24 BARBADOS PUBLIC WORKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE CREDIT UNION LIMITED Board of Directors’ Report (Continued) upgrade form part of the upgraded suite of services available on the online banking platform, specifically designed to enhance operational efficiency and enable faster service delivery. Real Time Payments (RTP) This service allows members to send and/or receive funds between their Credit Union account and accounts at other financial institutions, whether in their own name or in another member’s/customer’s name. As part of the process and to ensure member security, members will receive real time confirmation of the transaction settlement once it has been completed. BillPay Upgrade During the reporting period the Credit Union embarked on the upgrade of the backend of the existing BillPay solution, transitioning from the previous end of day manual process, to an automated delivery of payment information through the Surepay payment network. The upgraded BillPay service passes the payment information from the Credit Union to the Surepay platform in real time when a member completes a payment request in the front-end module, improving on the previous batching of payments and the once daily end of day transfers done under the old system. Collectively, these changes will: • Significantly reduce the time for members’ transfers to be credited to accounts at the various vendors supported by Surepay (BillPay), and at other financial institutions (RTP). • Allow for same day transfer/receipt of funds to/from other financial services institutions. • Provide members with confirmation of the completion of their transaction and the payment status making for easy tracking. • Allow members access to all billing parties supported by Surepay, both in the present and the future. Member Engagement We continued to attract new members, resulting in total membership of 111,118 as at the end of the reporting period, an increase from 107,506 as at March 31, 2022. This growth demonstrates the trust and confidence the wider Barbadian community continues to have in our Credit Union’s ability to effectively meet their financial needs. The trust and confidence placed in us, being a member-owned co-operative is not something we take lightly, as well as ensuring a consistently high level of member satisfaction is critical to ensure this trust is not eroded. We are pleased to note that we continue to perform well in this area as we registered a Customer Satisfaction Score this year of 84.7 percent compared to 83.2 percent as at March 2022, both against a benchmark score of 80 percent. Despite the confidence placed in us as reflected in the membership growth and attainment of our benchmark customer satisfaction score, we know from the reports received that we have not provided as consistent a member experience as we would have liked during the reporting period. There have been reported challenges with our branch wait times, our loan turnaround times and generally our consistent delivery of the quality of service in the branches and across our other channels. This area of quality service delivery continues to capture our attention as we engage with management to determine and address the root causes of the challenges being encountered. Cybersecurity & Resilience Cyberattacks and cybersecurity beaches and exposures pose significant risks to all businesses and is an ongoing issue for all financial institutions regardless of location. Locally we have seen the impact of these attacks across various sectors including retail, health and financial services. As part of our long-established defensive toolkit to proactively counter the possibility of these attacks within our systems, we regularly use independent external assessments to identify any deficiencies within our systems in order to ensure adequate mitigations are in place. Active penetration testing and authorised ethical hacking of our network are some of the tools used to detect infrastructural and system vulnerabilities, and to determine potential threats and areas of weaknesses that could be compromised by malicious/bad actors. The tests simulate realworld attacks and the recommendations coming out of these partnered approaches are used to strengthen the security of our internal systems,
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