2024-2025 Annual General Meeting-Round up

Smart Money Cymru held it's Annual General Meeting last Thursday, 20th March. Thank you to all who attended on the evening. If you couldn't attend, here's a run down of the evening's discussions.

The meeting opened and was declared quorate. Whilst Alun Taylor, the Chair of SMC felt it was a challenging year, it has also been a rewarding year, with the credit union progressing steadily towards meeting its long term strategic objectives, particularly regarding modernising technology and processes.

There was a 12% decline in lending over the year. Members are typically favouring smaller loans. This, along with higher bad debt provisions, meant that SMC did make a loss in financial terms. Whilst this is disappointing, extra support and ways of working has been brought in to support our senior team to in moving forward.

This year saw our biggest merger to date between Newport Credit Union and Smart Money, resulting in us becoming one of the largest community credit unions in Wales. Credit must be given to all the staff involved in this significant moment in our history.

Vice Chair and Treasure Geraint Jones then explained to attendees the financial position of the credit union over the last financial year. To find out more about this and what the audit and compliance team do, please view the official 2024-2024 SMC AGM Document here.

Following on from the re-election of the current Directors and approval of a new Director-Mr. Gerrard Donovan, joining the Directors, the Executive Committee was chosen:

Chair-Mr. Alun Taylor

Treasurer & Vice Chair-Mr. Geraint Jones

Secretary-Mr. Steve Wilcox

To ensure as many members as possible are able to attend, the next AGM date has been set. Members are warmly invited to save the date of 11th February 2026 as a time to get involved in how your credit union is run.