Interview with Brian Bennett conducted by Ben Woods on 6 December, 2022

Ben Woods (BW):
Ben Woods, Archivist at Australian Mutuals History, interviewing Brian Bennett, 6 December 2022. Brian, you finished high school in 1970 and joined the Registry of Cooperative Societies, Credit Unions, Permanent Building Societies and Friendly Societies in 1971. Is that because you had an interest in that area? And if so, how?

Brian Bennett (BB):
No, basically, I finished school and went looking for a job. And I was offered a job in the New South Wales public service and started in, as I said, the Registry of Cooperative Societies and Credit Unions, Building Societies, on the 25th of January 1971

BW:
And you moved into the local government area for a while. Why was this?

BB:
To move up in the world in those days, to get advanced, moves at the New South Wales public service were based on seniority. I joined on the same day as three other young people leaving school. And because they were all older than me, they always had first priority in getting a position that was vital. The registry of cooperative societies wasn’t a big organization, it was probably about 70 employees. So any opportunity that came around, even though we’re all qualified, etcetera, etcetera, they got opportunities to be promoted. So in order to get advanced I decided to leave for a short time and went to the Department of Local Government, where I worked as an inspector, examiner of accounts. And then finally, as an Assistant Inspector, before I made the big leap back to the Registry of Cooperatives and Credit Unions as an inspector.

BW:
You worked with the New South Wales Registry of Credit Unions. That would be a startling thing to people today, they would find that odd. Can you tell us a bit more of what the registry did and what you did within them?

BB:
Well, the registry was basically the state regulator, for cooperatives, credit unions, building societies or permanent building societies weren’t regulated by the state authorities. And that department was the registry, as we called it. And they were basically the monitoring organization. But not with the same powers that the current regulators have. They were very limited in terms of what they could do. However, you know, they did regulate credit unions, and in those days, credit unions were formed all over the place. Everyone with a host employer group would form a credit union. In fact, at the end of 1978, there were 348 credit unions in New South Wales. So everyone had a credit union in a workplace. And basically, they grew out of just a host employer. There were three types of organizations and three types of credit unions.  One was a host employer, which was employment based. One was a, what they call a community one, which was basically an area, one was a bit of what they call industrial, whic was more than one host employer. So they had three types of organizations. Initially, many of the credit unions were, to be honest, not well run. And because they were well meaning, but the people who were running it didn’t understand the ins and outs of how to run a financial organization, even though it was only very small. It was a lot different in the old days.

BW:
And so you mentioned that they didn’t have the powers that national regulators have today, so what might happen then that wouldn’t happen today. What sort of trouble?

BB:
Oh, look, it’s always the same thing. Poor governance, poor accounting controls, things like bank reconciliations. Members’ ledgers. Again, those days, they’re either handwritten or accounting machine. And the sub ledger, which are the member’s ledgers had to be balanced to the main ledger, which is the general ledger. Very, very few were balancing correctly and all that so they were out of balance, and they were always out of balance and the final thing was delinquencies towards the end. In those days, there was no such thing as you know, the three C’s credit, you know, understanding how people used to make money. So if you walked into a credit union and you worked at that organization, you can get along. The lines were very small in those days, but when you look at the salaries that people are earning a $2,000 loan when you’re only earning $2000 is quite substantial. So the register had authorities to limit the amount of loans that are accredited and could make. You had to apply to the registrar to get your limit increased in those days, and as I said before, and I’ll tell you, but credit unions did not do anything other than personal loans.

BW:
And that is something that occurred to me now. Were some credit unions better quality right from when they started? Is that true? And is that an accident because of maybe there was more financial ability in the people running it?

BB:
As an Inspector you would talk to the management of the organization, you’d talk to the boards. And you get an appreciation and understanding how they understood their business. So if they had a reasonable understanding, and a lot of initial managers of credit unions, always, always well meaning. But didn’t have the financial expertise to actually understand and run an organisation. They were well liked. And very popular. And that’s probably why they ended up as the Manager. But they lacked that expertise and skills. As the organization got bigger the boards realized that they had to try and attract more skilled people. And they did start to attract a few more skilled people and those skilled people then passed that knowledge on to other credit unions. In those days, credit unions did not see other credit unions as competitors, they worked very closely with each other. And if you had a problem, you could ring one up and you’d go over and see him and they’d help.

BW:
Okay, well, we’ll move on to 1980. For most of the 1980s, almost a whole decade, you worked at the University of New South Wales Credit Union, in what we’d call today a CEO role. Could you tell us about that?

