Ben Woods (BW) 00:05
Ben Woods, Senior Archivist, Australian Mutuals Archives, interviewing Kim Morris, 27 November 2025.Ok Kim, what was your first ever job?

Kim Morris (KM) 00:22
Ever? Well, I actually worked in a library. That was straight out of school. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do so I ended up at Wollongong City Council Library, and then I ended up applying for a job in the public service at the Corporate Affairs Commission, which was later renamed Business and Consumer Affairs. I was working and commuting to Sydney every day, and that was pretty tough for seven years.

BW: 01:13
What drew you to marketing?

KM: 01:19
Commuting to Sydney was really hard. So, I was looking for a job in Wollongong. And I did have a bit of an artistic flair from a written communication point of view. And the job came up at Southern Counties Credit Union, as Horizon was called at the time, which I applied for but didn’t end up getting, as it turned out. But they employed someone that apparently spent a lot of money, and it didn’t come up with the goods. So, I was offered it months later.

BW: 02:02
Ok, that’s interesting. Had you heard about credit unions before you joined Southern Counties?

KM: 02:15
Yeah, I was actually a member of Southern Counties. I’m kind of like the poster girl for the credit union. It started in 1964 and the origins of that were from Wollongong City Council and the Illawarra County Council. And so, they had merged to make Southern Counties, and it just turns out that my dad worked for Wollongong City Council and my mum worked for Illawarra electricity. So, both of them were members from both sides, and they started an account for me when I was a child, and they were putting money in $1 each week. So, I’ve been a member for a long, long time, which kind of made me feel like I was joining a family, something that I already kind of knew, or at least my parents knew and trusted, because back in the day, they were obliged to join there was no other option. You couldn’t choose to have another financial institution. If you were an employee of those organisations, you had to be a member of Southern Counties Credit Union.

BW: 03:28
So, is it a bit like a closed shop type of thing? Other people have said that before. So let us get this right. If you wanted to open an account with a bank and you didn’t join the credit union, you would get pressure. Is that what you’re saying?

KM: 03:50
No, no Southern Counties Credit Union was basically the clearing account for Wollongong City Council or electricity employees. So, all your pay had to go into Southern Counties, and if you had an account somewhere else, you’d have to move it yourself.

BW: Ah, I’m with you. Ok, well, that explains that. That’s good. Thanks for that information. I’m sure I could dig it up somewhere.

KM: 04:19
Well, back then it was an industrial credit union. Whereas a lot of them now are community. As Horizon, as it is now called is.

BW: 04:30
Yes, they merged with other entities and now the bond is open. So, what was your first role at Southern Counties? You might have touched on it a second ago.

KM: 04:46
Well, I got my first role as Marketing Officer [in 1991], and I was the only person there. It was a new role that they had created. Back then it was all about creating brochures and flyers and stuff like that. There was a little bit of TV, which was pretty exciting for me at the time. I was Marketing Officer and got promoted to Marketing Manager a few years after that. So, they realised that marketing was a very important role within the organisation and I ended up going to university and studying marketing while I was working. It worked out really well.

BW: 05:38
How many employees were there at Southern Counties when you joined?

KM: 05:45
I would maybe say around 50 because we had a fair few branches back then.

BW: 06:23
Ok, so how did your role change over the years even as you have had new titles and responsibilities within marketing?

KM: 06:36
Well, my title remained pretty much the same. I stayed in marketing for all the time that I was there, which was 34 and a half years. But what I did in that role altered greatly over the years. So, you know, you go from a very manual process of creating newsletters on an old casetna kind of machine to cutting out graphics to make up the newsletter to using desktop software Canva and all the good tools like having an in house, large print, large scale printer, color printer, so we could print posters, and using software like Corel Draw and Canva and digital marketing came into play. So, I retrained in all of that. Every day was different in my role. A lot of people think that being a marketer in a mutual bank seems boring, but it never was. I really enjoyed all the creativity that it required.

BW: 07:56
Yeah, I can see that, of course. That’s why I thought you’d be an interesting person to talk to, along with your longevity. You mentioned the training you did on various design programs. I would imagine you might’ve done more training over the years than a finance person. You mentioned your university studies, could you tell us a little bit about your training?

KM: 08:46
I did do a few courses. And there’s some great stuff online that you can do, like they had some really good TAFE courses that were on when Covid was happening, for social media. This is where you have to learn all about search engine optimisation, so all the website stuff. I looked after the website at one point. I looked after the App as well. And in my role, because we’re in a credit union, a smaller credit union, you tend to wear a few hats. In my role, I was the Business Continuity Officer. I looked after it for a while, when I first started. Apart from the General Manager, I was the only other person that was using a PC, all the rest were using old terminals. So, they called upon me to help them when they moved to PCs. And I kind of ended up with the IT job as well, which was a bit strange. But, you know, until the place gets big enough to employ someone else who is better versed in that area, then away you go. But we also rely, obviously, on third party suppliers. You know where your limitations are.

