We, Transition year students were introduced to the AIB Build a Bank Challenge when we were given a talk by two bank officials from AIB Bandon, Róisín and Dan. They spoke to us about the competition, the interview and selection process and what would be involved to be successful. Which of course we all wanted to be! Students who were interested in becoming part of the team all took an application form, filled it out and sent it off to the bank. The bank selected 10 people for an interview process, there was six positions available in the school bank. The interviews took place and Six students were selected for a position in the school bank.
Colin Kelleher – Manager
Melissa O’Regan – Assistant Manager
Peter O’ Driscoll – Financial Controller
Aofie Hurley – Sales & Marketing Executive
Heather Burke – Customer Service Representative
Steven Hickey – Customer Service Representative
The next stage was deciding on a name for our school bank! So we had a meeting. Here at St. Brogan’s we love to help fund charities, so it was only natural to dedicate our name to charities represented by bows such as; Focus Ireland, Cope and Cancer Research. The name we came up with was “Brogan’s Bow Bank”
As a bank we wanted to be approachable and friendly, so we went to all year groups from the first years, to sixth years introducing our bank. Having identified our demographic we set out to entice them to bank with us. After some intense brainstorming and many coffees later we came up with a brilliant idea, that surely no other bank would have…raffles, sure everyone loves a raffle. We then targeted the year groups who would have a reason for banking: sixth years and their upcoming debs and fifth years and their trip to Paris. We even made a presentation for first years on banking.
All of this was planned during our weekly after school meetings, it was here we delegated the jobs of our bank and made important decisions like what services we would offer such as loyalty cards and internet banking on our schools iPads. After all these ventures we seemed to get our message across as the students and teachers were lodging with us, but that’s not all. At ‘Brogans Bow Bank’ our community is also important to us, so we asked each other…’what can we do to help further it?’ we decided to give back to our elderly, so off we went to the community home to teach them more about using a computer, this was a great opportunity for our team as it allowed for us to share the knowledge AIB taught us.
On Tuesday 24th February 2015, us “Brogan’s Bow Bank” competed in the Regional Finals of the AIB Build a Bank Challenge in the Silversrings Hotel Cork. Here we had to set up our exhibition and display it for AIB representatives and judges. We were then interviewed by three different judges on our school bank and presentation. After this was the awards ceremony, and we at “Brogan’s Bow Bank” won the COMMUNITY OUTREACH AWARD which we are very proud of!
The bank member’s, Ms Carmel McSweeney (Transition Year Coordinator) and I have put a lot of work into this project and we are proud of what we have achieved!
We the team of “Brogan’s Bow Bank” feel it was both a worthwhile and enjoyable experience and we hope that it will benefit us in the future.