GECCU celebrates 60 years with scaled back activities

THIS YEAR MARKS six decades of service offered by the General Employees Cooperative Credit Union (GECCU), but in a release, the financial institution said it had to scale back its celebrations due to a number of unforeseen events.

This included the passage of Hurricane Beryl on July 1, 2024, which resulted in extensive damage to the branch in the Southern Grenadines , as well as an attempted armed robbery at the South Rivers branch later in the same month.

Speaking at the 60th anniversary lecture held at the UWI Open Campus on October 16, 2024, GECCU’s Chief Executive Officer, Maxine Richards-Johnney described 2024 as a challenging year so far for the credit union.

“We started our celebration in February of this year…we had a year-long celebration plan. We were supposed to do an activity every month but this year, since we started, has brought us both remarkable achievements and unexpected challenges that disrupted services at several of our branches and the lives of several of our members,” she said. “We had an attempted robbery and significant damage caused by Beryl especially to the Southern Grenadines. These events, they tested us, they tested the fabric of GECCU.”

Richards-Johnney said while they have opened most of the affected branches, work is still underway to reopen in Union Island. The lecture, held under the theme ‘A Gem We Built Together’, was delivered by Lennox Bowman, former CEO of GECCU, and he too, highlighted the numerous challenges the financial institution has faced since its establishment in 1964.

Most recently, the eruption of La Soufriere volcano and the COVID-19 pandemic put much strain on both members and staff with Bowman describing that rough patch as “crazy”.

“Sometimes they have a loan, we put them on moratorium, and we have to lend them money so they could do business to make some kind of income for their family,” he said of the organisation’s clients.

Bowman also spoke about the challenges in earlier days of de-risking by correspondent banks, which refers to a financial institution’s restricting business relationships with certain clients to avoid risk associated with money laundering and fraud.

“We had with our challenges- British American and CLICO wasn’t easy to overcome. The de-risking of banks wasn’t easy to overcome.

You could have come to GECCU as a member, your child at university, take a loan, before you leave GECCU, we prepare all the papers and everything send it over to the bank and we can send off your money for you. One stroke of a pen,” he recounted.

“We couldn’t do that any more. That was painful, and still is very painful because that is not the kind of service we want to provide.”

Bowman also revealed that in trying to develop products to meet the needs of members, he received much resistance from staff and the Board when trying to introduce the Carnival Loans.

“In the first year, we did just over a million dollars in carnival loans. The way that look on paper- ‘is so much costume and party?’ … when I showed that 81 percent of that money was lent to people who had a little ice box and a bar, they changed their minds; because we didn’t see the economic activity.”

The lecture was dedicated to the late Charles McIntosh, former Treasurer of GECCU and his family, represented by daughter Zaura McIntosh, who received a token of appreciation in memory of her father’s work to the organization.