BB:

Well, that was an experience in itself. That was my first, we also had an introduction to what credit unions were in terms of my role as an inspector or reviewing rules of a credit union. My experience was that I did an inspection at the University of New South Wales. And the manager there at that particular time, was only an acting manager. And he asked me to consider applying for the job. And I said, well, I don’t have that expertise. I’d never managed staff, I’d never run an organization. I can come and tell you where the issues are. And it was an interesting experience. And he was an ex bank manager from Westpac as a matter of fact. And he said, look, I think you have the expertise, because you understand what the philosophy is, etc., etc. It was at the University of New South Wales. And of course, all the directors were from University of New South Wales, it was a closed environment. And so I applied, and surprise, surprise, I got the job. But to be honest, I was completely out of my depth. You know, I walked in, I had no management training, I had an accounting background and accounting experience. So I understood that, but no, no, understanding how to manage or have an idea or a strategic way with this organization. So we had five staff. Myself included. A supervisor and three other staff. And in those days, it was a very simple organization, it was very easy. It was basically, we had one savings account, which was an on call savings account, which we paid half a percent per month. And we gave loans out at basically 1% a month. So that was a 6% margin. That’s why we were able to operate so efficiently or not efficiently, but we had no services, you could not get money out of your credit union. But to take it out, we had to give you a cheque, which you then took over to the State Bank of New South Wales, and they would cash the cheques. So we had no cash. We had no cards, we had no products other than a basic core account. We were fortunate the University of New South Wales allowed their staff to take payroll deductions and deposits into their account, but what’s not whole pay it was only just deductions, and then you know, they would do it that way. And then we would make a loan and basically you get a loan, but I think our loan limit was probably $3000 maximum at that stage. Yeah, so that was an interesting time but you know, as we, as time went on, there was a changing of what people wanted, of members expectations. So slowly but surely we firstly introduced cash. We introduced chequing. Down the track we introduced term deposits, we introduced whole of pay, but to be honest, without the combined support of all the credit unions, which, ANSWCU, Association of NSW Credit Unions, was the body, the peak body that started to organize all these things. They would organize all the cash deliveries, they would organize chequing. Chequing, was firstly, you got cheques through the NAB on your own account and then sent them over to the state bank. Then we had member chequing. I think a chap called Geoff Whelan from NT introduced that. He was the manager from I think it was Northern Territory Credit Society, he was the person who ran that project on behalf of all credit unions. So we got that, we got term deposits introduced at the same time. ANSWCU looked at what the future was in terms of IT. And at that stage, we were fortunate a lot of credit unions were using ledger cards. So it was all hand punched in the accounting machines. We were using the University of New South Wales IT system where we used cards to update our members but it was all dependent on what the schedule the university IT department was. And then we decided, they decided we needed to move to an online computer system and we moved to FCS. And again, it was in house. When you bought your computer, mainframe computer, you put your mainframe computer somewhere in your office, and then you maintained your office mainframe, and you had connections to cashiers and other ones and everything was done online. That was through FCS. So that was a big step forward. But it meant also that we then had to learn how to become IT people, you know, because we had to understand if the computer crashed. We had to then reboot it and get it started and all that in those days. The bigger Credit Unions started to have a whole IT department, huge IT for that. So it was quite a challenging time. But it’s also exciting a time because that’s when the actual credit union movement started to become a credit union movement. And, you know, it really was a real big challenge for everyone. We upgraded our computer system with FCS, which is now Ultradata, Ultradata bought out FCS. So, it was an experience and you had to install a computer system and I had no idea what that was you had to upgrade it. We upgraded the FCS with a version one version two and version three. As they went along. We got cash withdrawals, term deposits, and whole of pay. We introduced Redicard, which was the first card access ATM. Visa Debit Cards eventually came along, traveller’s cheques, insurance brokerage services, member chequing, bank drafts, we then started expanding our loans. And finally we got into mortgage loans. Because at that stage, the way it worked is that the big banks that are still there would do it… There was private companies, like AGC and all these were doing car loans. And we did the personal loans. So pretty much that’s all we ever did. And then eventually, as they got bigger, they said, well, I’d like a mortgage off you. But being a small organization, doing a mortgage loan, you couldn’t afford to lock all your funds up in one loan. So that’s why we started looking at where the University of New South Wales Credit Union was going. And we decided that we needed to talk to the other universities and employers about how we could start working collectively. And some of the other universities that approached us about it said we don’t have the expertise. Can we come and talk to you about where we want to go? So we ended up merging with Sydney. I think we’ve merged with Sydney, Macquarie, Newcastle. So we went from a one campus thing with 3000 members to something like about 11,000 members, $25 million in assets and you know, six branches, six offices around, which then required different skill sets again, that was in the late 80s. That was in the late 80s. Yeah.

BW:
There was a couple of things. But one I’ll ask later because we’ll go through it but you mentioned that the customers wanted other things. Is that because people saw what banks had, you know, MasterCard and different products and they thought they wanted credit unions to have that as well?

