This video (May 15, 2019) profiles the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta and how its cooperative funding model and employee-driven work support community development—especially in rural areas—through partnerships with local financial institutions. Speakers describe concrete community impacts (affordable housing, a widow's repaired roof), emphasize the bank's cooperative ownership and mission as "the bank for the banks," and detail a digital transformation using CRM and cloud platforms (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud) to improve member relationships and service. The video highlights employee commitment (stated staff count) and an ongoing journey toward better data-driven engagement.
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The world's changing and you don't think about any company that starts with federal as being able to adapt quickly. But I think this is the very beginning of a journey that's going to make us worlds better.
My dad worked at a bank. Growing up, I really saw where the communities that had financial institutions were, the communities that made it in rural America. And so being able to travel to those institutions, get to know them, get to know their stories and really see how they're impacting their communities, that's what really gets me going with this job. That's what I really enjoy seeing. And I'm not a commission salesman. I'm not out there just trying to hawk whatever is available. And I really do care about them, care about their institutions and care about their community.
We cover everyone from the largest banking the country to a small community like Adel, Georgia. A lot of the economic drivers are agricultural. Populations There haven't grown much. There's not a lot of development going on in those communities. There's not a lot of new jobs. And so the only way that those communities thrive is through a healthy financial institution serving them.
The Federal Home Loan bank of Atlanta is a cooperative structure. All the financial institutions in the southeast own this cooperative. Housing is such an important part to our economy. And at the home loan bank, providing this funding and this cooperative structure allows us to lend money to our shareholders at a lesser cost, so at wholesale funding rates, so that it's not as expensive for them to then lend money to those communities that they serve, which means it benefits every person that owns a home in this country.
We're the bank for the banks. Building communities is our mission. Markets come and go and they change. But taking data from our shareholders and allowing to drill down and figure out how we're going to use that to solve problems is how we succeed.
The crisis in 2007 and 8 hit us the hardest of all the homeland banks. Things were changing not by the day, it was by the hour. We were amassing an incredible amount of data. And that data allowed us to get an understanding and to protect the cooperative.
What we were looking for is the functionality to know our custom, our shareholder, our member, so much more deeply we've understood that CRM function and how important it was more than just a Rolodex.
We weren't looking for cloud, we were looking for the best CRM platform that we could find. And it just so happened that it was cloud based. We initially implemented a relationship management platform on sales cloud. We started a pilot, just a sales team we implemented CRM and we spent a year where we were incredibly reliant on our IT group. They kept us on pace, they set milestones, they made sure that we were focused and we really integrated into everything that we do. And we were able to provide examples of how to become more efficient and provide better service to our shareholders.
If the communities that our shareholders operate in are successful, our shareholders are successful and we will be successful. When we're bringing things to these shareholders, it's directly impacting their local community.
There's a story about a woman, a woman in Alabama who was a widow. Her husband fought in World War II. Their roof leaked for years whenever it rained. She would set all her pots and pans throughout the house to capture all the water that was coming in through the roof. Through some funds that we provided through a shareholder, she was able to repair a roof that had leaked for years. And the story she tells is she got her pots and pans back.
We give part of our income back in the form of affordable housing to our shareholders in the communities they serve. You put a roof over somebody's head, head and you build self esteem. You do that twice, you've created neighbors, you do that several more times, you've started building community. That's what we and our employees get to see every single day with our shareholders. That's when it really drives home that becomes special.
Every financial institution does not have the same need. Different regions in the country, different regions in our footprint, different customer bases. They all require different interactions from our banks. And so they should expect that we would provide the exact same thing to them.
As we started the process and started to bring other departments in after the pilot, we realized that service cloud would be ideal for our call center. I can log in and see all the activity. I can get down to the account level. I can also see what issues are going on, what deals we're in the middle of. So I get to take a more holistic, universal view. It's improved the amount of insight I have into what this team of folks is doing every day.
Our ultimate vision goes so far beyond the sales cycle. We've started layering on marketing cloud to use the sales cycle and use that information that we were gathering and really build out knowing understand every aspect of our relationship with our customers. If we have a new shareholder come on, we're able to send out messages to them to match their best fit. As far as products are concerned, we can do all of this through the marketing cycle in a way that we've never been able to do before.
I'm mobile every week visiting shareholders, and I can have my iPad sitting there during the course of a meeting and reference information right there to generate the questions that might guide me to helping them be more efficient.
We want to be a trusted advisor to our shareholders. We don't see that as an endpoint. You know, this is a journey that will always be ongoing. And part of that is being able to integrate the new technologies, integrate data, be seen as an institution that is looking for ways to bring the best to our shareholders.
We have 320 of the most incredibly talented individuals. They are subject matter experts, and they come in every single day, and they've got the passion to really do good things and do it well for our shareholders.
As a cooperative, we treat everybody the same. Everybody's got an equal voice. And we are very conscious with the advice that we're providing because we want to make sure that every decision that we make, we can play a role in making our shareholders better and stronger. That translates through the community.
