35 Years at Horizon Bank

Kim Morris has just retired from her position as Chief Marketing Officer at Horizon Bank after an extraordinary 35 years. In fact, that’s just scratching the surface as Kim has been a member of Horizon Bank since she was a child as her parents were both members.

The details of Kim’s life-long connection to mutuals were recorded for posterity in our recent oral history interview with her. Below are two of the choicest quotes from the interview:

Here Kim reveals her family connection to Horizon Bank and explains an interesting fact about membership of Horizon when it was known as Southern Counties Credit Union:

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.

Here is a nice story about cooperation among mutuals:

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.

The transcript of our oral history interview with Kim Morris can be found here.