BW: 10:22
What does Horizon do now? Do they employ any graphic designers or anything?

KM: No, we still do it in house.

BW: But are there graphic design people on staff?

KM: 10:40
No, not necessarily because there’s so many great systems like Canva. The whole graphic design thing, I mean you need to know some principles and have a bit of a flair for it. If you’ve got that you don’t, well, we haven’t found that you need to have a graphic designer on deck. So, we’ve been able to produce pretty good quality or high quality, whether it be posters or flyers, or graphics on the web or whatever.

BW: 11:25
All in house? I’ve just had some Canva training myself. What about your annual report? Do you do that in house as well?

KM: 11:49
Yes, well we employed one graphic designer for one of the Year in Reviews. And it turned out to be harder. It took more time to explain what we needed than just to do it. So, I actually did those things.

BW: 12:20
I suppose the more you do it and with the training you have had you get better at it.

KM: 12:27
Yeah, and the more efficient you are as well. And because I’ve got a lot of background knowledge of what works and what doesn’t and all that sort of stuff. So, it was fun. I’ve learned a lot and my skills have been increasing in all different areas since I first began, which is obviously normal for anyone in any role.

BW: 12:56
Yeah, I can see that. In the early days you said you were doing brochures and things like that, how has the focus of marketing changed from the 90s to today? What were your tools that you used for marketing and the channels, and how has it changed and evolved?

KM: 13:34
It’s changed so much. I mean back when I started and I said there was a lot of tactile stuff, as in posters and flyers and brochures, and they still exist. But back then there was no internet, so we didn’t have to worry about that. I mean we used to have an integrated voice response, you know, press one for an account balance etc. That was as high tech as we were back then. And it was highly personal banking and that’s what sets new tools apart. As the years go by, when more convenient facilities become available, like the internet and tap cards and the app and all that sort of stuff, it becomes less personal, which kind of makes it very hard to keep that difference and also earlier on, from a product point of view, you pretty much would go from either loans to term deposits, so you either need the money or you need to get it out. They were the two main things that that we’d be advertising, whereas today, it’s all about, well loans, specifically in this environment at the moment, because we’ve got plenty of money, but it’s become quite a highly competitive market, because we’re not just dealing or competing against other mutuals and the major banks we’re competing against all different types of banks, you know, the new players, the neobanks and Macquarie Bank and all that sort of stuff. So, there’s so many more players in the market that you have to compete against, and it’s become more about price rather than relationship, which makes it very difficult. And so in this marketplace, we’re promoting loans all the time, but also educating our members. And predominately, it’s all about educating them about how to avoid scams, which is such a sad commentary on life. In the mutuals, it’s all about making sure that you’re secure and our members are aware of what can happen. Just aware of all the different types of scams that are out there, so I would have to say it’s more complicated. Now you’ve got social media, once upon a time if there was a PR issue you had to really worry about what journalists would say. But these days if you step somewhere wrong, it’s going to end up on the internet, on a Google review, or worse. So, it’s quite a minefield.

BW: 17:22
Yeah, and that reminds me. I will ask you some broader industry questions but it’s interesting what you just said and that is that mutuals are competing more on price than on relationships with members. Is that part of the reason for the mergers, we know there are other reasons, but is it price that people would choose to bank with Horizon than anything else?

KM: 18:04
For us, and you know we do a fair bit of research on this, a lot of people from a loans point of view, it’s about price and also reputation. The new members that we get in predominantly because we’ve got really good priced loans at the moment and a really good reputation. So, we normally get new people in because other people have told them. It’s word of mouth, which is kind of a strategy that we’ve been working on for quite some time to try and encourage our members to be advocates for us. And that seems to be working. That will happen anyway, because they’re happy with the way that we use service. That’s for the loans. For the deposits the people that live nearby still value the fact that there’s a branch. Now we actually went against the grain and opened a branch in Berry, New South Wales a couple of years ago, where their last major bank left them and we came in. So, it’s about people who are not comfortable with technology and enjoy that human contact. And you know when something goes wrong, they know that they can talk to someone that they know. If they get scammed or whatever, if they’re concerned about being scammed, then you know we’re here for them. The branches have changed too. They’re still transaction based, but less so, now they’re probably more about people who have got a concern and want to come in and get it sorted out face to face.

