By Lisa Hochgraf
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Bill Vogeney and Janelle Grau about loan loss reserves. Bill's SVP/chief lending officer and Janelle is senior financial analyst for Ent, Colorado Springs. (Check out the resulting Loan Zone column.)
It wasn't because Bill and Janelle are from Colorado that I got to thinking about "The Farmer and the Cowman Should be Friends" (certainly not, since it's from the show Oklahoma). Still, something Bill said toward the end of our discussion started me to thinking about these lyrics:
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends,
Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
One man likes to push a plough,
The other likes to chase a cow,
But that's no reason why they cain't be friends.
What Bill said that triggered all this crazy musing in my brain was that Ent benefits from having lending staff and finance staff work together to think about and manage the loan portfolio. I say "one man likes to attend to GAAP, the other knows the specifics of the app, but that's no reason why they cain't be friends." And in fact, having lending and finance bring their talents together seems like it could help a lot.
How does your credit union operate? Do your CFO and CLO work together to make loan portfolio decisions? How does their relationship affect your credit union's lending success?
For that matter, how do other people at your credit union with seemingly very different styles work together to better the CU? (I'm thinking of marketers and IT folks, but surely there are others.) Please comment with your new sets of lyrics.
Lisa Hochgraf is a CUES editor.
