Annual General Meeting
AGM
Quick Notes
Our first-ever hybrid AGM was held on Monday 27th March 2023 at 6 pm, closing at 6:55 pm. We welcomed 33 online and 15 in-person attendees on the night.
The credit union performed exceptionally well this year recruiting members and processing loans. We recruited 1,132 new members this year and paid out over £7.7 million to our members, taking our loan book to £13.1 million.
During the year our credit union achieved a Good Trusted Service Award from our feedback partner Feefo due to the highly rated feedback given by our members. We also signed up 15 Ambassadors from across the country to help grow the credit union and serve our members in the workplace.
We are proud to be launching the first-ever discount club for credit union members in the UK. We have partnered with a discount brand to bring daily savings to our members through to use of our 1st Class Discount Club. Members will be able to save money on grocery shopping, insurance, health and well-being, and much more. More information will be shared soon.
Motions Agreed
Election of Paul Chadwick as a director of the credit union.
1st Class Credit Union staff will be presented with the opportunity to join a trade union, either our partner trade union CWU or another.
An increase to the annual membership fee of £4 to £5, to help cover rising costs of inflation, suppliers, and administration.
The election of our new auditors, McLintocks. Replacing Sharles & Co.
Dividend Update
Bruce Devenport, Chairperson delivered this speech,
"We are disappointed that we will not be distributing a dividend this year and would like to explain this in a bit more detail
Under legal guidance by Brodies Solicitors in Glasgow, we had to change our IT provider at short notice. We had not planned to do this but felt we would have been putting our organisation at risk had we carried on with the previous provider. This caused significant additional expenses. It was also disruptive to our business-as-usual plans and I can only commend the team for the way they regrouped and delivered this change. We are actively pursuing the previous provider for £125,000 owed to us.
As of December 2021, we had minimal organisational structure in place, we had minimal team functions and no senior management team, and minimal routes to career progression. With this came a muddying of roles and responsibilities which goes against the preferences set out by our regulator – the PRA. We have now fixed all of this and recruited an additional 4 people to ensure we have the right people in the right place. We have also been able to adopt an apprentice which we are delighted about. As part of this reshaping, we also put in place a new Risk Management Framework, Risk Register, and Corrective Action Register and undertook internal audit training. I am pleased to inform you that we have retained 100% of staffing in the past year, no one has chosen to leave and we have put in place educational opportunities and a training plan and log for all.
One aspect that you might not have heard of before within a credit union is the bad debt provision we carry. In basic terms we put money aside for loans that go bad, every credit union has an obligation to do this. In October we discovered that we needed £208,000 more in provisions than we were holding. Our team worked diligently through every credit control case and we discovered that when our data was migrated over from the old IT provider to the new IT provider it had been carrying a shortfall in provision. When we looked at the individual cases we should have held bad debt provisions to cover them going as far back as 2015. With this in mind and as a statutory obligation we had to cover the deficit in our provision from our surplus. Otherwise, some of this would have been diverted to a dividend.
We hope this goes some way to informing you of why we have not distributed a dividend this year. We have also put aside £26000 from the surplus this year to add to any future dividend in the year ahead."
We are happy to field any questions regarding this decision on 0141 552 8408, or on reception@1stclasscu.co.uk.
Final Remarks
We'd like to thank everyone who attended our AGM in person and virtually. Stay tuned for an update soon on our member event taking place in May/June of this year.
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