BB:
Well I think, you know, a credit union was basically like a family, everyone, once you join the credit union you thought this is a real good organization, you knew people by name, the staff knew the members by name, they were quite comfortable dealing with you and it’s good to deal with them. It was like we were all one big family. But then they said, well, look, I want to get a, you know, cards by that stage, the card came along, and they weren’t a part of it. So what we needed to do to get a card to go to ATMs. And you know, at that stage, they said, well, can you give us one of them? We went to ask you, and it was a very interesting process, because ANSWCU, was the peak body in New South Wales. And there were four associations at that stage in NSW. And it was rather stupid. But in the end, common sense came through and I think, even to the end, there were still some people who opposed part of the association, but it was good, because we would have organized regional meetings, we’d come along and talk about where we should be going as an industry, not just as a credit union but as an industry. That’s where we talked about what’s good for the future. And that’s where we got a lot, a lot of interesting products coming in. As a young person, I used to go to those meetings. And I would sit there very mildly, and make money and listen to the conversations in the arguments. And sometimes they almost came to blows. Yeah, but the funny thing that got me was, they’d be arguing and screaming, calling people names, the meeting would finish, you’d walk out to the bar, and they’d sit down and have a drink together. So they realized that they had to get their point across. But they also realized that this is the only way we’ve got to get it on the table. So they talked about it as an industry not just as a credit union. And the bigger ones were willing to help the little ones. Help them. You know, say ring them up, say I got this issue. They’d give you advice or sometimes they might send someone out to help you. And nowadays they’d say, I’m going to take you over

BW:
Why would they help them out? Because they work better by helping the little guy as well, or they believed in doing that in principle?

BB:
Well, I think it was all about the philosophy of credit unions and just people helping people. And I think that philosophy in the early days was very much to the fore. So they wanted to help people. And they also realized that if a credit union failed, the reputation of the credit unions would be damaged badly and from my recollection in 50 years in New South Wales, there’s only one credit union that failed where members actually lost money. And that was a long, long time ago. You know, they put in safeguards like the Credit Union Savings Reserve Board. And that was a struggle to get that up, but it got up. It was a precursor to Fin Com, which was the next one after that and was a national one. The Savings Reserve Board was a state one. And they had some excellent people running it, the Savings Reserve Board – people like Keith Mannix, Brian Sharp, and a few others. And the job was to, they were more hands on than the registry. And they had to basically, their job was once I identified a problem, they did two things, they either tried to remedy the problem, get the organization back on track, or they then said right, you’re not going anywhere, you’re going to merge to safeguard the members. So they would then merge the organization as a necessity, as what was best for the members. As what’s best for that organization. So yeah, so that was good but again, when that was proposed, that was a screaming match. A lot of people didn’t like that, especially those who weren’t traveling very well, because they knew they would be exposed as a problem child, which everyone knew, but they didn’t want anyone to see really. So yeah, so that was that. That got to the point where in the end of 1988, or beginning of 88, the board of the Universities Credit Union, because we had changed our name to Universities Credit Union, decided it wanted to go in a different direction. And I kept telling them, this is not what you want to do. You don’t understand how the organization functions, but they decided that was what they wanted to do. So that’s their prerogative. We mutually parted ways. And I had a little stint with Commonwealth Bank officers, which is now called FSU that was the New South Wales branch. That was quite a good time, interesting time working. The philosophies were the same. It’s a trade union, but cooperative based and member based. Always there for the benefit of the members. We had a building in Cleveland St, which I negotiated the sale of, they then moved down to Haymarket, then eventually they merged with, I think there was another organization, the Commonwealth Bank, I think it was the Bank Officers Association, I forget where they’ve come from but are the financial sector union. And that’s what they are today, the financial sector union. But that was a very interesting time. I met some nice people there. Who were the federal secretaries and state secretaries. And then in November 1988, I got a phone call from a chap called Michael Lewisham. He was from the Savings Reserve board and said, we’re looking for someone to help us because the Savings Reserve Board was basically running the Railway Staff Credit Union, which got itself into a bit of difficulty. And they appointed, they were looking for some senior executives to come in, they appointed a new general manager, a chap called Ken May. And myself and a few others. So I came in as the Financial Controller, then Deputy General Manager, Finance and then Deputy General Manager, Business Development & Marketing. It was an interesting experience. It was an interesting experience, because it was, to be honest, it was very much again, if you worked in the railways and you knew someone within the credit union, you got a job in the credit union, but they had no basic understandable background in financial credit and things. So fortunately, with Ken May, who is a very experienced and very knowledgeable person, as general manager, and there’s a financial controller helping and a few others, we managed to get the place back on track. After a lot of struggling and late nights, and they were on their own computer system, was a fay com system, which was a not even an Australian system. Fortunately, they had a fantastic IT manager Ken Carney his name was. And when we said, look, this is not sustainable, because they were the only ones on this system. And we needed to get some economies of scale. We said, we’ll have to go to FCS. And Ken said, okay, and he was happy to help us to have the conversion. Happy to put us where you’re sitting right now, in the computer room and this is where the computer was and that’s how big the place was. So we moved from Kippax Street, and then we moved down to here in Buckingham Street. I think we have been here over 21 years no longer than that. 30 years. We then converted our system, it took us 24, nearly 36 hours to convert our system from fay com to FCS. And then it’s never looked back. It became Transrail. It merged Railway Staff Credit Union with Transport Credit Union. In those days Transport Credit Union looked after the buses in the Department of Transport, which was the old motor registries. And we looked after the railways. So it was logical to have it transport based… So we then became Transrail. And as we continued to grow, we decided it was time to … Transrail tended to limit the name but the board decided they wanted to look at a new name. So they did a process of looking for a new name and came up with Encompass Credit Union. That became our name until we merged to become Select.  But in the meantime, we took over a number of other little ones like inevitably, as I said, when credit unions were first stablished, you only had to have a small employee base, and a lot of the bus depots had their own little credit union. And basically, they eventually became unviable because they couldn’t offer the services that others could. So they basically just became unviable in terms of their operating systems. The times were changing. They had to get new capital requirements, new requirements, etc., etc. So we have a merging with Ryde Bus Depot, Waverly Bus Depot …

