LivingNow interviewed members of the team of a banking organisation – MECU, a credit union. Ron Laurie, business consultant heading up Integ Solutions, and Elizabeth, editor of this magazine, sat in a meeting room in Kew, Victoria, speaking with team members, one by one, and were blown away by the good that these guys are doing at the same time as running a commercially viable business.

When we spoke with MECU, the Al Gore movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, had just been released and all this was truly ground-breaking. Now, interestingly, the same movie has had such an impact on us all (thankfully) that some of these concepts are familiar to us – but I urge you to remember that these bankers have been here in our own Downunder breaking the ground for quite a while before the community realised it should be done.

Group Manager Marketing and Development

Rowan’s background is in property. He spent four years in real estate, after deciding about two weeks into it that it was not his game. However, the need for experience kept him there. He moved out of property real estate into social housing, public housing, homelessness, and women’s refuges. Rowan stayed in that for about four years and then moved into an industrial relations role with the state government. After nine years of public service he had a hankering to go back and find some experience to do something in a commercial environment, to blend the commercial realities of running a business together with the social values of the not-for-profit sector. It was then that Rowan discovered credit unions. He’s been in credit unions for about 14 years. MECU started as a very small organisation and has built up over the years. They’re one of the larger credit unions in Australia, with about 100,000 shareholders and manage about 1.2 or 1.3 billion in assets.

Rowan: This organisation started out of CSIRO. We clicked into our 50th year on 19th September. At that time, scientists in the CSIRO could not get personal credit at anything less than about 20% – so they formed their own credit co-operative. And that’s pretty much how every credit union in Australia started – in response to consumer finance. When we looked at credit unions five years ago, that was no longer the issue. So we said, if we can’t define a purpose for credit unions, why do we exist? We’re a co-operative, we’re owned by 100,000 shareholders, we’ve got about $150 million in capital. The best thing we can do – if we can’t define a purpose for a credit union – is to give that money back, turn the lights out and close the doors and say, ‘Go and bank with a bank’. If you can’t define what it is you do, then you shouldn’t be in existence. Before we took that decision, we said, ‘Let’s go and have a look around. We can’t be the only organisation that’s asked itself those questions. Let’s look at the ethical banks in UK, North America, Canada – and ask ourselves if their business model is relevant for the Australian marketplace’. So I spent time with some of those banks, came back to Australia and said, ‘Look, I think there is a role. We don’t turn the lights out just yet. All we need to do is go back to basics’.

If we go back to basics – credit unions were formed in response to a social need at the time, and that was credit. If the premise still stands, and we believe that it does, we’re social enterprises, we’re businesses. The profit that we make is our members’ profit. The profits we generate are our owners’ profits. It’s just that the social issues have changed. Let’s look at the business we’re in. Housing finance, motor vehicle and consumer credit – that’s on the lending side. On the deposit side, a group of people comes together and saves with us and those moneys we lend to people who borrow from us. What are the contemporary issues around housing? We’ve got a generation of people who can’t afford to buy a home. What’s that going to mean longer term? We’ve got water conservation issues around housing, we’ve got energy issues around housing. So it’s a business with a socially responsible set of glasses on, and there are plenty of issues that are relevant to that type of business. If you look at motor vehicles, they are one of the biggest generators of CO2 and impact on global warming and climate change. If you look at personal credit, one of the contemporary issues is that there is too much of it, that people are at high levels of indebtedness, and it is placing stress on families.

So if we are a socially responsible business in those three markets, then how do we reinvent this business so that the business that we do makes a positive influence in those three key areas – so we’ve gone about redesigning the organisation, redesigning the products? We were the first provider of finance in the world to price its motor vehicle finance according to the environmental efficiency of the motor vehicle. We’ll be the only provider of car finance in the world that has neutral net CO2 impact because, working through a not-for-profit ‘green’ company who have a tree-planting program, we go through a process of sequestration; we’re offsetting all the CO2 that our vehicles produce. We finance about 3,000+ vehicles. We’re probably only months away from having zero CO2 emissions from our vehicles. The cheapest loans go to the most environmentally efficient vehicles and all the vehicles get a CO2 offset. Now, we don’t have a green product and the standard product. We just say that there should be a better way to finance motor vehicles at this time, in this environment, in this community. So we finance our motor vehicles that way.

