Our membership fees are unchanged for the year beginning 1 May. Members will shortly receive a letter inviting them to renew their membership and in the letter I explain some of the background to this decision.
We are expecting a good financial result for the year that ended on 30 April and as a result the ACT’s reserves continue to be strong. The financial result of course reflects the combination of activities undertaken during the past year, all of which will I hope have been of interest and relevance to members and all others who participate in what we do.
My membership renewal letter stresses the commitment to invest across the ACT. We have been doing that systematically, most obviously in the area of our professional qualifications, but it applies across all of our key areas. As you would expect of us, we make the best possible risk assessment of these important investment decisions. Our risk appetite will always be influenced by the level of our reserves and for this reason it is of course most encouraging that we have been able to build these consistently.
I hope you will have followed the detail of our announcement in March about the new format for the AMCT qualification. A key element of the new structure is the inclusion of the Certificate in International Cash Management (Cert ICM) as an eligible module for AMCT, as well as our stated plan to introduce further new certificate modules. The first of these will be in Financial Risk Mathematics, to be followed by a Certificate in Pensions. Both of these should be available during 2005.
With over 650 existing holders of the Cert ICM qualification and the expectation that the numbers of certificate holders will increase rapidly going forward, we came up with the concept of affiliate status for certificate holders. We have therefore prepared a package of benefits to be offered to certificate holders and this was launched a couple of weeks ago.
We introduced the idea of affiliate status specifically because we were concerned that certificate holders might feel that there was insufficient opportunity to remain involved with the ACT once their qualification had been passed. We know that we can benefit in several ways from retaining the involvement of these individuals and that conviction has driven the development of what we have now launched.
As the new financial year at the ACT starts I welcome Stephen Crompton, Stephen East and Malcolm Cooper in their roles as President, Deputy President and Vice President. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Chris Jones, the now Immediate Past President, for his outstanding commitment of time and energy to the ACT. We have launched a new AMCT syllabus, affiliate status and celebrated our 25th anniversary whilst he has been President and I personally have thoroughly enjoyed working with him during his time in office.
Finally, I hope that I will see many of you at our Treasurers’ Conference at the Celtic Manor next week. It promises to be an excellent event.
