GiftAid Extended
From 2013 charities and amateur sports clubs that receive donations of less than £10 will be able to claim GiftAid. This will be the first time that charities will be able to claim GiftAid on the small change collected in buckets and tins to the tune of 25p for every £1 collected. This change has been agreed to overcome the issue of a donor always having to complete a form to permit the GiftAid which is obviously not practical on such small amounts. However, from 2013 each charity will be able to claim up to £5,000 per year as GiftAid without donors having to complete the standard GiftAid form.

Payment Card Risks
As reported in Third Sector magazine’s online news page, delegates at the International Fundraising Congress were told that charities without Payment Card Industry Certificates could be fined or banned from processing transactions. The driver for this is the credit card companies and their targeting of fraud. Any organisation that stores or processes credit card details must have a Payment Card Industry Certificate to demonstrate compliance with the standards set by the industry.

To date it is believed that credit card companies had so far been concentrating on contacting large corporations to ensure they had these certificates, but they are now suspected to be moving to charities. Do you have a certificate? If you do not then there is the potential for you to be fined although we would hope that some leeway will be offered to charities in terms of identifying how to obtain the certificate and agreeing a deadline for this. Some financial advisers are suggesting that if you do not have one then it might work out best if you approach Visa or MasterCard directly in the first instance. The downside is that there will be a cost to achieving certification which relevant experts have cited as being between £7-£35,000 and the process will take somewhere between 2 months and 1 year.

Insurance Market Update – the Reinsurance Market
I am pleased to let you know that the two important reinsurance meetings (in Monte Carlo and Baden Baden) have now taken place and NO increased premiums will be required by the reinsurance market from your insurers. This should maintain the current ‘soft’/highly competitive insurance market for at least another 12 months.