Okay, personal credit is a big issue. What is one of the main issues on credit? Credit cards. You and I have received in the past, probably just before Christmas, unsolicited offers of more credit. ‘Just sign here and have a happy Christmas.’ We give you a guarantee that we will never give you an unsolicited offer of pre-approved credit. We will never push credit on a person, ever. We don’t think that’s a responsible thing to do.

So let’s look at a credit card. It’s got to be price competitive, it’s got to have an environmental element, and it’s got to have a social element. We’ve just covered the social element. The environmental element is that we produce a lot of credit card blanks. So we’ve gone out and sourced an environmentally responsible plastic for our cards. It’s not produced here in Australia – we have to bring it in from Italy. So we now have the only card in Australia that’s environmental. We’d like to go to biodegradable, but that poses a few more challenges. I’m learning about the waste hierarchy – from PETG to biodegradable. We try to challenge the industries to start thinking. Also to challenge the banks. We’re the first credit union in the world to be a signatory to the UNEP, United Nations Environmental Program.

We sit at the table with Westpac, and ANZ and NAB, and we challenge them to do the same things that we do because they’re going to make a bigger impact on the community than we will ever make. We’ve got 100,000 members. They’ve got millions of customers. So we go to them and we say, ‘If we’re going to put out environmental plastic, you should put out environmental plastic’, or ‘We’re going to put out environmental car financing – you should too’. Or if we move into the area of housing, we have a very low interest rate on a first house, and we provide $120,000 loan off that. We’ve got products that are priced very low on the basis that you put in water and energy saving in the home, and you get the cheaper rates. In the initial days people would have said, ‘You guys are a financial institution. You don’t have a chimney on your roof, you’re not producing enormous amounts of CO2, how can environmental issues be relevant?’ It’s our indirect impact that’s relevant. So we’re trying to redesign all our products to make a positive difference on indirect impacts. We’re working with Vic Urban here in Victoria on a house affordability project, called 1-in-10, so that one in ten houses on a housing development project will be sold for 25% less than the market value of the house so that Vic Urban will have shared equity in the house which, over a period of time, transfers back to the owner of the property. The house is the same quality as the one next door but will only be made available to a low income family. We’re financing those properties.

So there are lots of things you can do around providing finance in the sustainability space. In fact, I was getting to the point where I was getting a bit old and cynical, like we all do. I thought that in this business of banking, you can only compete on price – that’s a mug’s game. A credit card is a credit card, and a cheque book is a cheque book – until such time as you take a step back and look at the business you’re in, go back to your values and look at your products in a different light; just attach the values to the product.

An induction process we do here for new staff tries to break down all this theory around brand, what it all means, and what we’re trying to do. I’ve bored so many boards to tears over the years – and management colleagues – talking about sustainability, and the easiest way I’ve found to get this message across to the new staff is I use a piece of soap. I ask them, “Describe this piece of soap for me”, and people will say, “It’s round, it’s blue, it smells nice and you use it every day”. Then I turn the soap over and people can see the Body Shop logo on the top. Then I ask them to tell me about the piece of soap, and they tell me it’s not tested on animals, that it comes from an ethical provider, that a percentage of the profits go to help women with self-esteem issues, that a percentage of profits goes to help the AIDS program in Africa, that it’s produced in Scotland by people from a low socio-economic background. I say, “Guys, you’ve just solved the issue of brand. That piece of soap is now Body Shop soap, and what have you done? You’ve identified all these values that exist around this piece of soap, and all we’re trying to do with this business is attach those values around home loans, car loans and personal loans – end of story”.

Elizabeth: Are you operating in other states of Australia?

Rowan: About 80% of our business is in Victoria. We have service centres in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra. We have members all over Australia. The vast bulk of our business is done direct. Because our traditional markets have been in science, technology, aviation and education, a lot of our members live overseas and business is conducted overseas. Of the 100,000 members, about 65 or 70,000 live in Victoria.

