Jesús Martínez Castellanos

CEO of the LATAM North Regional Area
In the most extreme crises, opportunities arise for the best-managed companies. And that is our case.

Jesús Martínez Castellanos, CEO of the LATAM North Regional Area, tells us how this global crisis has affected them in MAPFRE MEXICO. “The country has been in a state of health emergency since March 30, which entailed closing schools and universities, banning mass events and non-essential public and private sector activities, but allowing people to go out. It is worth pointing out that, in Mexico, 60 percent of the working population have no coverage whatsoever, so they have to go out to work every day just to survive. The situation has brought most productive sectors to an economic standstill and has had a very serious impact on the liberal professions and SMEs.

At MAPFRE MEXICO we adopted teleworking before the official measures were announced, and well before the vast majority of the private companies in our country. Everyone did an excellent job and, within four days, we had 95 percent of our employees working from home, with the continuity plan fully working, thus maintaining the service for our clients. We established different working procedures, with a daily internal communication plan offering close contact with collaborators, labor discipline schemes stipulating working hours and personal hygiene, setting objectives, the use of tools and relationship formulas learned in the Corporate Digital Challenge Initiative. As an additional measure, we launched an initiative whereby all our employees collaborate directly by selling or recommending products to family and friends.”

We have designed an ambitious training plan to be carried out during this teleworking period, specific to each employee profile, taking advantage of the excellent technological tools available to us

As for the business, Martínez Castellanos stresses that “extraordinary measures have also been adopted for our clients: flexibility in the collection of premiums, digitization of processes, new products, such as an innovative insurance solution for SMEs and a free telephone service offering medical and healthcare advice on COVID-19. Additional measures included a system of incentives for agents and advance payments for the Embajadores vehicle workshops.”

And he proudly mentions “the COVID-19 Support from Fundación MAPFRE in Mexico. With its contribution of one million euros, we donated medical supplies and consumables to various healthcare facilities.”

“We will emerge stronger from this situation, given that, in the most extreme crises, opportunities arise for the best-managed companies. In the post-COVID-19 world, industrial and social relations are going to change, but we are learning a new way of working together, and this will serve us well in the future. We will return to the pre-COVID-19 situation, but with employees and brokers more united and committed than ever before.”