BW:
All in the transport area

BB:
Select was electricity. So it was still state based. So all basically state based employees or their members were state based employees. At the same time, as we also saw that we had our own computer systems, we had to have IT people. In the initial days it wasn’t, it was mainly just to do transactions backwards and forwards. But as you’ve got more and more online transactions, ATMs, Visa cards, etc., etc. You had to start running your IT system 24 hours a day. And I’ll tell you a funny story. Once railways, because they had workshops all around, when I joined railways had something like 33,000 employees at workshops at Clyde, Redfern, everywhere. And one day, I was at one of the workshops up in Broadmeadow, up in Newcastle. And then what happened was when the ATM system was working, when was online it was instant balances, but they had a file sent, so that if it went offline, we can pull it down but would have an offline limit. But the offline limit never checked, it stays the same. So you can go and take up to your offline limit. And most offline limits were either 100 or $200. I think. And this particular day, I was there in Broadmeadow and this in our office and an announcement came over the local pa which it shouldn’t have been done but anyway, but chaps turned up said the credit union ATM network is down, everyone go and get your money out. So next we know, we had all these overdrawn accounts because the money comes out. But they knew they didn’t have it. But then they said oh, machine gave it to me. Yeah. So we had difficulties trying to explain to them eventually, you know, that was a bit of a problem until you got the reliability. So it came up again, it’s one of those situations where they suddenly said, well, how can we run a computer system with a small credit union and we had an IT department of two or three, I think, 24 hours, seven days a week. So a number of credit unions decided that they had to do this. Again, they did the cooperative bit and they formed TAS, Transaction Solutions. But we didn’t join TAS, we ended up setting up Combined Financial Processing, CFP and number of other credit unions got involved in that. And we set that up so that we had our own. It was funny because you weren’t allowed to join TAS as a shareholder, but you end up doing the processing for CFP. We set up a company called CFP, Combined Financial Processing Pty Ltd. It had a manager and I think two staff. One was Robert Batty who now works with Community First and the other one was Tony Cheshire. And I think that a couple of others as well. So that went with 45 credit unions in New South Wales and eventually Combined Financial Processes was bought out by TAS, and it’s now part of TAS. That’s how it works. Yeah, so a lot of it is hard work, but eventually, you know, Encompass Credit Union is still here, or we’re still here. And then we know, I was here for 12 years.

BW:
Sorry to interrupt but I notice you had a break there. You had a stint with SGE which today is known as G&C Mutual Bank. What happened there?

BB:
Well, I was here. I was, look, it was one of my great mates is Ken May. So he was a great manager a great person. But he, you know, I’ve always wanted to succeed him as a CEO. He kept saying he’s gonna retire, retire, retire. And I thought you’re not going to retire you liked the job. You’re good at what you do. And then out of the blue, I got a phone call from Helen McIntyre, who was the CEO of SGE, inviting me to lunch and offered me a job. I thought it’s something different somewhere. Completely different. I didn’t realize it was another basket case. Because Encompass was very well run, smoothly run, it had no major issues, had plenty of capital and everything else. I go to SGE. And this is a comment that I’ll make now and later and that is they decided CEOs and consultants know best. So they decided to go and buy a new computer system because they weren’t happy with FCS. So they went and bought an overseas based system called Ovation. And they didn’t realize that when you buy an overseas system, that you’ve got to have it customized for Australian conditions. And that the support staff you get are overseas and when you need something to be done are charging in US dollars, which was an arm and a leg. But anyway, there’s just the conversion was an absolute, to be honest, it was a mess and nothing was balanced. Everything was out of kilter. It was just, I walked into a hornet’s nest. And I just shook my head. But in the meantime, because of the mess, members couldn’t get their money out, there was people over drawing. Some people, you know, we end up writing off one lady for $60,000 because she managed to draw a cheque and nobody checked it. And that went through and they were trying to get it back. So the members were getting very dissatisfied, very unhappy with the board, very unhappy with the management. And then there was a, I would call it a coup. And there was a change in the guards. Helen McIntyre left, the board was basically changed. And Ray Clark was appointed as the CEO. And the first thing he asked me was, what should we do? I said we’ve got to get off the system. So we went to look around, and then decided the best thing to do was get back to FCS. Though we then converted back from Ovation back to FCS. And then that basically stabilized that accounting system, stabilized that system. And members could get money out members were then happy

