For several years now, Grupo Ageas Portugal is adopting a stakeholder management approach. This means that we do not only value our shareholders, but that we love our customers, partners and society too. We aim to be a company where our employees feel happy at the workplace, so they can contribute to deliver an emotional and meaningful experience into people’s life.
Grupo Ageas Portugal plays in the insurance industry, the backbone of all activities and all industries in society. It manages and carries the risks and is a crucial investor in many fields to comply with the liabilities linked to its assets under management. As such, it can play a triple role in sustainable development to close the protection gap and support the transformation towards a better world. At Grupo Ageas Portugal we try to find the right people to do so, because only together can we help our business evolve.
Our corporate Foundation aligns its mission with social issues in health, towards the elderly and in prevention and protection of our environment, and one can see that these topics are materially important for Ageas as an insurance company, creating coherence between both.
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Adding sustainability as one of our main strategic choices provides the best ground and sign of our firm management commitment. A company with a sustainability agenda is better positioned to anticipate and react to economic, social, environmental, and regulatory changes. So, considering our Foundation as one of the vehicles related to impact, and aligning it on the strategic narrative, is an important starting point.
If the Foundation can grow the awareness on the challenges to be addressed by all, and by showing evidence that every step we take, makes a difference for at least one person, one family, one village, why would a company look away from that ? why would a company not invest in such social projects when it can get money out of it, increase performance, grow reputation and help to create a better world ?
The extensive network that the foundation has, backed up by both a pool of employees and agents from within the company’s distribution network, the knowledge of working within the social environment, the company can absolutely tap into that. The idea is to add the business expertise to the table to co-create solutions that in an initial stage are kept under the safe guidance of the Foundation, but if successful, can be scaled up to broader, sustainable business solutions.
Katrien Buys Director Strategy, Innovation and Sustainability
A challenge for the future will be to bring people with social vulnerabilities into the company’s value chain, to see them as future customers of shared value solutions, and as such addressing the social topic with a business perspective. The opportunity for Ageas to do that lies in the rich experience and broad network of institutions the Foundation has built over many years. This is unique, and an important asset, grounded and linked to civil society.
Besides that, we see a fixed and growing pool of volunteers from within the company that with all their skills and capabilities supports the Foundation and its programs. Pooling out of the workforce of the company is creating resources in terms of helping hands and a living library, not to mention the incentives created on a financial level.
The challenge is to make that grow structurally, to scale up over the longer term so we can tap more and more into social investment, expanding its activity scope beyond charity, donations and volunteerism – and yes, by involving the company.
At Grupo Ageas Portugal, social innovation comes alive by bringing the best of our capabilities together: it starts with a deep understanding of the problem, to listen to the challenges and to work with impact start-ups, carefully selected from our participation in FundacaoAgeas the MSM Impact Fund, to bring them into the conversation and add our best business resources and skills to it, so we really make a positive change together!