Elizabeth: So people in other states are going to be able to access you and do internet banking through things like that. People get their housing loans everywhere these days don’t they?

Rowan: A lot of people who are phoning 132 888 have no idea where that is. 132 888 is a national service centre based in Moe, Gippsland. Down there we’ve had a business partner for a long time. It was a merger partner; when we picked it up, it had seen better days. The SEC had downsized and there were high levels of unemployment. We have 30,000 members down there, out of a population of 67,000. Now, a purely profit generating business would have said, ‘Let’s pull out of town; this is not the place to be; the prospects for Latrobe Valley over the next decade or more aren’t looking terribly flash, let’s downsize and move out.’ We took a different view. Because we’re a co-operative, we took a view that our business needs to support the local community. So we have a 42-seat call centre down there. We’ve just spent half a million dollars on upgrading that centre so it will probably take 70 or 80 people as we grow. When we grow nationally, Moe and the Latrobe Valley reap the reward, and local businesses recognise that. It’s a very small community. Down there we’re a bigger fish in a much smaller pond but we put our call centre down there and we also do all our loan processing down there. We’ve got some young people who are quite highly skilled now processing mortgage documentation all over Australia out of that location and the business people love the fact that we are there because there are people out there buying lunches and coffees, that part of Moe now is quite vibrant, kicking along.

Ron: When you reassessed the values that you operate from in terms of the community bank, did you find the clientele moved with you with those values?

Rowan: Good question. It’s a combination. About 48 % of our 100,000 shareholders describe themselves as socially responsible or socially progressive consumers. They’re the type of people who are buying organic, or they’re buying green energy or they’re investing in SRIs. So they’re making choices now about the purchase of other products and services based on the reputation of the organisation. So for that group of people it’s about being true to what the co-operative values were. It’s about saying they joined us for a purpose. Some joined because it was price alone, others joined us because they actually believed in the co-operative approach to banking. So this approach to doing business is really saving face with that group of people, it’s going back and saying, ‘Yeah you can actually make money by being a socially responsible business, and this is your business. We lend your deposits, your billion dollars plus in deposits we put out into the market with these types of products. So it’s retention for that group of people.

The second group that this is attractive to is people who don’t already bank with MECU, but are organic food shoppers and the LivingNow readers, the people who are saying, ‘I’m looking for something a bit different in banking. I know I can invest in SRI and equities and managed funds but when it comes to cash deposits I want to know what the choices are. We’re saying to that group of people that there is a choice – you can use your cash deposits in these types of ways. A lot of people don’t make that connection between cash deposits – how their cash deposits are being used. They do think about that in terms of managed funds, purchasing equities; so what we’re trying to say to people now is: ‘Those same principles can apply to your everyday cash. And if you want your everyday cash sitting in your transaction account to be used to fund environmentally responsible car finance or socially responsible credit cards or environmentally responsible and affordable housing loans, then run your everyday transaction account with MECU.’

Ron: Do you see the external banking institutions recognising the values that you’re standing for and approaching you in a different sort of way?

Rowan: I think the only bank in Australia that is not responding to consumers’ needs for more socially responsible banking is the Commonwealth Bank, but I’d say the new CEO will probably address that. I think he’s been brought in to change the culture of the Commonwealth Bank. Then you look at Westpac. Westpac’s doing some terrific work in the sustainability space; more so I think within its internal operations and its culture rather than its products. Probably the same with the ANZ bank; they’re doing a little in terms low small value personal loans for people on fixed incomes. I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily innovative – we’ve been doing that for 50 years. The NAB again is active in the sustainability space but probably again more so within its internal operations rather than its products. So I think three of the big 4 banks have their eye set on the need to become more responsible in their banking practices. They’re always going to have the challenges that a co-operative doesn’t – they’ve got to maximise the profits for their shareholders, whereas our shareholders and our customers are the same people. So structurally we’re very different organisations. Now I’ve got to satisfy your needs both as a consumer and as a shareholder rather than your needs as a consumer and external sector needs as a shareholder.

