Agricultural Lenders Agricultural lenders are a unique breed in the lending industry. Today, agricultural lenders' technical skills with regard to "number crunching" must be equal to several other important aspects of the agricultural lenders "customer-centric" talents which include;
All of which is critical to long-term customer loyalty in a shrinking agricultural lending marketplace. Agricultural lenders will need the expertise to understand the drivers of change. Forming expectations of future debt repayment capacity requires tomorrow's agricultural lenders to understand the business relationships and environment in which their borrowers make decisions. This expertise is exceptionally important when you consider the complexity of many of today's agricultural enterprises. Many of the multiple entity relationships will be between agriculturally-oriented businesses and businesses for which agriculture is only a minor part of their business portfolio. Many current agricultural lenders do not have the training or experience to assess the credit risks associated with these firms' non-agricultural business activities. Agricultural lenders evaluating the creditworthiness and business performance of horizontally and vertically integrated firms will be far more challenging than traditional agricultural lending. The diverse and unique combinations of assets found in these firms are going to involve unique credit underwriting standards -- a challenging endeavor even for the most seasoned agricultural lenders. Add to that the fact that there is a huge impending gap in the agricultural lender workforce as older, experienced agricultural lenders are reaching retirement age without an equal amount of young agricultural lenders to replace them. The solution to this dilemma lies in a variety of strategies that include "guerilla tactics" to recruit and develop young talent, keeping older experienced staff on a part-time basis, leveraging "stay-at-home-mom" employees and getting people trained up. That's where FCU comes in. With this 24/7 resource available to agricultural lenders today, your institution can get younger workers ready to replace retirees while getting the most out of elder workers who stay working well past retirement. View FCU Lending Degree Programs Here...
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