Hello all,
Further to our email last Friday, the situation continues to develop rapidly and we are in unchartered territory. We do not know how long crisis measures will have to be in place and it is difficult to quantify the full financial impact these measures will have on credit union Members, the economy and indeed credit unions themselves. We are aware that you have received many calls from concerned members about their sudden loss of income and how they may be unable to meet some or all of their loan commitments.
With that in mind, CUDA has created a web form to help standardise the requests process for loan repayment flexibility. The web form can be utilised where members are financially impacted by the Covid-19 containment measures and are deemed to be in pre-arrears. This is an easy to complete form designed to help you with prioritising the sequence of call backs. See sample version here on this link https://digitalcreditunion.ie/covid19/.
We have also prepared a Procedural Document for you and a Guidance Note for your members to help with the implementation of the new web form.
If you would like to avail of this support we will:
- brand the web form with your credit union name and colours, your version of the URL can be linked / accessed from your website or social media accounts or indeed members can be referred to the form in response to their phone calls. We will talk directly with you about this.
- we will lift from your website, or if not possible, use our standard generic versions of T&Cs, processing of data and privacy notice, which are all necessary links that have to be built into the form.
The two linked documents for your attention are:
- Draft of Procedures Document for internal use by your team, and
- In addition to Procedural Document, please also find attached Guidance Note for Members, “Guide on Loan Flexibility Options”. This is available as a word doc, similar to what we did with MARP document, to allow any relevant customisation you might want to include.
What you need to do if you would like to provide the web form for your members:
- Inform us by return email that you would like to avail of this support, and we will brand the web form for your credit union;
- Provide us with the email address that you would like these loan flexibility requests to be directed to.
We are also building a library of initiatives that colleagues across credit unions are putting in place to support all members through these difficult times, please let us know what steps you are taking to maintain member services and we will collate and share these with you. To help your thinking of this, as well as the forbearance arrangements, we are looking at steps being taken to provide remote access for members to their funds or new loans, reciprocal arrangements with other credit unions, redeployment of staff to member engagement activities, cash management, liquidity management, any other topics surfacing that you are tackling or would like help with.
Finally, CUDA is in constant communication with the Central Bank of Ireland, the Department of Finance and other stakeholders involved in Ireland’s National Action Plan in response to COVID-19 (Coronavirus), last updated 16th March 2020, and we will keep you informed of developments, if there are suggestions you would like to see included please do not hesitate to tell us.
Look forward to hearing from you, keep safe, regards for now, Kevin