country. My first job was with the
commission, right after leaving university. At the Coordination Commission, I
came to know Valente de Oliveira, who is one of the people I most admire and
consider a friend. He made a big impression on me because of his integrity,
knowledge, capacity for enterprise and vision. Then I went to work for BPA and that’s where I got my
first taste of insurance, funnily enough. When BPA challenged me to take on
this task, we launched an innovative project in Portugal – banking insurance,
in other words, the sale of insurance through the bank was born at BPA, and I
was in charge of this totally innovative project, one of the pioneers in
Europe. Those were important moments. Then I was involved in
various things: I was chairman of an insurance company and spent some time in
politics. I was invited to join the independent list as the number two
candidate for the city council of Matosinhos and I was very interested in the
idea of contributing to my city, because I already had some knowledge, some
experience, and it was a wealthy, well-managed city council, with financial
resources which were crucial for doing things. So, I ended up taking on
everything, building work, licensing, town planning, the entire economic,
financial, IT, HR, culture and sport areas. And I really enjoyed that
experience. I only stayed for three years, because at the end of that time I
didn’t like the more political, partisan side of things and so I wrote a letter
to say I would be leaving. The last election year is always the worst, but in
the three years I was there we did extraordinary things, so extraordinary that
the New York Times came to Matosinhos to find out what was going on,
about the cultural revolution in Matosinhos, and published an article about it. And eventually, one day Belmiro de Azevedo invited me
to work with him. And so, due to life’s circumstances, I ended up in the third
of the places where everyone dreamed of working, and I stayed in that place for
25 years. I can hardly believe it! (he laughs)
How did you feel when Belmiro de Azevedo presented you
with the challenge to take on the leadership of MDS? Did you have a goal for
your life at that moment?
No, because I don’t plan much either. I think that when you plan too much,
everything goesbackwards. When Mr Belmiro invited me, I was very excited. I
didn’t know what I was in for, I didn’t know MDS, and Mr Belmiro recruited me
as Senior Executive, to a position whose primary focus was thecompany MDS,
which was very small, with 15 to 16 people, and practically withjust oneclient,
Sonae itself. I never imagined how this would turn out, but it did, and Mr Belmiro’s
visionary side was crucial. He wanted to make MDS a leader and I realised that
I would have a project for a very long time.
And today there are more than 2,300 employees and 54
offices all over the world. It has been almost 25 years. What has this journey
been like? Did you see things that others didn’t?
When I came to MDS, I was a bit of an outsider, I was a manager, so I
wasn’t a broker. MDS was a small company that wanted to grow and assert itself
in a market where there were many sharks, from the international brokers to thehistorical
Portuguese ones. We had to choose a different path. This process of setting
ourselves apart was very important, being myself different from the others. I
started in 2000, and by 2005 we were already market leaders and we have been
ever since. International expansion was also very important. There are many
things that the Portuguese market experienced for the very first time with MDS.
There was always this side of contributing to the market, in terms of investing
and taking risks. I remember, for example, the
digital transformation in 2015/2016. The CEOs couldn’t sleep for fear that a
start-up would come along and steal the business. Everyone was anxious, nobody
knew what they were going to do, the start-ups were saying that insurance was
going to end, that brokers were going to end, because young people were going
to want to do everything on the Internet, and so on. But we’ve always invested
heavily in technology. The first time that MDS, when it was still small, bought
a company, in other words, the first time it spent money investing in another
company, another broker, was by investing in an Internet broker in Paris, in
2001. Then, in 2004, in Oporto,we
and four other brokers we were friends with from other countries, created
something that we had no idea what it could create, something we called a
network of brokers at the time, BrokersLink, in order to build a platform that
would allow us to manage the insurance of our clients outside Portugal, without
using the multinationals. Today, it’s a Swiss company with a network of brokers
and risk consultants in 183 countries, managing 60 billion Dollars, led by a
Portuguese man from the start (me). And it was founded here in Oporto. Part of
the team is in Oporto, part in France, part in Spain, but it’s something made
in Portugal. Often Portugal isn’t even aware of it, but what started with just
five brokers at lunch in a hotel in Oporto is now a large global organisation.
