When Saturday Comes

I'm addressing the Scottish League of Credit Unions conference on Saturday morning and this is what I will be saying.


I am delighted to be with you this weekend. It is a real privilege to be able to address you for the first time as President of the Scottish League.

Before I carry on, I would like to offer my (and your) thanks to our outgoing President Helen Kane for her work as President over the past couple of years.

I am relatively new to the Scottish League and am still learning my way – I hope you will be patient with me if I don’t understand all the nuances of what has happened with the League over the past 16 years. I have met some of you over the past couple of years and hope to meet many more of you this weekend.

For those of you who do not know me, I will offer a little background:
I have been involved in managing a small community credit union in Falkirk for the past 15 years. In my day job, I am an accountant and over these same 15 years have worked in a number of industries – motor trade, advertising, packaging and for the past 8 years foodservice. I have worked in small businesses and plc’s, business start-ups and 3rd generation family businesses.

And in every business I have worked, I have had to deal with the banks. RBS, HBOS, HSBC, the whole alphabetti spaghetti of High Street banking! Without exception, the bankers were superior, patronising and condescending. These guys made it clear every time we spoke that they were the masters of the universe, each one a whiz kid or a captain of industry and always, the smartest guys in the room. They traded in derivatives, credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. And while they did it, they abandoned villages and town centres and communities. We collected savings and loaned them out to people who needed the money.
So over those 15 years, I have helped build my little credit union, as you have built yours:
When I started, we had £7,000 in loans – now we have £207,000
When I started, we had £13,000 in shares – now we have £313,000.
We have loaned out £1.25Million and got almost every penny back.
Real Money for Real People living in the Real World!
And the bankers have bankrupted themselves and had a damn good go at bankrupting the whole world as well!
We don’t need to learn any lessons from them – perhaps they ought to come here and learn from us!

At seminars with Charlie Ferguson and at the AGM in Pitlochry last year, Peter kept coming back to the same question – “Where do we want to be in 5 years time?” We could hardly have expected the chaos in the financial world when we set out our plans, but it is important that we continue to focus on the strategic objectives of the SLCU and how these will help you to deliver the medium and long term plans you have for your credit unions. I would like to focus on some of the League’s priorities and where we are as this conference begins.

Insurance will be a real challenge over the next year, but we have some exciting opportunities – some credit unions have taken the “Johnstone Model” and we wish them well with that; others have turned to a restarted Death Benefit Trust and we will have a session over the weekend to discuss ways forward with that. Whichever model you have chosen, the most important thing is that we keep the funds within the Credit Union movement for us to use and to invest.

One consequence of the growing success of the Scottish League and the Credit Union movement is that politicians are trying to co-opt us into their agendas and to determine what we are to do. The botched suggestions about the Social Fund illustrate very clearly the dangers inherent in getting close to those with a political agenda and not a co-operative agenda. As an aside, the fake furore created in the press about how Credit Unions would charge an APR of 27.8% on Social Fund loans illustrates the folly of ABCUL pushing to get the 2% interest rate – imagine credit unions being equated to doorstep lenders! And yet that was the tenor of the complaints from across the political spectrum.

Just in the past month, another danger from Westminster has reared its head: the Financial Service Compensation Scheme, which provides the safety net to depositors when a bank goes bust, has gone about collecting the funds to pay for the cost of the 5 bank defaults from last year. I bet you thought, as I did, that the Government would meet these costs? Well, the banks are being asked to contribute, as they should, but as government has invested £37Billion in the banks and loaned them a further £200Billion, they should not find it difficult to raise the cash; our friends in the building societies movement have been asked for their share – which I am sure they will be resisting; and just to put us on a par with all those esteemed financial institutions, the Credit Union movement has been asked to stump up £1Million over the next 4 years for the scheme. I am astounded that the government should even consider asking the smallest part of the financial services sector to bail out the big boys and this is something the League is campaigning on very strongly.

Last year, Peter added a page to the SLCU website listing the 7 Co-Operative principles; I was struck by the simplicity of those principles and their resonance for our movement. The guiding principle for the SLCU in its relationship to its member credit unions is number 6

Co-operatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.

And that is why Peter and I hope that this AGM and the work we are doing will reinforce the ties between all of us in the Scottish League, and that we can use this principle to reach out and build alliances elsewhere with like-minded organisations. We have met with the other trade associations, tried even to lead them in a more progressive and constructive direction. And we are happy to meet with any credit union to discuss shared objectives, no matter what their affiliations might be. It is because we know that working together will make us all stronger that we have sought to deliver real benefits based on our collective buying power:
· The linked accounts with Unity Trust Bank giving a higher interest rate on surplus deposits for all
· The shared IT platform with FedComp and the exciting possibility of the Scottish League being able to provide a centralised back office for all credit unions
· The Scottish League debit card making smart, modern and flexible financial services available to all our member credit unions.

I hope that you will all find this conference valuable and that you will each take something from it. From my experience, the best part about these events is meeting the people in this room who make the credit union movement work and who are the cornerstone of its success. I hope that we can have some lively, challenging and open debate over this weekend. And, that despite the passions we have for the issues, that we can be courteous, well-mannered and respectful of our colleagues’ opinions.

Finally, I would like on behalf of the conference to offer our thanks to Kilsyth & Villages Credit Union and Mercat Cross Credit Union for hosting Scottish League board meetings and Ellen and the crew at Cranhill Credit Union for housing and feeding the SLCU office, I would like to thank all of my fellow board members for their sage and wise counsel, and on behalf of everyone here, I would like to thank Peter and Katrina for all of their work, both in preparing the AGM and in everything else they have done over the year.

The credit union movement in Scotland and in Britain has the moral and ethical high ground: let’s take advantage of that opportunity. Let us fill the void in the towns, villages and communities that have been abandoned by the banks. Bobby McVeigh said last year that the CU movement in Scotland reminded him of where the Canadian movement was 20 years ago. What a fantastic challenge for us all and what a fantastic opportunity. Together, we can help to transform the Credit Union movement – improving our services and extending our reach in the communities we serve. I hope to be around in 20 years time to see how we get on!

Thank you.