So while we are a profitable organisation, we don’t seek to maximise the profits from our shareholding members. It’s about giving good value and maintaining the financial strength of the business, and it’s very strong, and the strength in itself gives people confidence to invest with us. We’ve got some quite large investors now, both not-for-profit sector investors and government investors at a local level, at a commonwealth level and a state level. Our largest investor would now have at any point in time somewhere in excess of 20 million dollars with us, and those guys traditionally haven’t banked with credit unions, I’ve got to tell you. Credit unions weren’t on their radar. Credit unions were not on the radar of local governments, or of the state education system here in Victoria, or even necessarily of the not-for-profit sector. Our approach to banking has interested those groups of people, but what also gives them confidence is the fact that there’s a very solid business, very high levels of liquidity; so investing with us is not an issue for them.

Elizabeth: Now how did you go out and find those people or did they find you?

Rowan: Some found us, which is always cool, always nice. Some we’ve had a relationship with for a long time but not a banking relationship. So we might have done something – we might have serviced their staff or worked within the community so that we’ve known them but they’ve known us at different levels. It might be because we’ve invested money in their communities in scholarships, or professional development or running science classes or something, that the relationship may have been there, but now it’s a banking relationship as well as a relationship where we invest back into their community. Others have come about simply by some of the advertising that we would place, whether it was in the Big Issue or Ethical Investor, or some of the conferences we would present to. People have been intrigued and have asked the questions and have come to us. A good example would be the state education sector here. We’ve traditionally serviced teachers in the secondary education sector for about 35 years, but just the teachers not the schools. The schools now are beginning to bank with us, and this year we will increase. I expect we will achieve 100% growth in schools investing with us, going up into the tens of millions of dollars increased business in a 12-month period from the state education sector.

Jelina Mitrovic

I’m in Community Relations. I form partnerships with the not-for-profit sector. We look at organisations we can form partnerships with to address commitments we’ve made in the EPA . For example, we have a partnership with Big Issue – great organisation – I love them. We provide funding so that they can train their vendors so that they can learn to sell more efficiently, improve their earning capacity and better their lives. We provide funding to put on a fortnightly breakfast which doubles up as a sales meeting. This improves their capacity to sell. Rowan and I are actually going to go out and sell The Big Issue ourselves to see what it is like for the vendors.

Eizabeth: Oh! That’s great!

Jelina: Yeah – that should be an experience. I’m having heart failure just thinking about it. Just imagine a person that has not had a lot of education or not a lot of contact with the public. For them to go out on the street corner and wave around a magazine and get people to buy it would be quite a daunting experience. So the better we can equip them, the better they’re going to do, and the better for the magazine as they’ll retain that staff. Apparently a lot of people who try to sell the magazine don’t even make it through the first session of selling the magazine. It is quite demanding.

I work for quite a lot of organisations, not-for-profits, and put into plan those sorts of agreements that will better their social capacity, better the community.

Ron: So you work with them strategically with their social impact – at what level?

Jelina: Usually general management.

Ron: What other types of organisations?

Jelina: The Gould League. We’ve put together a project with those guys in the Gippsland region where we have a cluster of five schools. We started off with quite a small program where we were going to fund them to go into a certain number of schools but we got more organisations involved in Gippsland and now it is a bit of a community project where we’re helping them to retrofit their schools to minimise their footprint on the environment.

For the past two or three months I’ve been working on the sustainability report for MECU and revising the covenants and looking at the sustainability project.

Elizabeth: You guys have got to be the most exciting corporation, and no-one knows what you’re doing.

Ron: When you’re engaging with those community groups how do they relate to you compared with another major financial institution like a major bank? Do you detect a different attitude?

Jelina: Yes, they do have a different attitude. We don’t have shares. We’re a banking co-operative, we’re a mutual stemming from a credit union history. We try to help out the community, reduce the ecological footprint and also maximise community capacity. The values are aligned between the two organisations. I think we do share a lot of the same values – integrity, working holistically. We’re not trying to maximise our profits – just get the best deal for our members. So I guess we’re lucky in that respect.

