Page 55 - royal-times-14-15

Pot of Gold Bank

The Pot of Gold Bank is the Royal School Cavan’s 2014/15 school bank.
The group is made up of Transition Year students Sara Whitley, Andrea Chan, Tiwani
Akinlabi, Hannah McHugh, Ciaran Flynn and Kate Agaba. We were selected after an
interview process. Our bank representative is Aoife Finnegan from the AIB Cavan
branch.
We usually open on Wednesdays in the school library at lunchtime. We take on
basic banking functions, opening new accounts and taking lodgements, as well as
encouraging the use of internet banking. Our team met up regularly with our teacher,
Ms Trenier to discuss and plan events, fundraising and openings. Our main target
market was the younger years as we wanted to get more people into banking at an
earlier age.
One of our main points of service for the bank this year was to educate people about
banking. As a result, we were invited into Cavan No.1 NS to talk to the 4th, 5th and
6th class pupils about banking and played a game on banking with them. We also
made promotional videos about using banking machines, and handed out leaflets to
customers in the AIB Bank.
We have been open since November 2014, we had our Grand Opening on February
11th in the library where we had a special lunchtime with food and music. Since this
is a regular occurrence for us, we decided to have a fun day for the 1st and 2nd years.
The bank was officially opened by Orla Thornton, the local bank manager. We had a lot
of games for them and a themed treasure hunt based on banking.
We have been a self dependent bank, with a lot of our resources coming from
fundraisers which is also a result of competitions that we have hosted on our
facebook page, such as our like and share competition for cinema tickets. We received
sponsorship for prizes for our raffle from local businesses in town. We also held a
movie day for 1st and 2nd years and a rose day for Valentines where we went around
classes delivering roses.
Our bank team headed to the AIB Build a Bank Regional competition in Derry on the
30th of February. We managed to get into the top 8 but unfortunately did not make
it into the National finals.
Throughout the year, the 6 of us worked very hard together as a team, learnt a lot and
we had an amazing and enjoyable experience.

The Royal Times 2014-2015 55