BB:
So, yeah. So you know, the biggest challenge was to get a stable operating platform a computer system platform. And that’s what we did when we went back to FCS. And basically then I was in charge of that project. That was a major project. But it was just a tough time, because it was a lot different to working here. But I worked for five years there. And to be honest, G&C now it’s gone from strength to strength. It is really a well-run organization now and it is basically based on the fact that you’ve gotta have a stable computer system. Now. I will tell you now that anyone who in Australia who thinks they can go and buy a new computer system that will work other than Ultradata or Data Action, has got rocks in their head, and the board should be sacked immediately and so should the management because they don’t work. I’ve never seen anyone. There is not one credit union in Australia that operates successfully, unless it’s under Data Action or Ultradata.

BW:
What exactly is this computer system that you’re talking about? It calculates transactions and balances and that?

BB:
Well, it’s more than that. From a member’s perspective, what you want, when you go to a shop, we go to an ATM or we go to not a master branch anymore, but you do something. You want to be able to get your money out. You want to be able to get your balance, you want to be able to do that. Those systems do it very, very successfully. They’re not worried about the all-encompassing sort of bells and whistles and all that, they want to be able to go and stand in front of the cashier at the grocery shop and tap their card and walk out or tap their phone. That’s the system they want. And that’s the system they need. And that’s always been the thing, you know, you can come up with all these other ideas or things that you may want to do. But that’s not the main core, the core banking system is what people want, they want to be able to know that I’ve got $100 in that account, I can take my $100 out when I want to. But you know, if the system is not reliable, or the system doesn’t work, and it’s a very stable system, and it’s basically both based in Australia, and both upgrades, you know, requirements, according to Australian standards, and having Australian standards. If there’s changes, like aus track came in, reporting for that app has got new reporting requirements, it needs to be able to have a system. That was when I talked about SGE. The Ovations system did not understand the requirements, the reporting requirements for Australia, because they were based in Canada, in the US. So they didn’t have the same reporting requirements that we deal with in Australia. And you tell the regulator, I can’t report because the computer system doesn’t work well, then I don’t think that’s satisfactory. So then, in June 2005, I came back to Encompass Credit Union as the CEO, basically, took over from Ken who finally retired. And we’re still friends today I see him from time to time, so we just had to show that the place was still well, secure and well, then we just needed to continue to grow the business and, and I did 11 years working with Encompass with some wonderful people. We had a few businesses that were in fact, not part of our core business, which we sold off. We had financial planning, which we got rid of. We also negotiated the sale CFP to TAS. You know, we had a whole range of challenges coming in risk based systems, APS 310, which is a risk based reporting with new credit license requirements. You know, there was a few other things that we did. But yeah, so the credit union got to the point where in 2000, and I think about 2014, maybe 13, somewhere in there, we reached, because at the same time, our host employer group, which was the railways was going through radical changes. And they had, as I said, when I first started in 1988, the railways employed over 33, over 30,000 people. It was down to about four and a half. So you know the potential to keep growing was lost. Those host employer groups, e.g. like teachers and police never got, they still have always have had a base, because there will always be teachers, there will always be police. But the railways went from doing a lot of the work themselves to outsourcing, they restructured. So we started to realize that we needed to start thinking about where we would be in the future. And especially with the requirements that were going to be placed upon us. We thought well, we better decide where we should go. And what we should do, the board was very adamant that they needed to find a suitable partner, that we believed was comfortable enough to take the organization forward. And at the same time, we were, we were moving to a lot of it was probably the start, I would call it the start of action for climate change. And we have to start looking at how we do our processes, whether we needed. It was interesting that we were one of the first to drop deposit withdrawal slips and nowadays, if you came into a credit union or a bank, we used to fill out a form,  a piece of paper, which was then duly stamped and put in a box and then sent away for seven years. We started to ask, do we really need to have all this paper or do we need everything paper generated? How do we start looking at becoming more efficient? Rather than chopping down trees?

BW:
Okay, continue.