Ron: So do you think there is a way that they see partnerships in financial institutions and feel more comfortable working with you?

Jelina: Yes, I guess it comes back to sharing the same values. Maybe there is a bit of cynicism with the big four – but the bigger banks do great work with charities, and I don’t want to bag them at all. I guess in terms of relationships there is more of a natural fit between not-for-profits and a co-operative.

Ron: How do you personally connect to the work you do, in terms of your values and the way you look at life?

Jelina: I’m a bit of a corporate hippy. It’s great to work for an organisation where the values support my own. I really do enjoy that. Working on the sustainability reporting and just looking at the different initiatives that come up, including products – for example the PETG credit cards, working on the Go Green car loans – and researching what else is out there, what else we can deliver to lesser our ecological footprint. I try to do my own bit too. It’s great to work for an organisation that’s leading the way – for a small organisation such as our own, we’ve done quite a bit.

Ron: Are you from a banking industry background yourself?

Jelina: I worked in New York for a while for an organisation called Wall Street Transcripts, and you see a lot of cut-throats. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. So to work for an organisation that cares for the environment and social aspects is huge.

Ron: Do you see there is a developing trend along the lines of more community banking, more social responsibility?

Jelina: Definitely. You see so many organisations now producing a sustainability report. Go back ten years and it would be just the resources industry producing these. Also you see people trying to go back to basics by purchasing organic foods and trying to cut out preservatives and artificial flavours and colours as well. I think that extends to acting socially in other aspects in their lives – not just what they’re putting into themselves.

Ron: Tell me about the work you’re doing with the sustainability report and triple bottom line reporting. You’re involved in that area?

Jelina: Yes, I’m involved in co-ordinating the report. So I liaise with different departments in MECU to produce data. For example, I work with the Lending Department to see how many Go Green loans we’ve financed throughout the year, how many trees we’ve planted, how many CO2 emissions we’ve nullified – to see how we’ve lessened the footprint and contributed to society.

Ron: Have you always had this corporate hippy outlook on life or has there been something that has transpired to make a change?

Jelina: I’ve always had a more social interest. I volunteer at Hanover, which is a homeless shelter, and I’ve been working there for three years, but prior to that I worked at Wall Street. If I did have those values…but I guess that has led me away from that really stern and really hard capitalist point of view into where I am now considering social and environmental excellence.

Ron: How do you find the culture in the organisation?

Jelina: I think it is a great culture. I think a lot of it stems from the organisation values. The staff support it; they support sustainability strategies. I think the way they support their managers is a crucial element of the culture and why, in my view, staff here are quite happy. We had a staff survey which showed overall 82% satisfaction. That’s huge, and it’s an improvement on last year.

Ron: Regarding the impact of the organisation in society as a whole; do you see you are contributing quite positively to community collaboration and interaction?

Jelina: Definitely. Just through our community development program. Let’s face it. We’re small fry, but the organisations we’re working with – we do feel we’re making a difference to them and to the community development in that way. With the design of our products as well, everything has a flow-on effect. Maybe we’re putting a bit of a challenge to the banks to follow in our footsteps. We’re definitely contributing to the community and lessening our footprint.

Ron: Where do you see it in terms of the future, relating to your services and products? What do you see coming down the track in this regard?

Jelina: I’d like to see a closer alliance between us and the not-for-profit sector in that maybe we can provide banking services for them and do a bit of research around what they need and maximise their income instead of theirpaying excess fees.

Ron: Is there anything you’d like to comment on in what you see in terms of social change?

Jelina: I hope I am contributing to social change. Even within my generation, I see with my friends the mentality and the attitude starting to shift. We have to. Things like Al Gore’s film are must-see movies.

Ron: Do you have a plan or a strategy to look at the youth market and align some of those emerging values in the youth?

