Coronavirus Hero honoured by the Queen

9 November 2020

3 min read

This year’s Queen’s birthday honours list has included ordinary people, who have been recognised for the incredible way they’ve pulled together during the pandemic. 

We’re incredibly proud of our colleague, Kathryn Davies, who has been awarded an MBE for her outstanding and selfless work during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Kathryn has been part of the team at The Co-operative Bank for the past 32 years. Her role is to support The Bank’s customers who find themselves in more complex financial situations. Kathryn has not only supported hundreds of customers with their finances, ensuring they can go about their day to day life during the pandemic but she particularly became involved in helping customers stuck abroad and needing repatriation during the early part of the lockdown. She single handily dealt with many priority cases ensuring customers had access to cash and were able to reach positions of safety following disruption in the travel industry with bookings and refunds.  

She has also helped to register many more customers on to digital services so they didn’t need to leave their homes and processed business loans and payment deferrals in response to the governments support schemes, ensuring those in need of assistance received help quickly.  

Above and beyond her magnificent financial services achievements, Kathryn volunteered to support NHS workers and patients across the country by organising and distributing care package donations from the Bank’s employees. Care packages were sent to many hospitals across the UK including Greater Manchester, Ormskirk, Stoke, Macclesfield, Tameside, Preston, Stirling and Carmarthenshire. These care packages received great feedback from the hospitals concerned as they were tailored to help the specific needs of those locations and included refreshments, toiletries, iPads and walkie-talkies to help patient and NHS worker communication. Kathryn still undertakes this work on a voluntary basis and has spent over a hundred hours personally overseeing the distribution of the packages. 

Kathryn’s determination and positivity has made a real difference to customers, colleagues and key workers. 

On receiving the award Kathryn said “It’s such a massive honour for me and I honestly couldn’t be any prouder. Whilst it’s a great to be recognised personally, all of my colleagues have worked really hard to look after each other and our customers this year. I’m absolutely thrilled to receive this recognition.”

A massive congratulations to Kathryn on her wonderful achievement. Together, we are people with purpose.

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