BW: 20:13
Well, that’s it. I mean for certain things you need to talk to someone and at these big, unwieldy places, if you can’t get to a branch, you can spend hours on hold. Well, a long time anyway, and it could be much easier. I think for a lot of people they would rather speak to someone in person for these major decisions.

KM: 20:42
We held these member events where we would invite the people who have been really good supporters of Horizon and invited them for drinks and nibblies and to tell them a bit about what Horizon’s been up to and what our plans are for the future. And remember, our CEO John Stanfield at the time said that we were committed to having bricks and mortar as well as all the convenient technology that a modern bank should have. But he said something that we won’t be doing is having call centres overseas and there was an audible gasp as it’s something that people really value when they do want to talk to someone, they want to talk to them now and talk to someone that is local. And, you know here there are no language issues and people who are empathetic.

BW: 21:52
Well, yes, absolutely. I mean it could be crucial. I’m just going to read this question because it might be easier. The mutual landscape in the Illawarra has changed a lot in your time. There were quite a few players when you began in 1991 and now it is just Horizon Bank, IMB Bank and Illawarra/Community First Bank of the local mutuals. Can you tell us a bit about the changing landscape?

KM: 22:21
I think probably the one that left or got merged, one of the bigger credit unions was City Coast Credit Union which merged with a mutual bank that subsequently left the region. So, there was that, but now it’s as I mentioned, all of the Neo banks, the ones that don’t actually have a branch in the town are here, but they’re all online. So that’s the biggest change in the landscape. The Macquarie Banks and the INGs, all those ones were back when I started, they were unheard of or didn’t even exist. And the internet has just brought a whole new bevy of financial institutions that people can choose from.

BW: 23:23
Yes, ok, just some more about your experience. You participated in the Small Credit Unions Forum and the Small Australian Mutuals Network. Can you tell us a little bit about these and the importance of such collaborative networks?

KM: 23:38
Yeah, I find that credit unions have always been open to supply information on what works and what doesn’t. And it’s something that’s really valuable, because if you’ve got a particular problem chances are other credit unions face that problem already and have solved or told you where the potholes are, so to speak. So, it’s really useful from the point of view of knowledge and sharing costs too. If you were going to do a certain project, sharing that cost comes in handy, because a lot of the small credit unions obviously can’t afford some consultancy fees or whatever it is, if they were just going to do it by themselves. But if each of those benefit from that then it just makes sense to pool your resources rather than employ a consultant to do something. It’s just been great. For example, Lysaght Credit Union used to be in Wollongong, and they merged with us in 2019 I think it was [merger was in 2021]. But long before that, if they needed some staff for the day, or if they needed it, we would share training facilities and a trainer, and we weren’t the only ones, other credit unions would do that for them as well. I mean it wasn’t that there might be something in it for us in the future. It was just helping out a fellow credit union. So, I think that that goes to show the moral integrity of an organisation.

BW: 25:48
Absolutely. And that leads to my next question. We’re coming towards the end, but do you think mutuals are in good shape and are there things they could be doing differently?

KM: 26:02
Yeah, look, I think mutuals are doing a good thing and we definitely have a better reputation than what the major banks do. Our problem is, and you mentioned mergers, the problem is the cost of compliance, so I don’t see that changing anytime soon, but also the cost of technology, and that’s one of the things that we’re always kind of behind in. I mean, we’ve provided a good service, but we’re never going to be on the leading edge of technology, so we’re always going to be on the back foot there. But that is definitely something that we could do better. And yeah, I think if we can tap into our members and getting them to be, as I mentioned, advocates for us. It’s really hard in a fast-paced world to even get any kind of space to be noticed by anyone. So that’s going to be the hard part, to try and maintain that kind of personal connection with your members and have the personal connection that gets you business as well. I guess you have to be nimble and efficient. The pricing must be right and you must give back to the community and be sustainable. Sustainability in the environment is another aspect to that but there’s only so much that you can do. But it’s really tough because there’s really well funded competitors.

BW: 28:08
We just talked about the Small Mutuals Forum, would collaboration help, more collaboration via peak bodies and things like that. Could that aid the competitiveness of mutuals? You know, help yourself by being together, mutualism among mutuals?

KM: 28:34
Yeah, it definitely would help. I mean one of the things that we face at the moment is where the first home buyers grant that’s being funded by the government is provided to a certain panel of financial institutions and it’s not for all financial institutions. It’s not a level playing field. So having lobbyists in Canberra trying to get that government guarantee to be offered to any financial institution, or to at least include some of the smaller ones, or all of them, really, that would make it a lot better for us. I mean, we’re small fish in a very large pond, so our voice is small, but together it’s a lot louder. I think that’s an example of how we can perhaps make a change for the better.

BW: 29:37
That’s great. Thank you.