Jelina: I think we will in the future. It’s important to capture that. With a lot of financial institutions they’re trying to get the younger guys in, but, with generation Y, we’re not very loyal. We shop around. So it’s kind of harder to capture that market. I’m sure in future we will go down that path and we need to. Our membership is ageing and we need to replenish and replace. I’d have to check the stats, but the majority would be sitting around 40 or so and through to retirement. There’s not a lot we have in terms of the youth market, and we definitely need to go out and attract those guys, but it’s just how you go about it, offering everything, and knowing that they won’t stick with us in the long term.

Jacob Edwards – Personal Banking Manager

Ron: The readers of LivingNow are interested in looking at alternatives, specifically around sustainability issues, and also alternative ways of looking at the world and potential solutions to economic, cultural, environmental sorts of things. So MECU was suggested to us as an organisation that is cutting edge in doing these sorts of things.

What kind of individuals do you find want to bank with MECU? Is there a certain characteristic?

Jacob: Not really. If you put a cross-section of them in a room you’d struggle to see something consistent with them all. They range from terribly wealthy ex-pilots who think we do a good job with banking and have no interest in sustainability, to a 23-yo kid with dreadlocks who has just bought his first home and think it’s fantastic that we do something different. But I think the sustainability does appeal to a wide cross-section. When I look at my family, my grandparents are interested in that sort of thing, and recognise it’s important, and so does my younger sister. Of course, at the same time, we’re just a bank, and you might not even realise what we do – just someone who has a decent loan rate.

Ron: When you deal with people and you mention to them the sustainability background and issues that MECU are interested in, do you find that people are interested, and more so than what would normally be in MECU as an organisation?

Jacob: Yes certainly, but, because a lot of our products and services are linked back to those green issues or social issues it’s hard to get through a conversation about anything without touching on a link between a product and an issue or the support that’s been given through the product.

Ron: Have you always been in the banking industry?

Jacob: Yeah – left uni six or seven years ago from Tasmania and I’ve been working here ever since.

Ron: I understand that you are part of an internal initiative that looks at the footprint that MECU has on the environment.

Jacob: Yes, the board has come up with a great strategy. There’s a marketing component of course, but it’s one thing to say we’re going to do it, and another to actually do it. I personally think the most important thing is to embed it and have people do it.

So that’s what Footprints, our committee, does, making sure that people know what’s going on and are engaged in it. No matter what month it is, we always have something going on or some sort of cause, whether it be social, or environmental, or economic. My part on that committee is that I look after all inductees, all new employees. I run a session with them on sustainability and the environment and why it is important and why as an organisation we can do more than perhaps the government and certainly an individual can do. So that’s essentially what the committee does. It’s just a voice box from the board down to not only the staff but the wider committee.

Ron: Can you give us an example of what type of initiatives you look at in Footprints?

Jacob: Recently we had ‘Travelwize’ month, where we put about 80% of our staff through about a one hour training session on sustainable driving principles – changing gear early, maintaining your car, the type of car you buy, the type of petrol you buy, the time of day you drive your car. It was a fairly interesting, fun and light, engaging activity. We got huge results. Everyone’s been talking about how much they saved, and this sort of thing. At the moment we’re ‘Looking at energy’ month. We’re walking around looking at the building and asking things like, ‘Can we de-lamp in here?’ We’re looking at seals on fridges – and taking it home, looking at my own fridge seal; do I need to have the air conditioner on? All those little things to engage staff at work and to take it home as well.

Ron: Do you see that as raising awareness of sustainable issues?

Jacob: Definitely. Some of the kids downstairs are fresh out of school and it’s great to see them in the lunchroom, looking at the bottoms of their lunch containers to see if they can recycle them. Yes, awareness has certainly been raised. That 18 year-old girl at the pub on a Friday night, she’s not going to be flicking her cigarette butt out into the garden. There is a knock-on effect.

Ron: When you’re inducting the new employees, are they overtly aware that there are issues of sustainability that MECU champions? Is that a surprise to them? What effect does that have when they realise they are working for an organisation that’s got a mind on other than just profit in a corporate sense?

Jacob: I think they have an awareness of it. It’s something we bring up in the interview process and ask what they think of sustainability and whether they are aware of what MECU does, but they are a little taken aback that we’re actually doing things about it. Yeah – they are surprised but happy to be surprised.