BB:
Yeah, as I said, it was probably the start of where we started looking at how we could do things more efficiently. It was the rise of the fin coms, the FinTech organizations. And the difference between the fintechs and a, an established credit union, like, Encompass, Encompass had been operating for over 60 years. Fintechs had been operating for one year. So they came in with a different approach. And we needed to start looking at our approach because we obviously developed policies and procedures for over the last 60 years. But were they still relevant in 2015, or 2012. So we started to have to think about how we can improve efficiencies, how, what’s the state of action on chopping down trees, action for climate change, and we realized that we had to do things differently. And as I said, we were one of the first to get rid of withdrawal and deposit slips. We will probably have a whole warehouse full of deposit and withdrawal slips.  No one ever looked at them but requirements were that you have to keep them for seven years. So when we introduced that there was a bit of a kerfuffle, but in the end, the members accepted it, the staff accepted it, and we moved on. So then we looked at other ways of storing data and being more efficient, we had to be more efficient, because the costs were also increasing. And we needed to be more efficient how we operated. So we tried to eliminate paper as much as we possibly can. In those days, when I first started way back when, the Board Papers were probably maybe six inches thick. And it was all paper based. We moved the whole board on to electronic board papers. And the first question I got from one of the directors was, where’s the printer, I said, you don’t get a printer, you do not get a printer, you do not print this out anymore, because you’ve got it now in a soft copy. But it was a mindset change. And, again, that saved again, another procedure that we implemented, it saved a lot of paper and records and all that sort of stuff, we removed a lot to electronic paper. But some of the requirements are still antiquated in terms of, you know, when you apply for loans and everything, you still gotta have hard copies signed 15 times. And it needs to be, again, it’s one of those things, I think, going forward, there’s got to be some looking at how things can be improved because people want money, people want an answer within 24 hours nowadays, in some cases, they want it within an hour. So you’ve got to have a system that can improve and do that. And so you need to have efficiencies in your processes and procedures. So we looked around, spoke to a number of other similar minded organizations. And we settled on, another government department based credit union which was Select.  We merged on the first of July 2016. And I stepped down as the CEO and Mark took over as the CEO of what was Select Encompass and then became Endeavour Mutual And now Australian Mutual Bank. At the same time one of the things that, that my board and I were very adamant about was that we’ve been operating for 60 odd years, we had a capital base of around about 25%. And we believed that, you know, we’re happy to merge with an organization, I think, Select had 21 or 22% capital. But it had to be an equitable merger because it was almost an equal partner. So we said we need to ensure that we’ve got something going forward. And both organizations believed in, in promoting credit union values both in Australia and around the world. And we agreed that we would set up the Australian Mutuals Foundation, which is what we’ve done. We in 2016, set that up. I’ll mention this once and only once there was an organization that used to be representing the credit union movement. It no longer does, it is now nothing more than an NGO, it might have the name in there but it doesn’t do any promotion of savings or credit unions around the world. It does more what I call not for profit NGO sort of stuff. That’s fine, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you think you want to do. But it’s we believe that you need to have like Australia, the Australian credit union movement, which is, I think it’s probably about $30 billion, started out because the pioneers of the Australian credit union movement, understood and saw what the credit unions were in Canada or America during World War Two and brought it back to Australia in about 1945/46. And that’s how the industry started. So we also believe that that should be an industry worldwide. In America, it’s very big. And you’d be surprised when I tell people this, but in Australia, Australia thinks it’s big, the biggest credit union industry in the world is America, followed by Canada, followed by South Korea, followed by Japan, and Australia is number 5. We’re not the leaders in the world anymore.  But we need to continue to have opportunities for people in developing countries. And also we wanted to make sure that we could create opportunities in Australia to help disadvantaged youth and children in Australia. So we set up Australian Mutuals Foundation, with the support of at that stage of Endeavour Mutual Bank, now Australian Mutual Bank, and a number of other supporters. And we do work within Australia in terms of Barnardo’s Australia, which does social work for children at risk. And looks after that within New South Wales. We’re also doing international credit union development and we do genuine international credit union development. We actually established credit union systems in Myanmar, we did work in Bhutan. We’re going so right now in Laos and Timor Leste. But it’s establishing a credit union system, which allows people to learn how to save and how to grow the system, you can teach people how to save. But if you’ve got nowhere to save, then you’re only wasting your time. So we’re an affiliated member with the Association of Asian Confederation of Credit Unions, which represents I think, over 30,000 credit unions in Asia, around Asia, and I forget how many assets, but we’ve been doing work with them in developing countries. And lately, we’ve been doing work with them in relation to develop an action plan for climate change impacts, on COVID, which was over the last two years and also management, training, financial empowerment for women, personal finances, things like that. So we teach them how to do that, but also to get it out there on the ground. It’s interesting, if you ever had the opportunity to go see some of these things in action, you’d be surprised. Another thing we do is the Asian Confederation runs what they call a development education program, which has now been done by over a 1000 people. It used to be done in Australia, but it was run by another organization. And it decided it didn’t want to do that anymore, it was too hard. So they canned that. So we have now sent 16 people from credit unions since 2016. To Asia. Unfortunately, with covid, we didn’t send anyone for two years. But we’ve just sent someone just recently, three people over there recently, where they get to meet and to mingle with people from around Asia from Thailand to Nepal to the Philippines in all those countries there and understand the issues and challenges facing credit unions in developing countries. So that was the second program. The third program was we had obviously used to do natural disasters, which natural disasters can occur at any time and unfortunately, we’ve had a couple in the last few years. One was the bushfires in southern New South Wales and Victoria and South Australia. We managed to raise $385,000. We have a different business model, we give our grants back to the local communities who would not normally receive the grant because they have to fill out government organization forms, these are mainly trying to help welfare rebuild the communities back on their feet. So we gave that to the bushfires and then in 2022 we raised $216,000 in grants to New South Wales and Southern Queensland areas affected by the floods. And again over 40 community organizations, there is a video if you want to see it, I can send you a link to it. So we’ve, we’ve been there. And we will continue to do that, and hopefully not too many, too many more disasters, but with the way things and the climate is changing, we expect there to be more natural disasters going forward. So that’s going to be a thing. And the last one is we are now offering educational scholarships to employees of supporters and sponsors. To understand the values of credit unions and mutuals, the values of directorships of CEMs, and also some innovations we offered international scholarships to people from Nepal and Thailand to do the course. So, yeah, so, obviously do that in 2023. So, yeah, that’s been my role for the last six years. So I’m still involved with credit unions and in relation to the Asian Confederation we received this year a recognition award for our credit union work in development and supporting credit unions in Asia. So it’s been an interesting journey. But I think it’ll be as of next year something like 53 years.

