Customer Owners,
Happy Holidays from all of us here at Farm Credit of Southern Colorado! It always seems like once we get to Thanksgiving the year just flies by in a frenzy. We hope you all get to take some time to enjoy family and friends this holiday season. We want to thank you all, our customer owners, for your support and business in 2023. We understand that with rising interest rates, volatile prices and weather this year was full of challenges. We are grateful for the opportunity to be your financial partner! This month we are writing this email message from both myself and our Board Chair, Whitney Hansen. We wanted to join together in expressing holiday wishes from both the team and our Board. In addition, we have some exciting strategic news related to technology that the Board and team have been working together on.
Technology Transformation Coming!
“For the last several years, the collective Board has challenged management with finding an independent solution and pathway forward when it comes to a technology platform. Management has been diligent in the task at hand, and we fully support them as we begin this implementation in 2024.
We are excited to make this announcement with management and what this means for investing in the future of FCSC as member shareholders ourselves.”
-Whitney Hansen, Board Chair
We wanted to take this opportunity as we end 2023 to share some very exciting news about our plans for 2024 and beyond. For the past 20 years, Farm Credit of Southern Colorado has been a customer owner of AgVantis. AgVantis is a technology service organization that serves 7 other associations in the Farm Credit system for technology and business service needs. During those 20 years, we have been a proud partner and collaborator with AgVantis in the technology services space. Over the past two years, our management team and Board have been heavily involved in a thorough due diligence process to review our technology and business needs for the future. Those needs include a focus on the ever-changing needs of you, our customer owners and the needs and expectations of our talented employees. We are very pleased to share with all of you that the Board and management team have decided to leave the AgVantis group and to go through a complete technology transition that will take place throughout 2024 and much of 2025. This transformation will involve investment of financial and human capital that will ultimately position us to better provide the necessary tools to serve you for years to come.
This transformation will mean that we at Farm Credit of Southern Colorado will be contracting directly with software vendors to provide world class, up to date solutions, and will not need to go through a third party provider like AgVantis. We again want to pause and thank you all as customer owners of this cooperative. Thanks to your loyalty to Farm Credit of Southern Colorado and the hard work of our employees, we could not be better positioned for this change. We have been reporting record earnings, have built up capital and are now able to focus on new and exciting ways to deliver the credit you need into the future.
Guiding Principles
Throughout our due diligence process and this project there have been some key guiding principles we are referring to and we wanted to share those with you:
We will continue to update you all frequently on this project as we feel it is a vital part of our future. Our updates will include enhancements we expect and progress reports and will be more specific to the software we plan to deploy, so you know where we are in the journey.
Colorado Springs Building Update
As you all recall, we listed the Springs building for sale in late summer of 2023. To date, we have had some showing and a bit of interest, but we still have not received any offers. We continue to be committed to a sale of this asset and a reduction in our overall overhead. We hope that as we finish the year and start 2024, we have more promising news on this subject to share.
Happy Holidays to all of you and we look forward to seeing you all in 2024!
Sincerely,
Jeremy Anderson Whitney Hansen
President & CEO Board Chair
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Christmas – OFFICES CLOSED
Date: December 22nd, Offices close at 12:00 noon
CLOSED: December 25th
Open: Tuesday December 26th
This blog post is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Any information contained in this post is subject to change without notice and should not be relied upon without seeking the advice of a qualified professional. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of our Association. The author and Association are not responsible for any errors or omissions and are not liable for any losses or damages arising from the use of the information contained in this post.