Mario de Pace 1943 - 2015
Mario de Pace
Mark Holford has sent in a piece on the influential former IT
partner of Thomas Miller who died after Christmas at the age of 72 in St Agnes,
Cornwall:-
Mario de Pace was born and grew up in South Africa, coming to the UK
as a young man. He joined Thomas Miller in 1975 in their Cockfosters office and
throughout his 25 year career was Head of IT. As the importance of IT grew, so
did his role and eventually to such an extent he became a partner in 1988.
I knew nothing of Mario when I was appointed by the then Thomas
Miller Senior Partner, David Martin-Clark, to work with him in 1990 on an IT
strategy. In fact most of the things I had heard were negative. How wrong they
were. He was the best colleague to work with. Always wise and supportive. It
was a "marriage" made in heaven: we each complemented our strengths
and weaknesses. Mario was a past master at ensuring that everyone was on side
before a meeting took place, while I was good at presentations, which he did
not like doing. In fact the first illustrated presentation ever made to the
Thomas Miller Board / Partnership was our 1990 IT Strategy – we used 35mm
slides made from a PowerPoint type presentation package; we created it together
and I delivered it, heavily rehearsed by Mario!
Mario, Sam Ignarski and myself
turned our IT Strategy into a competition entry on a vision for the London
Market. It won the first prize, which included a pair of video conference
phones – we never used them!
Mario was a visionary. We were one of the first
London insurance companies to get internal email in the very early 90’s (actually 1987). He
then suggested that I look at a product called Lotus Notes (eventually taken
over by IBM). It took me 6 months to grasp why it was so powerful, but he had
seen it immediately. Only now is Thomas Miller ceasing to use it.
Arising out
of the IT Strategy Mario and I created some very big projects, including
“Guide”, a complex underwriting system, that had its challenges. Yet he always
was clear-sighted, encouraging and helped me through some difficult times to a
satisfactory outcome. “Oasis”, our largest project, was designed to make Thomas
Miller’s claims paperless and to control the entire claims documentation
process. This was radical in 1995 and the size of the project was ambitious.
Mario was taken to Peterborough by IBM, our project partner, to see how the Sun
Alliance handled 2m motor claims. When he commented that we only had 85,000,
the IBM executive said”… but you have more documents than they do!” Despite its
size and complexity, the project was a great success and won a number of
awards. My colleague Kim Vernau (now the CEO of a major Thomas Miller
subsidiary, BLP Insurance,) ran the project and remembers “how supportive Mario
was during the project, both in terms of advice and in managing the Budget!”.
Mario always had money squirrelled away and would find the funds – sometimes
large sums – to do things. We never knew how he hid them from the Finance
Director, Bruce Kesterton (now the Thomas Miller CEO). Despite, or probably
because of, this, his projects were always on or below budget.
A young Swedish
lawyer, Åke Nilson, joined Thomas Miller in the late 80’s and left in 1992 to
start a business in shipping EDI using technology to connect businesses. Mario
had the foresight to stay in touch with Åke, who was developing a project to
create paperless electronic bills of lading. In 1996 he said to me that Åke
needed help to fund the business, christened Bolero. Between us we managed to
persuade SWIFT (the banks’ payment network) and the TT Club (Thomas Miller’s
second biggest mutual) to invest $5m each. Bolero still exists today.
The last
thing we did together was Transactio. In 2000, the middle of the dotcom bubble,
Mario and I, along with two other Thomas Miller executives, decided that we
should try to use Thomas Miller’s connections to create Transactio, a shipping
portal dotcom. As always Mario was a core part of the vision. The deal was that
if we got funded the four of us would leave Thomas Miller. We drew up a
pragmatic and modest plan and set out to raise money but we could not find
funding. I always said that we failed was because we were not prepared to lie
and say we would get £50m of shipping advertising - everybody else did. Had we
got funded, there is no doubt that we would have been the oldest “dotcommers”;
all the rest even in shipping were in their 20’s. It is interesting there were
over 200 shipping dotcoms by the end of 2000 and only about 5 survive today.
Following our failure to find funding, Thomas Miller decided to invest in one
of these survivors, ShipServ, a shipping ecommerce business.
At this point
Mario took the wise decision to hang up his IT / Thomas Miller boots and retire
to Cornwall. Despite illness, he took up another challenge, driving the
renovation and conversion of the St Agnes Miners’ & Mechanics Institute
into a successful community centre. In this as in all his projects he showed
great drive and determination, despite failing health.
Finally the other thing
I remember was his vicious one fingered typing; he would destroy a keyboard a
year. He wrote 7 IT help books this way. I am pleased to see that they are
still available on Amazon. Like many of his achievements he was very quiet and
modest about his writing career.
Thomas Miller owes him an enormous debt of
gratitude; all the systems we put in place in the 90’s are still there and only
just now being replaced. It is a testimony to their quality and inspiration
that they have been difficult to supplant. To me he was a wonderful colleague
and friend. Our careers were inextricably linked for 10 years and I owe him a
huge amount. All my retirement activities are involved with IT and without
Mario I would not be doing any of them. I know that you will be watching over
us and ensuring that we apply your wisdom. R.I.P.
[Your editor is also highly indebted to MdP for his wise guidance
over many years, not to mention his friendship]
[nb Mark Holford is the Chairman of Klipboard.io]
