The new boss at Irish Life and Permanent, Denis Casey, talks to Chinedu Onyejelem about hard work at the top, and developing a workforce that represents the changing face of Ireland
You are the new CEO of Irish Life. You also look after Permanent TSB, which is the third largest bank in Ireland – what exactly do you do in both companies?
I was appointed to run Irish Life and Permanent Group in May this year so I am relatively new to that role. My previous job has been chief executive of Permanent TSB bank and I had taken on that job in the middle of the summer of 2005. Because I haven’t been doing that job very long, we started a number of exciting things in the bank that I wanted to see through to fruition, so I decided that I would continue on in that role until the end of 2007.
In a sense I am kind of double-jobbing at the moment as chief executive of Permanent TSB and as chief executive of Irish Life and Permanent Group. My intention will be that at the end of 2007 I will appoint a new chief executive to run Permanent TSB bank.
My responsibility in Irish Life and Permanent Group and in the bank is to lead the growth and development of both businesses and to make sure that those businesses are providing the kind of products and the kind of services that our customers want and need, and to ensure that we are providing those products and services in a way that is better than and easier to deal with than our competitors.
What are the main operations of the group?
We are the biggest provider of life insurance in the Irish market... lots of products to customers, long term savings products, pension products, mortgage products, new car loans. So we would be number one on all of those market places. And also a significant and rapid growing bank. Our aim is to make our bank the largest retail bank in Ireland.
When you were appointed the new CEO of Irish Life and Permanent Group, many people, especially in the business community, welcomed it. However, they said that you don’t have the quality and length of experience to move the group forward. How do you respond to that?
Well I suppose that is something you could say about any new chief executive. But I have a lot of experiences in running big businesses. I ran Irish Life – the retail arm of the group – for seven years between 1998 and 2005, and then I led Permanent TSB between 2005 and 2007. So that’s quite a lot of experience running reasonably large businesses.
How did you rise to running such large businesses?
I have a kind of simple philosophy, and that’s ‘work hard to be successful in the job you are doing’. If you make a big success in the job you are doing, you tend to be asked to do bigger jobs. And that’s been my philosophy all the way through my career. I left school at 16 and my first job was as a postboy. From there I moved to a whole variety of jobs in my career, and my simple philosophy was just to work hard and try to make a success of the job you doing today – if you do that, you tend to find opportunities emerge for you.
When you were growing up and when you were a teenager, did you ever think that you would manage a group like Irish Life and Permanent?
No… as a teenager I left school at 16 without any clear picture at all of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to become. I took my first job as an opportunity because I left school in 1976: jobs were not that plentiful in Ireland. And if it had even been suggested to me back then that my career might have taken the direction it has taken, it would have been unbelievable.
To what do you attribute your success?
I am a great believer in hard work. I think if you work hard on something and you try to perfect every job you doing, I think that has a huge amount to creating success. I think you also need to be able to understand and get on with people, whether they are your customers, your colleagues or your staff. Being able to relate to people in an organisation at lot of different levels I think is very important. And you need to be lucky. Being at the right place at the right time can be very helpful.
Could you tell more about your background, as well as growing up as a teenager before you left school?
I have a very typical and pretty ordinary background for somebody who grew up in Dublin during the 1960s and ’70s. I was born in ’59 so I am 47 now. So my teenage years would have been the 1970s. The reality is that in Ireland in the 1970s there wasn’t very much money around.
So I went to a local Christian Brothers school. I played football. I played hurling. I came from a reasonably large family – there were six of us – an older sister and four brothers. My teenage years were probably very typical of Ireland in the 1970s.
Was there any business blood in your family – was there anyone who had managerial skills?
I suppose one of the big influences on me would have been my mother, who placed a huge value on education. And she would always have strongly encouraged her children to work hard at school and get the best education that they could. I think all of us in my family have benefited from that because all of my siblings have done pretty well with a foundation of a very good education. Most of my brothers would have gone to college. My sister would have gone to college.
Apart from your mother, was there any other person that had influence on you?
I think as I have worked in lots of different jobs and with lots of different bosses over the years, I can certainly say that I have learnt from every boss or something different from every boss because every boss is different… I am still learning. I think it will be unwise and dangerous for anybody to think that they finally know it all and that they can stop learning. I am continuing to learn from the people around me, from people I work with and from the people I interact with.
In relation to education which you have mentioned a few times, you said you left school at 16. How did you manage?
What I did then was I started work. And having worked for years I came to the conclusion that I needed to do further study in order to create some better opportunities for myself. So I started to study accountancy at night. I studied accountancy for five years after work, part-time, and I qualified as an accountant through that route.
I have seen a few reports which Irish Life and Permanent Group have produced on corporate and social responsibility (CSR), which make very good reading. How do you handle CSR in the bank?
One of the things that we want to make sure is that the people who work at the Permanent TSB feel proud to be part of this group and this bank. And one of the things that makes people proud to be part of an organisation is when they see the organisation making a meaningful contribution to the society and to the communities where we do our business. We’re working hard…We sponsor the Ethnic Entrepreneur of the Year Awards to try to promote some of the positive aspects of the new communities who are now becoming part of the new Ireland. And we recently won some great recognition in the O2 Ability Awards…
You mentioned the new Ireland. What do you think of the diversity in Ireland today?
I think that the diversity that we see in Ireland today is fantastic and very, very healthy. I think it has made Ireland a much more exciting place and a much more vibrant place and much more colourful place. I think it’s made Ireland a much more international and in a sense a much more normal place. When you travel to other major capital cities you expect to see that kind of diversity and that kind of mix… The world has been very, very generous to Irish people for many hundreds of years providing us with new homelands, with employment and opportunities when the Irish economy wasn’t capable of doing that. And I think it’s great that Ireland now has a chance perhaps to begin to repay that debt in some small way.
What do you say to those who are actively promoting interculturalism?
I think there are some fantastic examples now of work going on to better integrate some of our new communities. I think that is one of the challenges for Ireland. I think it is really important that we integrate people and that we don’t have clusters of people standing at the edges of society. So I think we have a lot to learn in this area. We have a lot of progress that we still need to make.
A lot of people believe that the business community are not doing enough in terms of integration. What do you think of that assertion?
There is always more that can be done. When I talk to my colleagues in other businesses in Ireland, there is a real awareness of the importance of grabbing this opportunity and dealing well with immigration. And many of the businesses I am familiar with have programmes to give employment to new immigrants, to serve new immigrants as customers and to figure out for example how to make their products more accessible to customers.
I am sure that there is always more that can be done. But I think there is a great sense of goodwill and great sense of positive intent across Irish business to try to ensure that we get this right. It certainly makes me very cross when I hear about the example of businesses, usually small businesses, that are treating new immigrants badly.
If you were an immigrant in Ireland, how would you go about becoming successful in whatever area you choose?
Getting a good education is so important – that really opens so many opportunities. And then grabbing those opportunities… Whether you are an immigrant or whether you are an Irish person, I think that’s a very simple recipe to success.