Our BrokersLink member in the United States is the eighth largest broker in the
world. So, I’m very proud of this project, which is celebrating its 20th
anniversary this year. In addition to this, the
largest investment ever in an insurance company outside Portugal was made by
MDS in 2007. We were still a medium-sized broker, belonging to an industrial
group, and we bought 32% of a large insurance broker in London, a market
radically different from ours. But MDS invested and became the largest
shareholder of this broker, which was operating in 15 or 16 countries. It was
very important for us, and in a way for Portugal, because we became part of a
company that had access to the big markets. We had an office in London, our
teams had somewhere to specialise, they trained there, it was a school for us
and it gave us worldwide visibility. Everyone in the world found out what MDS
was. I’ve never forgotten that MDS’s starting point is a country that is
positioned in a marginal market in the world and that is not exactly seen. So,
we had to make a name for ourselves in many ways, and that was one of them. Another very important project that we launched was an
editorial project, Fullcover, a technical magazine about the market,
with the collaboration of international people, employees of ours, etc. It is
distributed free of charge to insurance companies, trade fairs, major
conferences and clients. And it’s probably the best insurance magazine in the
world nowadays, certainly the most beautiful. That’s the other side of MDS, the
aesthetic side. We always take great care with beauty, in the sense that
beautiful things work better. We are now the most
international Portuguese financial company, with 75% of our business out of
Portugal. We went to Brazil, Angola, Cyprus, Chile, Mozambique, Spain, and Switzerland.
As an example, in this international market that is Brazil, we are now top3. MDS has always been a bit of a wild card, we’ve
quietly gone about our business. Another area in which we have invested a lot
is in risk management, pure risk consultancy for companies, and today we have a
company with more than 30 experts working in more than 50 countries for clients
in the area of risk consultancy. They’re not necessarily MDS’s clients, but
they are that company’s, which means investment.We have multinational clients,
clients in 40 countries where we operate and which we support. I’m extremely
proud of this company - Risk Consulting
Group. It’s 100% MDS, but it means risk, because I had to invest in people, it
might not have worked out, it’s not a comfort zone. We also own an insurance
company in Malta, a specialised insurance company, it’s a different type of
product that we sell, but it issues 3 million policies a year. Our idea of being a leader isn’t just about being big,
it’s also about contributing to the market. That’s why we have a culture of
differentiation. I’m very proud of my team, which is made up of super
professional, very technical people, in the sense that they know what they’re
doing. There’s no such thing as more or less, they’re people with a lot of
character, with a backbone, who have a correct way of acting in the market and
not through blackmail. We’ve managed to preserve this culture even as we’ve
grown, which is sometimes more difficult, and so this has set us apart in a
way. And then, of course, it obviously has to do with the people who are
managing it.
What can clients expect from MDS?
Our clients can expect various things. First of all,
they can expect us to be an ally, a very powerful partner with a lot of
technical ability and with solutions to help them with their risk management.
They can expect a team that talks to them as equals, on a technical level, on a
quality level, with tools and knowledge that are guaranteed to give maximum
confidence to a client’s insurance risk management. We are a company that has
invested a lot in people, in terms of knowledge, specialisation and know-how.
And I do mean «invest», because these people are more expensive. And then we
also invest in technology and in data.
MDS is 40 years old,
what’s the future? What’s next?
I don’t like to tie myself down, I don’t like to
create straitjackets, and sometimes a plan is tying me down. I have to do ‘this’
and then sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to do ‘that’, and I end up missing
the opportunity to do what was waiting to be done, it’s a bit like that. With the acquisition of MDS in 2022 by Ardonagh, we
have reached another dimension, with capital resources that we didn’t have, while
maintaining our strategy and management team. We now play an
important role in the ArdonaghGroup, in terms of growth and expansion. And the
way forward is to invest in people, brand, reputation and technology.
And what does the
future hold for you, for José Manuel?
I’m not thinking about
this, or rather it’s not that I’m not thinking about the future, but I’m not
thinking about a deadline. I feel really good and full of energy. I’m doing
less executive work these days, but I travel a lot and I follow business and
teams all over the world. I also have a fantastic family; I do a lot of reading
and there are always lots of things to do. I’ve already been chairman of the Casa
da Música, I’m chairman of the Casa de Arquitetura, I was chairman
of Leixões. In short, I’ve never stood still. I love sitting and reading a
book, but I’m not in the mood to ‘settle down’. I think I can continue to contribute
to this project.I love what I do, I love this company and
I love my team.
You love books. If you had to give a title to the book
of your life, what would it be?
There’s a film set in Bali, with Julia Roberts, Eat, Pray, Love...
I like that title. I think for me it would be more like ‘Know, Seek, Build’:
getting to know people, the world, realities, books, museums, everything... To
seek and to build.
