Customer Stories

"Lawson gives me a kaleidoscopic view of the data."

My experience is perhaps a bit unusual, in that I learned my new job and Lawson at the same time. I had started as the general ledger accountant in June 2006, knowing that Lawson was coming.

On the day Lawson was implemented – October 13, 2006 – I promised myself that I would make it my friend. And I soon discovered that it was producing more information than I had ever hoped.

With Lawson I can access any piece of data from essentially perspective, and Lawson gives me a kaleidoscopic view of the data. I can dissect. I can document. I can do with that data exactly what I want.

I credit Lawson for helping me learn my job. The timing was just perfect.

• T Creed
• Farm Credit of East Central Oklahoma, ACA.

“We refuse to compete with Stupid.”

“Here at Southern Colorado we use AgVantis loan analytics in a couple of ways, but first of all as a measurement of Association profitability per customer. We’re confident by now in our ability to predict accurately the results of our loan pricing, based most especially on a ‘return on assets’ calculation. We use these AgVantis tools to spin down to loan pricing that enables us to be competitive but still profitable.

And loan analytics has proven to be . . . shall we say? . . . an eye-opener: we’ve learned that with some smaller or high-risk loans we cannot, we simply should not attempt to compete.

Let’s face it. Anyone can go out and buy credit. Even the most disreputable of borrowers can eventually find the loans they want. We use AgVantis’ credit-risk and risk-migration-testing modules to identify those borrowers genuinely deserving of Southern Colorado’s trust. We identify those borrowers, and we give them every consideration, every service available to our Association.

In regard to some of these other potential borrowers and the lenders who choose to do business with them, we have an in-house rule. ‘Please don’t compete with Stupid.’”

• R Tomky


• FC of Southern Colorado, ACA

“Approving a loan for a new pick up truck – under a tent – in rural Kansas.”

I was part of the team that helped develop the credit automation and, more specifically, the scorecarding concept and, I must say, I’m very proud of the results, of how the system has served our Association. From a purely numerical standpoint, credit automation has made us much more efficient, and the time savings have been just phenomenal.

It seems to me that Frontier uses scorecarding more than some other Associations might – because of our size, our markets, the geographical territory we serve. But I knew early on that loan analytics was going to serve Frontier well.

I was attending a large farm show in Pittsburg, Kansas, a four-state gathering of potential customers, and I was setting up a loan-processing service on site. We had the computers and the telephones we needed to process a loan quickly. And I remember a local farmer approaching me for a loan to buy a new pickup. He walked into our tent – certainly nothing very fancy there in the heat and the dust – and I asked him a few questions, submitted his answers into the system, and in just a few minutes I was able to approve his loan.

I can tell tell you that particular approval process caught the attention of the people standing around our tent. Our Association amazed some farmers and ranchers that day with the bare-bones nature of the information we required to make a loan.”

• R Kuhle


• Frontier Farm Credit, ACA