CFO Janneke Hermes Chief Value Officer of the Year

The Chief Value Officer of the Year Awards were presented to the four most impact-driven CFOs in the Netherlands during the Nationale Conferentie Brede Welvaart 2024 impact conference. We are proud to announce that our CFO, Janneke Hermes, was one of the winners of the ‘Chief Value Officer 2024’ award, in the company of Josefien Kursten, Boele de Jong en Bas Brouwers.

Among other aspects, the panel of judges praised the award-winners’ commitment to collaboration: ‘They inspire other companies and partners to participate in their mission to raise the standard for impact and sustainability in their sector. Their ambitious vision, strategic acuity and determination to bring about real change for society make them the rightful winners of this prestigious award.’ Janneke Hermes explains the importance of broad prosperity, or in CFO parlance, sustainable value creation.

‘Focusing on financial health as a company is no longer enough. I realised this as I reflected on what I want to leave behind as a business manager and as a person. We face scarcity across a broad spectrum, not just scarcity of funds. Natural resources are being depleted and people qualified for the work that needs doing are becoming scarcer and scarcer. And we must stay within a carbon budget if we want to leave behind a liveable world for ourselves and future generations. So we need to include a wide range of aspects in our considerations. We have agreed with our Supervisory Board that for each investment decision we will provide an analysis of the broad social impact of a project – both positive and negative. Initially in qualitative and broad-brush terms, so that we can learn how to do things and get a feel for the type of issues we encounter. But we are also already working on a discounted value flow model, a variant of the net present value model that you can use to express future social and environmental benefits in euros. This provokes really constructive discussion and leads to meaningful insights.’

‘One of the main challenges is finding the right balance in decisions that have both a negative and positive impact. During 2022, a significant portion of the supply of natural gas suddenly fell away. We felt responsible for ensuring that that energy remained available in Europe and the Netherlands, for industry and for citizens. We achieved that goal by installing and connecting two floating storage and regasification units for LNG in the Eemshaven area, in close collaboration with many other parties. But that solution did lead to additional carbon emissions. An even more negative footprint, in other words. We also had to complete this project within a very short period of time, which could lead to high safety risks for our people. The question was: how do you quantify and clarify these impacts and how do you weigh them up against each other? You can learn a lot by jointly investigating issues like this.’

‘Porthos is a good example. This CO₂ storage project makes a solid contribution to meeting climate goals, but justifying the business case financially was also a huge challenge. And that's when the discussions get really interesting, both internally and externally, with the shareholders and with the Supervisory Board. How do we weigh the different aspects up against each other? How do we ensure adequate consideration of financial value creation, without losing sight of all the other forms of value creation associated with that project? If euros had been our sole management criterion, the Porthos project would never have come about.’

‘I work best by gathering people around me who are committed to creating social value. People who are intrinsically motivated to do so. And there are plenty of them. When you form an enthusiastic team like this, you get an accumulation of momentum. And I obviously try to lead by example. We have explicitly defined social value as a theme that always needs to be addressed in our decision-making documents. So it is automatically given attention.’

‘A question I feel should be asked more often is: ‘How can we adapt our business strategy to not only create economic value, but also maximise our positive impact on society and the environment? This question forces us to look beyond profit and loss and consider how we can make a broader contribution to society.’

Janneke Hermes will leave Gasunie at the end of February 2025. During the course of next year, she will start as CFO and member of the Executive Board of Koninklijke Wagenborg in Delfzijl, where she will continue to work on realising her ambitions in terms of social impact.