Ron: Tell me about your own personal values. Are they congruent?

Jacob: Oh, most certainly. Definitely since Rowan has ramped all these things up. I think that everyone goes through life trying to do good, but blindly doing good is often bad. I’ve recently bought a house and I considered green aspects and environment and my own footprint. We have a footprint calculator we use here – so I weighed up various houses – and could see that I’d be using 5.6 global hectares if I bought a bigger house at the beach rather than 4.3 if I bought another house. Purchasing a car as well…me and my partner Cath both think about that sort of thing. Obviously there is a money thing there as well, as you want to save on petrol. We’ve just got the power connected at our new house, and we’ve bought green energy. It’s not rocket science. Just having a basic awareness of how important that grass roots support is, it’s a bit of a no-brainer.

Ron: You mentioned a footprint calculator. Is that a way of interacting with your clients when they’re talking about their finances, is it within MECU?

It’s an EPA calculator that looks at the size of your home, how many people are in it, whether you have running water, do you eat meat, how often do you travel, do you travel by plane, all these sorts of things, and it spits out how many global hectares it takes to sustain Jacob. We currently use four times the earth’s mass – so that’s very bad, and obviously the lower figure you can get, the better.

Ron: Is that something you have a conversation about with your clients potentially or not?

Jacob: Not as a matter of course. If you’re coming in for a loan, you don’t really need to be discussing whether you eat meat or not, but we raise that in our induction with staff. Once these sorts of topics come up with our clients – members we call them – they are more than happy to engage and discuss those things. It’s a fairly interesting concept – we need four worlds to sustain our own – and people will engage to how much they want to. We don’t force it down their throats but if they want to get more involved we’ve got tons of stuff we can email out to them.

Ron: How much more engaged do you think you are with this sort of thing in working with an organisation like MECU than you’d be when working with another mainstream banking institute?

Jacob: It’s hard to say of course, but very much so, again, awareness being the key. I just would not be aware of these things. Everyone watched Al Gore last night on TV; everyone’s got a basic awareness of what’s going on, but sitting at the pub and bringing out a nice little fact like the four worlds thing can have an effect. So I’ve certainly become more personally engaged and have stronger feelings than before working at MECU.

Ron: For instance, the Al Gore interview: was it a topic of conversation today around the coffee machine?

Jacob: Yes, everyone had a chat this morning and some said we should make tickets to see the movie available to the staff.

Ron: What part do you see MECU playing in the wider social environment that it’s part of?

Jacob: Basically lobbying – that’s our main power as an organisation. As far as companies go, that’s where I suddenly switched on and thought we can do more. Out of the top 100 economic entities, 66 are corporations, 44 are countries. The balance of power actually sits with companies. So, from a social aspect, in relation to all those issues, we can do more as a company, hopefully an increasingly bigger company, to ensure we can do more, but it’s certainly opened my eyes to see that’s actually our avenue for achieving what we want to achieve. We can do a lot of little grass roots things, like buying green power as 200 individual staff, but when we consider we can lobby the 20,000 staff of credit unions Australia-wide, that’s a big change, and then all the credit union members Australia-wide, 3 million let’s say. That’s a huge change, and then every other institution in Australia, and we can almost encompass all of Australia. That’s where I see the serious impact really coming from. Having said that, it’s good that we all do our individual things, and what MECU is doing now is great, but I’d like to think that’s where we’re heading.

Ron: So you see MECU as a vehicle for social change.

Jacob: Certainly. Obviously, again, it’s just a bank, but it certainly contributes, and it will be a catalyst. Everyone who comes in to get a home loan just gets a home loan, but if they go home with a seed in their mind to plant a tree or stop watering the garden, that’s where the catalyst has a bigger effect.

Ron: Do you have notions of living on the edge of a cusp of a new initiative of something that’s going to get bigger in terms of people’s awareness of sustainability issues and in financial institutions in particular?

