MARCEL DESAUTELS

Dean Roger Martin with Marcel Desautels, President and
CEO of CCMF, at the May 2000 announcement of his first
$10-million gift.

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Marcel Desautels earned Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws, and Master of Laws degrees from the University of Manitoba.  In 1971, he joined Creditel of Canada Ltd., a financial services firm specializing in account recovery and consumer credit reference checks, as president and CEO. Together with his board of directors, he helped grow Creditel’s assets from a modest $11,000 to over $60 million in 1996.  

Following the sale of Creditel in 1996, Marcel and his board members decided to pool the proceeds to create a foundation --the Canadian Credit Management Foundation (CCMF), with Marcel as president and CEO.  CCMF’s mandate would be to support specific educational organizations in Canada in the fields of business and finance.

In 1998, CCMF made its first gift to the Rotman School, providing $1 million to establish the University of Toronto Canadian Credit Management Foundation Fellowship.  This fellowship remains the largest student award in the history of the Rotman School. Matched by the University and the Ontario Student Opportunity Trust Fund, it created an endowment of $3 million to help ensure that talented young business minds can pursue a world-class business education regardless of their financial circumstances.  To date, more than 40 MBA and PhD students have received CCMF Fellowships. 

But this was only the beginning of Marcel’s boundless generosity.  Over dinner one night in the fall of 1999, Dean Roger Martin told Marcel about his vision for ‘Business School 2.0’ – about the need for a cross-functional approach to problem solving and model building, and about the critical need for Integrative Thinking in modern business leaders.  While many generous individuals support established and ongoing causes, only a small few are visionary enough to support the invention of something entirely new.  Marcel is one of these special few. 

In May of 2000, Marcel’s visionary gift of $10 million established the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking.  In January 2002, the Centre was officially launched with the appointment of its director, Mihnea Moldoveanu – a Rotman professor of Strategic Management. 

Marcel was so pleased with the School’s progress on the Integrative Thinking initiatives that in December 2004, he pledged a further $10 million to ensure that the Desautels Centre will play a pivotal and far-reaching role in business education worldwide. In November of 2007, Marcel once again supported the ongoing initiatives of the Desautels Centre with a third gift of $10-million. Then, when the School launched a $200-million campaign in October of 2008 (the largest in Canadian business school history), Marcel once again donated $10 million toward the campaign, bringing his total gifts to the Rotman School to a remarkable $41 million. His ongoing support has helped put the University of Toronto at the leading edge of business education, and at the epicenter of a knowledge revolution.