FCS Financial: One Hundred Years July 2016 | Page 90

FCS Financial believes education is essential for agriculture and the
cooperative system to grow across the world. Visitors from Namibia were
in the central office to learn more about the Farm Credit System.

Finally, they upgraded their computerized customer database
to a new level of sophistication. To this point, they were using
systems built by the wholesale bank. In a collaborative effort, FCS
Financial teamed up with three other associations: GreenStone
Farm Credit Services in East Lansing, Michigan; Badgerland
Financial of Wisconsin; and 1st Farm Credit of Normal, Illinois.
Donna Patterson of FCS Financial was in the thick of the process
throughout its development. “It took us a while to figure out we had
to take one piece at a time. But we decided to build our new software
for customer relationship management system from Microsoft and
that would be our platform and then we would build off that and
integrate into CRM.” Primarily a contact record, CRM contains all
the demographic information for FCS Financial’s customers and
other important contacts. From that, they built operating systems
for loan origination, loan conversions, disbursements, and receipts.
Teams made up of employees from each of the organizations helped
build the forms, fine-tuning them along the way. Employees now had
a customer’s total information at their fingertips. Nearly 80 percent
of all loans were put through a scorecard process instead of being
analyzed by hand resulting in much faster loan approval.
The financial crisis of 2008 led to what has since been labeled
the Great Recession, its effects trickling down from Wall Street to
virtually all aspects of the American economy. Conservative estimates
say the unemployment rate shot up to 7.2 percent and housing

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Selected References