Jacob: I’m aware that it’s rather novel and cutting edge, what we’ve done, or what Rowan’s done, and he has to take credit. At the same time, I come into work at 9 and I go home at 5 and it has become part of my life, and if I thought of it as something edgy and really different and diverse, it wouldn’t be as real. When it does embed itself into ‘This is my job and this is what I do, and I’m just a banker, but I have this aspect over here as well’, then it becomes a bit more everyday.

Every now and again I’ll be at home, sitting on the couch, feet up, and chatting away and Cath, my partner, will say, ‘Oh, what did you say then?’, and I’ll be nattering away, not thinking about it, and it makes you wake up and think, ‘I made a bit of a difference today; did something good’. I don’t think that most people who work here consciously think 24/7 ‘Wow, I’m doing something fantastic’ but when you dig deep and think about it, it’s a very nice thing, a bit warm and fuzzy.

Ron: Do you think there’s a sort of pride in working here?

Jacob: Certainly. I think the same way people are picking up their containers and looking for the recycling code, it’s been embedded into the culture. If you were to ask anyone working around the service centre to give you five words about MECU, two of them would be sustainable or green or social. Everyone is fairly proud to be involved with it. It’s certainly better than working for Exxon or something.

Elizabeth: It seems to me that Rowan has spearheaded the move into the environmental and social conscience thinking. Is this the case?

Jacob: I imagine he would not have told you that. He, as head of Marketing, needed to look at what we were doing. We needed something different. We were just a credit union and most likely would have fallen by the wayside in the future if we didn’t do something. So he went and looked at the Body Shop and other organisations doing different things and came up with this. I think it was a bit of a Eureka moment. It’s fairly obvious once you come upon it that you can spend a bit of time and spend a bit of money doing these good things, environmentally and socially, but it also has that economic benefit. We’ve certainly prospered a great deal; from that green aspect core to our marketing.

Elizabeth: He did say he’d gone overseas and done research. At the time I thought it was a board directive, but sounds as though it’s Rowan’s brainchild rather than a board initiative.

Jacob: It’s Rowan’s baby. He’ll pitch his ideas to the board and they’ll usually take them on, with wider agreement from everyone. He spends a lot of hours sitting and playing and thinking – emails coming out at 1 o’clock in the morning about his ideas. So it was certainly from him.

Elizabeth: Is he on the same level as other GMs? What might the other guys think?

Jacob: Rowan is the touchy, feely, marketing guy. John is the personal banking guy – so he’s about numbers and stats – so it works out for him. Then the risk guys and the corporate services guys – it’s working for them too. Everyone is definitely behind it. It’s brought a lot of good to everyone’s roles.

Ron: Have you got more to say?

Jacob: I was actually thinking while we were chatting we need a purple product. We’ve got green, social, but we need purple now.

Ron: What would you say is purple?

Jacob: I don’t know, a home loan where you get a little bit of spiritual therapy, a reiki with your home loan; a kinesiology session with your term deposit. I’ll tell Rowan. He’ll come up with something.

Elizabeth: Does this fit in with your own thinking? Are you into spiritual development?

Jacob: My partner is a kinesiologist – so she’s raving mad about all that sort of stuff. I’m not crazy about it, but I certainly have my sessions every now and again, and all that sort of gear. There’s always an incense stick burning in my house. I get a bit ribbed by the boys sometimes, but I live.

Elizabeth: Are you a meditator?

Jacob: I’ve got my own style of meditation. I’m not ‘Aum’ and crossed legs and all that sort of thing, but I think everyone does to a certain degree. I’ll typically stick on a CD and go and lie down. Cath’s into meditation. She’ll sit there with her Buddhas around her and meditate in her little room.

Elizabeth: What sort of CDs do you put on?

Jacob: Anything that’s slow, contemporary, like David Gray or Coldplay …. Something slow and a good melody.

I’ve been getting into a bit of running. I ran the OxFam 100km run. I always run with an iPod to keep me interested. I programmed 50 faster songs in there for when I want to go running, and Cath had invaded one of my play lists with the Tibetan monks and they were ‘Aum…’ and I was running along and thinking ‘What the hell?’ So it’s got into my life, but not always in a good way.

Elizabeth: Did you go mad at her?

Jacob: No. I just pressed delete.