Scania Financial Services has a growing portfolio, a
large insurance arm, a close relationship with its parent, and is
about to launch in Brazil. Fred
Crawley catches up with Koen Knoops, its global
vice-president.
Go deeper with GlobalData
When I first spoke to Koen
Knoops he was in Brazil, emerging from a board meeting to plan the
back office, software and HR components of Scania Financial
Services’ (SFS) newest business unit in Sao Paolo. For Knoops, who
spends roughly half of his professional life travelling, this was
an ordinary day as vice-president of SFS, an organisation with
impressive geographic credentials.
The SFS umbrella covers 15 business
units across 40 markets. This will grow by one with the launch of
the Brazilian arm in Q2 2009. With some 500 employees, SFS provides
financial cover for 71 percent of the geographic markets in which
Scania operates, and finances 35 percent in those markets. It has a
loan book of €4.4 billion, and drew an operating income of €56
million in 2007.
“Our success as a finance
provider,” says Knoops, “comes from building mutual trust with
dealers and customers, running joint marketing campaigns with our
parent company, and maintaining a strong geographical presence –
all on a highly localised scale.”
SFS, therefore, has a huge physical
range over which to keep an extremely close business eye – and this
is where Knoops comes in. A key part of Knoops’s work as
vice-president is participating on some of the directorial boards
of SFS’s business units – a responsibility he shares with fellow
vice-president Per Spjut and senior vice-president Claes
Jacobsson.
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By GlobalDataCurrently, Knoops serves as a board
member in Scania’s French, Spanish and Russian divisions, and
chairs the board of Scania Finance Italy, Scania Credit and Scania
Finans in Sweden, and Scania Finance Chile.
Showing the way
As part of this board work, Knoops
is responsible for providing guidance and coaching to MDs and their
management teams in SFS’ international units, as well as managing
the considerable flow of cross-national staffing moves in the
organisation.
In addition, Knoops is committed to
enabling and securing business relationships between SFS’ finance
companies and local Scania distributors.
It was on this business that last
month he travelled to Scania’s headquarters in Brazil. His ongoing
brief there is to give the embryonic finance company a robust
infrastructure, and get it well connected with Scania Brazil and
its dealers.
The Brazilian set-up is not a
typical green-field operation, rather it is based upon an existing
vendor platform with local banks.
“We only move into a region once
our sales staff have established a demand for finance among dealers
– this way we know we have a strong basis for business,” says
Knoops.
However, in addition to the
strategic role of his board work in SFS’ horizontal expansion,
Knoops also plays a key role in the captive finance company’s
movement into new vertical markets: his second set of
responsibilities entail managing the development of SFS’ customer
insurance business worldwide.
In this line of work, it is
Knoops’s business to plan the design and distribution of insurance
products across all SFS territories, working with an international
team. More directly, he works with local insurance managers to
develop local products, and helps to negotiate international frame
agreements with global insurance companies.
The demands of a job that is so
diverse both physically and mentally are significant, but Knoops
has a CV that backs him up well for the task. Born and educated in
Belgium, he began to work for Generale Bank (now Fortis) in 1990,
where he rapidly moved into management.
When Knoops transferred to Scania
in 1997, he began his international work, with stints in Germany
and France before his move to HQ in Sweden in 2007 to take up the
globetrotting VP role. Along the way, Knoops has picked up
fluency
in Dutch, English, German and French, and is now hard at work
picking up Swedish.
Knoops will get a chance to
continue the latter particular project when he returns to Sweden
for the start of 2009, as SFS reflects on the year gone by and
plans for 2009.
“Scania’s deliveries remained
strong until the end of Q3,” says Knoops. “Afterwards – as with the
whole industry – volumes decreased significantly. SFS responded by
offering more packaged products such as finance including
maintenance and insurance, more dealer financing, and more focused
local marketing.”
Close to customers
SFS is also hard at work getting to
know the priorities of its customer base in the transport industry
for the year ahead.
Knoops says: “Diesel prices,
transport volumes, industrial demand and funding scarcity – we will
keep a close eye on all these things.
“Of course, there will be a focus
on collections, but more importantly we will stay close to our
customers, and try to find solutions based on trust and
long-lasting relationships.”
Personally, Knoops is dedicated to
managing those relationships across SFS’ global range, and keeping
up the morale of the managers in charge of them – all the while
finalising the Brazilian launch and rolling out insurance products
to even more markets. Needless to say, he will have a lot on his
plate. But as developing markets such as Brazil become increasingly
important to the sales figures of manufacturers such as Scania, his
far-reaching international work will become only more
important.