BB:
I’ll give you one example. This is my first personal experience with credit unions.  When I joined the Registry in 1971 I didn’t have a clue what, straight out of school, banking was something which you did with the Commonwealth savings account or Commonwealth Bank for, everyone had a Commonwealth Bank account. But when I joined the Registry, someone said to me, oh, you got to come in the local credit union and the Registry had its own credit union. And oh, okay. All right. Okay. So, and you contributed so much per fortnight to the credit union, and I didn’t think much about it. And then in 1973, unfortunately, my father died suddenly. And in Queensland, and in those days, to get to Queensland was not a cheap flight. It was I mean, TIA I think and there was Qantas was Ansett. It was expensive and how do I get myself and my brother to Queensland which was Coolangatta, to get to my mum, get my dad’s funeral organised, get my mum back to Sydney. And at 19 years of age, when you’re 19, you don’t save any money. You’re too busy partying.  But my boss was a director of the local credit union. He said, no worries, we’ll give you a loan. I said, but I don’t have any money. He said, don’t worry, we’ll give you a loan. I said, Okay. So they gave me sufficient money to fly up to Queensland, get my mother back, organize a funeral. And that was my first experience.  But at that stage and I can show you that I’ve actually got a pay docket that says I was earning only $50 a week. And I think they leant me something like $2,000. And I said, why are you doing this, because we trust you. And we’re here, credit unions are here to help people.  So that was my first experience dealing with the credit union. And I thought this is not a bad philosophy, not a bad value. So my values were there from then on. This is something I like to be involved with. And I’ve been involved with it ever since. So it was very interesting, because I was only a youngster, I didn’t really understand credit unions. I didn’t understand the values.  But you know, I will say this. I say this, quite rightly, is that if we don’t have members, you don’t exist. Unfortunately, some of my current colleagues think it’s got nothing to do with members. It’s got something to do with how big you are. And without customers, you won’t exist. There’s too many corporate failures around the world where they focused on the product, rather than what the customer wanted. If they don’t, as I said earlier, if we didn’t change our business models to accommodate the customers, we would have not been here. We had to continually evolve, continually change, we had to continually listen. You know, my values were that I, I loved to go out and visit different areas, talk to different people, get to different functions where the members were. And you’re talking, when you’re talking about the Railways, you’re talking from fettlers up to the Chief Executive Officer, not very often, but I’ve met a lot of people in between, and you listen to what they want. And they say, oh, yeah, I don’t save with you because you don’t give me what I want. What do you want? So, you’ve got to be, you’ve got to, you know, I never did surveys of members satisfactions, because there are always cracks in the way that give you the answers you want. The best answer is go out and talk to a member and find out. If you want to know what they think of you, go and ask him, but don’t go and ask him through a survey, because most surveys are written and designed to give you the answer you want. So you know, and the other thing is that, you know, the credit union needs, they need to understand that they only exist if they cooperate, unfortunately, someone thinks because you’re a big credit union, you don’t need to cooperate anymore. You can do things on your own, but your competitors are not other credit unions, your competitors are the big four banks and stop trying to be big 4 banks, because if we become a big four bank, you’re no different then and you’re gonna get the same criticism as what the big four banks got. You’ve got to have a point of difference.

BW:
I just have one last question unless you want to say something else. And that’s, earlier, you mentioned you didn’t have any management experience, just as a credit union CEO, what’s the most difficult part? Managing people or regulation and other things? What was the hardest?

