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Celebrating the RCI Team
This month, we are celebrating RCI Bank’s 5th anniversary as a savings bank in the UK. The last five years have seen our company grow to more than 300 employees serving over 100,000 customers. It has also seen us move from Watford to Rickmansworth, obtain a UK banking license (in 2019) and launch 7 new savings accounts.

We are very proud of how far we have come over the last few years and honored to have been recognized with over 20 prestigious awards, most recently including Online Savings Provider of the Year 2020 at the Moneyfacts Consumer Awards, Best Savings Provider for Existing Customers at the Moneynet.co.uk Awards 2020 and the Fairer Finance Gold Ribbon and Happiest Customer Award in 2019 and 2020. RCI Bank was also named a “Which?” Recommended Provider for the Savings Accounts Category 2019.

As we look towards our 6th year in the UK, the country and the world are in a very different place to when we first launched, with many facing a challenging time personally and financially. That’s why we wanted to take this time to celebrate our incredible colleagues who have gone above and beyond to support the community and local charities during this challenging time.

RCI Bank and its sister company RCI Financial Services (together the “RCI team”), has been committed to its community, customers and employees and we are proud to celebrate some of our colleagues.

Amelia Summers, from our cashiers’ team, and Jean Summers, Head of Internal Control, have been supporting the national effort to procure more personal protective equipment (PPE) by sewing suits, scrub bags and headbands for the NHS. So far, they have made 18 scrub suits, 95 scrub bags and 30 headbands. Also, when they aren’t on their sewing machines, they have been painting positivity rocks and placing them around their neighbourhood for people to find.

Jovita Correia, from our information systems team, has a 3D printer at home and realised that she could use it to print PPE visors, together with her husband. Once she had ordered the raw materials, they asked a local Facebook group whether anyone needed visors, and they were overwhelmed by the positive response. In order to meet the demand, they asked the RCI team and Sky (where her husband works) for support.  Sky offered to donate plastic material and both the RCI team and Sky offered cover binders. The Internal Control team also cancelled their Easter eggs production this year and instead donated 1kg of plastic filament for the 3D printing of visor shields.

Jovita worked with Nina Parker from HR and Laura Murphy from Marketing to help distribute the visors. To date they have donated over 1,000 visors to key workers, hospitals and care homes… and they are still going.

  • 100 to Charing Cross Hospital
  • 110 to a nurse from Bristol Hospital
  • 68 to policemen
  • 5 to nurses
  • 100 to ambulance drivers
  • 40 to a Watford Hospital midwife
  • 459 to Healing Hands – Helping NHS to heal group
  • 20 to Water Mill House care home

Mitchell Wheatley from the information systems team – who has been with the RCI team since the beginning – worked with his football team Glenn Sport to raise money for the NHS by doing 3,000km of running, walking and cycling in May. Since 1st May, he and a team of his family and friends have covered just over 9,070km.

Sandra Scott from Network Funding usually spends her weekends at football or other events, but as they were cancelled, she decided she would use this time to volunteer for St John Ambulance. For five weeks she spent her weekends at Harrow HQ training in care and nursing in order to be deployed into NHS hospitals (including NHS Nightingale). She has now completed her training and has since been attending induction days, going on ward walks and has also started working weekend shifts at the local hospital.

Sandra said it was an absolute privilege to be involved in getting our volunteers ready to support their community during this pandemic.

Laura Murphy, Head of Marketing Operations, has also been finding ways to spend her newly found free time by helping local hospitals. Last year she decided to learn crocheting and has answered the request from local hospitals to make handmade hearts as well as others knitted and crocheted items for babies. In addition, she worked with the charity Octopus for a Preemie UK, and have made 7 Octopals, two of which met the very high standards to go to premature babies and the other five went to comfort angel babies.

Finally, the RCI team have donated 35 webcams with microphones to Harefield Hospital. The cameras have been put to good use in the intensive therapy unit and Covid -19 areas by allowing the families of patients to have video calls with their loved ones during treatment. 

So, on this 5-year mark in this RCI Bank story, we say a big thank you to all our colleagues for their incredible gifts to our community during this challenging time. To our customers, we thank you for your continued trust and support. We look forward to next year and to celebrating in a way that we are all more accustomed.

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