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Just as the serene evening set out for us, for what I would call one of the most informative and the best evenings ever at Frankfurt, we got a gentle reminder mail from the career services at FS mentioning the room that the event was supposed to take place. Just as always, the fireside talk began on time, with a cosy and packed room of 20 energetic and passionate students from FS, all geared up, revving their engines, to hear from one of the industry’s most prominent individuals, Mr.Mathias Herrmann, Director Credit & Risk Management Daimler Financial Services AG. The event which was organized by the Career Services at FS, was not the usual seminar but a “fireside talk”, which included shooting of questions and a fired up conversation. The talk began with a small interactive game where we had to give a short and crisp introduction of ourselves to Mr. Herrmann, so he knew each and every one present before addressing us, followed by his introduction of his career so far which included his education in the USA, followed by some phenomenal stuff from setting up the audit system framework and moving to France to take care of insurances before landing to credit and risk management.
The talk began with an amazing video that Mr. Herrmann had for us from Daimler about the self-driving car from Mercedes-Benz, which was followed by explaining Daimler’s strategy, and their recent move into mobility solutions. The organizational structure along with the management and the revenues generated from each of the divisions were also explained. It clearly showed the company’s strategy on high level talk yet keeping it simple and very informative. It was very intuitive for some us , to know some of the companies /brands that we are associated with on an everyday basis belong to the Daimler group , Car2Go,Moovel , Flixbus,mytaxi and Tiramizoo to name a few . Mr. Herrmann took his time to explain the strategy behind going to explore in these areas though they seem so futuristic and the necessity for doing so.
Keeping the diversity of the audience in mind, he also asked us about the user experiences in these brands, and took both the positives and suggestions in a constructive manner. He also articulated the challenges and the decisions of Daimler when it came to some dilemmas in deciding about some of these brands which sometimes had conflicts with the traditional relationships, in the case of mytaxi and the traditional taxis as an example. He also spoke on the importance of data in these new ventures and the importance of understanding the mindset of the consumers today based on the data, where owning car is become out of trend these days. That explained the strategy behind their move to connected mobility and self-driving cars that communicate with each other, which have huge advantages.
A simple slide deck to understand the different types of risk in the organization was also shown ,and the understanding about some of the risks involved and keeping delinquencies of payments as one of the key identifiers of an impending problem. One of the questions from the students involved the trouble shooting mechanism that Mr. Hermann would adopt in case of a bad situation and there came the prompt answer about the delinquencies which tell us about the customer and Mr. Herrmann himself going to ground zero to sort the issue out and get it back on track. There were interactive videos in between to show some of the new innovations happening at Daimler and the application process for entry into the group, with internships, which may also include Master Thesis and Career Program which included working on 3 different locations at different departments for a period of 15-18 months in total, a program which he recommends for young professionals who want to understand the business smarter and to climb the corporate ladder in an efficient way! This was followed by dinner and drinks, which Mr. Herrmann was kind enough to arrange for everyone, out of his own interest!
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