BB:
Well, in terms of my experience, it was like, learning how to deal with people and different personalities, management is all about managing people, and managing people is trying to understand their personalities, understand what is good for them. And, you know, in that way, you know, there’s all different management styles. And I’m not saying right or wrong.  I’ve seen where a CEO would walk in the front door of his office and walk straight into their office and never see him again, for a whole day. Others you would never see. They never came in the office. Others were more, you know. There was one I learned from very early on, from one chap, he wasn’t the CEO but he was a very bright person. He just said, you’ve got to get to know everyone who works in your organization. And it’s pretty hard now when you got 1000 or 2000 people working here. But one of the people I really did admire because I used to hear a lot about what she’s doing was a lady called Gail Kelly from St. George. And she was always very approachable, personal, I actually did meet her a number of times at functions and she was always wanting to talk to you, no matter who you were. But other CEOs they don’t look at you, you’re too small. And that’s not the right personality. Managing people is hard, you know, sometimes people can, for whatever reason, there can be a problem at home or something else, sickness or illness. Which they don’t want to tell you or mention to you, but it’s interesting that you’ve got to try and understand and be sympathetic and empathetic to their needs. Try to get them to work for you, not I will say that people don’t have to like you, they have to respect you. You’re not going to get every person in the whole wide world to like you. Because that’s the way personalities are everyone’s got a different personality. But they got to respect you and if they respect you they’ll work for you. And I think that’s important going forward.  I tried to always encourage staff to participate in functions, send them to conferences, or educational training programs. Hence we send people to the development education program, that is an eye opener for anyone who’s been doing that because they really just get to see what other people are experiencing, not what you’re experiencing and Australia is a bit isolated. And Australia tends to think it’s the top of the world and in some ways we are the leaders. Americans will tell you they’re the best. But when I’ve talked to them and listened to them, sometimes we’re streets ahead. They still have personal cheques. We don’t have chequebooks here anymore. We’ve moved on from there we moved on. I was talking years ago that the next wave of development will be the personal phones, where you have a phone where you pay all your bills, everything’s done on your phone, that’s now here. Where we go in the next stage, I don’t know. Right now, it’s yeah, you can pay on your phone or you can do everything you need to use on your phone. That Australia was well and truly advanced in than most countries, some countries have gone to the next stage, and that is to get rid of cash. I’m not sure that’s the way to go. But who knows where we all end up. Look, I think there’s always going to be a need to have an alternative banking system. And credit unions are the ones that are going to fill that as long as they keep understanding why they exist. If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you go. And I think unfortunately, that’s why the history is so important is that, you know, a lot of the current people don’t know where they come from. And they certainly don’t know where they’re going. But that’s my criticism, right. And if people don’t like it, well, that’s unfortunate. That’s the way I am. But you know, it, you know, I’ve seen over my years, I’ve seen all sorts of different management styles I’ve seen people have come in and told you how to run the organization. And I say you’ll last about 12 months, 12 months’ time they’re gone. They don’t understand, especially, you know, I’m a listener, you listen, you learn by listening, you don’t learn by telling people what to do, when you don’t know what you do. So I listened to what they say. And, you know, you just got to listen and understand. And then, you know, but in that as a manager or CEO, you have to make decisions. And some decisions are not always easy, some are tough, but you have to make the tough decisions. Because the tough decisions may not be in the best interests of a particular person, but it may be in the best interests of the organization. And that’s, you can’t just simply say, I’ll put my head in the sand and hope that this issue will go away because issues don’t go away. You’ve got to front them and confront them and then try and resolve them. And if we can’t resolve them, you’ve got to take some action and move on. Once you’ve moved on. That’s it, you move on, you know, go back and say, oh, I shouldn’t have done that. Well, once you made a decision, you can’t change history, history is there. Unfortunately, some people think we should change history. But history is there. You know, and the movement has been great for. There’s a lot of great people in this industry I’ve met over the years. And I must admit, they were quite willing just to give you the time of day and hope you’ll get anything you want to mentor you or give you guidance. Being a good manager, being a good manager is not easy. Sometimes you make mistakes, we all make mistakes. But you got to learn from it. If you learn from your mistakes and I would say a good manager, if he has an employee or someone who comes into their organization and leaves with the same level of knowledge as when they first started then they’re a poor manager. As far as I’m concerned a manager is there to increase the level of knowledge and expertise of the person underneath. They should leave the organization with more knowledge than when they started with. If they don’t and a lot of managers are insecure they get worried about someone being a bit smarter than them and more intelligent than them but that’s not something I used to worry about. I was hoping, hoping that you know as I said we all have expertise and some of my expertise is different than someone else’s but if you can use their expertise, IT for example, it’s a different world and if you can get someone to help you with it, it’s good. Let’s face it, what are you gonna do without IT?

Australian Mutuals History Oral History Program 2022