In Amsterdam, Finance, Insurance, and Continuous Education

Born in Trieste in 1970 and MBA alumnus of the SDA Bocconi School of Management, Luca Della Santa has been leading the Amsterdam chapter of the Bocconi Alumni Association (BAA) since last November, and the group acts as a magnet for Bocconians throughout the Netherlands. In the country since 2010 after several years of work experience in London, today Luca is responsible for the corporate development of NN investment partners, the asset management company of the NN Group, a Dutch finance and insurance corporation. His interest for the insurance industry has been the common denominator of all his career.

➜ How did you get to your present position?
At the end of 2001, after my SDA Bocconi MBA, I decided I wanted to work in a financial company rather than a consultancy (a professional path that was anyway blocked in those years because of the dot-com crisis and consulting companies going bust). So I joined the Generali Group, in Trieste, just when they were working on their new three-year strategic plan: it was a stroke of luck, because it allowed me to immediately delve into various business areas, and develop an interest for financial communication and reporting, until I decided to take the job of managing relationships with institutional investors.

➜ Which then became your job of choice..
In a certain sense. In 2006, I moved to London, to work for Goldman Sachs as an analyst of Italian insurance stocks, which is a bit like the other side of the coin. In 2010, I made the transition to NN investment partners (at the time called ING investment management), where I held the position of global investment analyst, again dealing with the insurance industry, but in this case managing the group's financial assets. Then I took on the present role.

➜ A career between Italy, the UK and the Netherlands at the turn of the 2008 crisis. How has the insurance industry changed since then?
A lot, because the aftermath of the crisis has reverberated throughout the financial sector. My group had to divest all its assets abroad, for example, and separate its banking and insurance activities: today it is no longer that large financial group (ING) that it was in 2008. The company I work for, NN, was born as a spinoff of the insurance and asset management divisions of the then ING Group. The crisis has forced the entire financial industry to revise its business model and change its investment strategies.

➜ What lies in store next?
The great revolution of fintech: banks see it as a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, but the same applies to all incumbents in the financial industry. It's a major challenge and could be highly disruptive. I believe that only the players that have made the right kind of investments will be able to seize its advantage. And it is not clear that the crux of the matter is simply to invest billions of euros in digitization, as I have seen some financial groups doing.

➜ Since November 2017, you have been Amsterdam's BAA Chapter Leader. What are alumni in Holland working on?
We have especially focused on continuous learning – we have organized a series of workshops on the topic of leadership – but also on innovation, with an event to be held next November. And then we have worked on professional networking, also in conjunction with the Embassy of Italy, which is very active in promoting the Made in Italy.