It usually took a few days for the anniversary celebration of the Ayala Coop to be completed with what seems to have become a validation of the excellent year the Coop has just had.
This time, however, that validation came right on the day the Coop was celebrating its annual milestone as the Coop scored a third straight sweep of all the major honors in the KoopBida Awards on the day it was celebrating its 24th anniversary last October 15.
The Coop, for the third straight year, garnered first place among billionaire coops as the best-performing cooperative in terms of asset growth and in terms of membership growth while also being honored with a special award for its “significant concern” for the community nationwide.
The awards were given in ceremonies held at the Narra Ballroom of the I M Hotel along Makati Avenue right after the thanksgiving mass and lunch organized by the Coop in commemoration of its anniversary at Tower One.
Third straight
It was the third straight year the Coop swept the three major awards given during the annual KoopBida Awards, now on its eighth year, which the Makati Cooperative Development Office through the Cooperative Development Council of Makati organizes every year to honor the best-performing coops in the city, which has one of the biggest number of cooperatives in the country. It was the fourth consecutive year, meanwhile, that the Coop earned recognition as the best-performing cooperative in terms of membership growth, with MCDO officials calling the feat a “four-peat.”
Makati City Mayor Ma-Len Abigail Binay signed the trophies awarded to the winners.
Ayala Coop GM Dina Orosa thinks the Coop’s continued success that has resulted in the perennial honors that it has been accorded may be partly attributed to its having served as an attractive and effective vehicle for savings by Ayala Group employees.
‘Aggressive recruitment’
“Our continued growth in terms of membership is a product of our aggressive recruitment effort. Our people get out and the Coop is just waiting in the wings whenever Ayala companies merge. But one advantage the Coop has is its having become an attractive savings vehicle for the Group’s employees,” Orosa said. “It has become an attractive avenue for people to have a better lifestyle as they don’t have to go through a complex process like one has to when he, for example, takes out a loan from banks.”
Ms. Orosa also said a built-in advantage that the Coop has is the return on investment that members earn from their savings on top of the patronage refund they get whenever they take out a loan from it.
Despite the success that the Coop has reaped particularly in recent years, the Coop’s top officer cautioned that it doesn’t intend to take its foot off the pedal nor should it forget the basic or core business philosophy of helping out Ayala Group employees.
Continuing effort
“We intend to continue to think of other exciting and innovative offerings or packages for our members. We also intend to continue our tieups with other Ayala companies as well as other external parties to enable our members to get discounts,” Orosa said. “We will try to keep up our aggressive marketing and remain active in employee engagement activities to maintain our visibility before the Group’s employees. All our team members, in fact, are engaged in promoting the Coop as they visit branch offices of various Ayala companies.”
Ayala Coop CFO Jenny Cura seconded Ms. Orosa’s assessment, saying that the Coop intends to continue providing the best possible savings vehicle for Ayala Group employees while trying to further improve its services to enable its members to enjoy the benefits of being part of the Coop.
“Even as we continue earning recognition from our external stakeholders, we never lose sight of our core philosophy of helping our members, who are our reason for being here,” Ms. Cura stressed.
Continued rise
As the KoopBida braintrust noted, the Coop further boosted its total assets in 2018, reaching the P3-billion mark for the first time with a total of P3.24 billion, which represented an 18 percent growth from the total of P2.7 billion in 2017.
The Coop also reached an all-time high in membership growth with a record total of 37,221 at the end of 2018, an 11 percent increase from the previous year’s 33,618.
Ms. Orosa said such schemes as the Member Get Member Promo that the Coop is launching aims to further increase membership recruitment as well as loan application among members of the Coop.
Based on figures cited by Coop Chairman J.P. Orbeta during his anniversary speech, the Coop continued to register impressive growth in terms of business results. Loan releases as of September 2019, for example, had totaled P1.519 billion, which is above the target of P1.515 billion and 12.9 percent more than the previous year’s figures.
Business growth
Total assets, meanwhile, had registered an 18 percent growth over the same period with P3.49 billion as of September 2019, while total share capital had reached P2.884 billion, a similar 18 percent rise over the same period. The total includes the share capital of 530 Coop millionaires, or members with the share capital ceiling equivalent to P1 million.
Such growth, Orbeta said, has enabled the Coop to share with the less fortunate sectors of society and to undertake more corporate social responsibility projects, including a Brigada Eskwela program with Ayala Group subsidiaries and the Corazon S. Atayde Memorial Foundation in four Bohol schools last May.
The Coop has also partnered with Ayala Corporation, Ayala Foundation, several private companies and Rise Against Hunger Philippines, launching the Be Juan Para sa Kalusugan Project last September 27. The project is a long-term feeding program aimed at enabling 500 undernourished public school students in Pampanga to lead a healthy and active life after six months of participation in the program.