Professional Services

We are your trusted leaders in insurance, lending, investment and risk management for churches and schools. We are pleased to provide our report for the conference period (2021 - 2023).

Insurance

With unprecedented floods and storms occurring across our nation over the past few years, and record claims paid across the insurance industry and within ACS Mutual, this has placed the insurance industry under extreme pressure with significant premium increases and paring back, or even removal of cover, particularly for flooding. During this period, ACS has provided proactive service to our clients, even before floods arrived in simply checking in on clients and preparation advice, where this has not been the case across the insurance industry generally. Our global reach in negotiating our reinsurance arrangements for ACS Mutual means we are assured that we secure the very best cover and pricing for our clients on a global scale.

ACS have also secured longer term sexual abuse cover for our clients when most of the insurance industry globally have excluded this cover due to the high profile of events and risks historically in this space. Our proactive risk management advice to our clients and how this has been implemented within our churches and schools was critical in order to secure this cover going forward. Our own innovative insurance offering for the National Redress Scheme has enabled most of our clients to participate in this scheme with minimal cost, ensuring that genuine survivors of sexual abuse receive proper closure and compensation without needing to go through the adversarial and costly processes for redress in the legal system. This has also enhanced our reputation with the Federal Government and community generally as a Movement.

Whilst most ACC churches are our clients, we continue to reach a great number of churches and schools who are not ACC and continue grow across the independent church and school space.

Insurance highlights include:

• Grown our assets insured by 11% ($4.5 billion to $5 billion)

• Relaunched a new website and continued to update our interactive online portal containing much risk management content and advice for our clients.

• Our innovative online Insurance Declaration portal is now saving you time with renewals and removing cumbersome paperwork. This has now also provided us with an extensive online database and reporting which greatly assists in our presentations and negotiations with our global reinsurers in Australia, London and Singapore.

• The team works tirelessly to assess, advise on and pay claims made, and to reduce downtime as much as possible. Our strong alignment to our churches, Christian schools and ministries enables us to understand their needs.

Investment Management & Commercial Lending

• Maintained Accumulator at $32 million to 31 December 2022 during a challenging covid economic period and financial strain on our churches

We continue to work hard on continuing to develop our largest leap forward in Church and Commercial Lending, in securing a partnership for a $100m+ lending warehouse fund. This continues to be a long and challenging process with the post covid economic climate and tightening of the credit markets generally. Once established this has the potential to grow significantly over coming years to position us to compete with the major banks and dominate the lending market in our space with competitive, aligned and tailored lending with our specialised skills and experience and knowledge of church. This will leverage our existing expertise with much greater levels of our own funds to lend directly, and greatly improve access to funding for our clients and the ACC Movement and increase ACSF’s profitability over coming years to grow two substantial business revenue streams in Insurance and Lending.

We continue to look for other opportunities to grow and strengthen our business and financial performance to continually increase our significant annual and consistent financial support of our Movement.

Leadership

The ambition of the ACS Financial team is to serve with professionalism and dedication. I believe the team deeply understand the business, our clients and the market in which we operate.

Jon Holloway, our Chief Executive Officer, has led the team with strength and grace, especially through the Covid-19 season.

• Most of the fund has fixed interest deposits, for higher earning returns

Goals and Vision

At the start of this decade, our team is more focused than ever at continuously improving products and services to provide to you, our clients.

The National Executive met in our new office last year, Ps Wayne Alcorn officially dedicating and declaring it opening for our staff. It was time a great time of reflection and thankfulness for all that God has done in our business over the past decade. We remain grateful to God, the ACC Movement, our clients and staff for making this possible

It is an exciting time for ACS Financial, having finalised all legacy loans at the end of 2020. We are now looking forward to and planning for a hope laden decade ahead. Our new 3 year plan to 2025 will have us completely debt free from our legacy non property secured business loans.

As a board, we continue to be committed to building the value of the ACS Financial business. I am grateful for the care they take and diligence they give when exercising their duties. Our desire is to see the team and the business flourish.

We are grateful for your continued support of ACS Financial.

Dr Stephen Crouch Chair of Board: ACS Financial Group, including ACS Mutual