Henk Kolk

NN International’s Henk Kolk has seen Engineering grow rapidly. ‘For me, there’s nothing greater than an empowered team with highly competent people solving problems for customers and our company. In the past 5 years, we grew from zero to 1,500+ engineers, 60+ UX designers and 50+ data scientists, as well as 200 product owners. To coach and mentor our teams, over 50 engineering, UX and data science managers have been recruited, and promoted from our ranks.’

Experts in learning

‘We are building a learning culture and have created ‘guilds’ for the professions of the future. A guild doesn’t only serve as a community to solve problems and learn from colleagues across the company, it’s more: guilds are responsible for raising the bar. They own the job descriptions, assessment tools and learning and development paths. We are designing a company that helps you learn and grow faster. 

‘I truly enjoy helping to build a company that is a home for competent people who are learning and growing every day, regardless of their profession. And who deliver great results for our customers, our colleagues, and shareholders.’

Committed to change

‘To deliver those results, we are transforming. A digital transformation means changing people’s attitudes. I started making changes in smaller pockets like product management, UX and engineering. By demonstrating how changes work at a smaller scale, you can take the journey to a higher level and then roll out solutions at lower levels. We’re making increasingly bigger waves. 

‘What makes this journey unique for the financial services industry, is the fact that our senior management is fully committed to our transformation. You need that commitment to drive lasting change. 

‘So how does NN differ? We are committed to building a company that is digital and cost effective. I believe that we need to build such a company with our own people. And I believe that we can become better and faster every day through learning: new insights, new skills, more efficient processes, high levels of automation. It’s the people who deliver on our promises to customers and shareholders, and we must do everything to enable their professional growth.’

Harnessing technology for customer relevance

‘We are here to build the best multi-product customer experience. For our customers, agents, brokers and third parties that sell our products. To achieve this, we must also clean up. We’re improving the architecture of our target systems, cleaning up and decommissioning older systems that have no place in our future, and improving and standardising our API layer. We will also be rigorously managing our data.

‘NN offers engineering experts amazing challenges. Because this is a company that has been around for 175 years and is determined to stay relevant to its customers by being a frontrunner in the application of the very latest technologies.’