Serving rural and agricultural communities effectively and compliantly

The U.S. Farm Credit System has been a financial backbone for America’s farmers, agribusinesses and rural communities for more than 100 years.

At the heart of this system is Farm Credit Mid-America, a customer-owned cooperative with more than $40 billion in assets and 86 retail locations serving customers across Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee. Dedicated to empowering rural prosperity, Farm Credit Mid-America offers real estate financing, equipment loans, and rural living support tailored to the evolving needs of its customers.

To keep pace with digital innovation and rising industry and customer expectations, Farm Credit Mid-America is leveraging the power of the ServiceNow AI Platform to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences and drive enterprise-wide efficiency. From lending support and business applications management to information security and IT operations management, ServiceNow is enabling Farm Credit Mid-America to modernize critical workflows and scale with confidence.

Rebecca Mark, Head of Lending Support; Fred Gordon, Director of Business Applications; and Tiffany Smith, Chief Security Officer and Head of IT Operations; share how Farm Credit Mid-America is accelerating its digital journey with ServiceNow―unifying systems, increasing agility and setting new standards in agricultural finance.

Discover how Farm Credit Mid-America is turning tradition into transformation, powered by ServiceNow.

Supporting multiple critical processes and business responsibilities

While Farm Credit Mid-America is an alternative to traditional banks, it has the same responsibilities to meet regulatory requirements. Rebecca spearheads an effort with a centralized team to support business processes in areas ranging from agribusiness finance to rural community loans.

“We’re responsible for content and records management and quality assurance,” she explains. “We check that we’re adhering to the processes we’ve put in place and handle all the content and service management relating to those processes.”

As Farm Credit Mid-America―and Rebecca’s responsibilities―grew, it became increasingly clear that the organization’s management systems were becoming overstretched.  

“Our ticketing system was highly customized for one team, and as we started to expand it became obvious the system couldn’t keep up,” says Fred. “Even major customizations wouldn’t give us the scalability we needed. That’s when we started looking at ServiceNow.”

Farm Credit Mid-America’s initial choice of ServiceNow IT Service Management offered the functionality and flexibility it needed to deliver high-quality service and capacity for growth. Based on that success, when ServiceNow launched Financial Services Operations (FSO), both Fred and Rebecca jumped at the opportunity to leverage a tool built specifically for managing customer service operations in the financial services industry.  

“With Financial Services Operations, we saw that we could move away from our old, siloed approach and build better connections to share customer servicing information across the front, middle, and back offices, while being able to report across multiple areas of the business,” recalls Rebecca. “My team has very specific process and compliance support needs, and FSO facilitates this. That’s huge for us. It puts team members in the right place to process information in an efficient manner and ultimately improves our customers’ experiences.”

With FSO, Farm Credit Mid-America now has a consolidated information, data, and case-management platform that provides new levels of efficiency, connectivity, and collaboration for loan servicing. Crucially, Farm Credit Mid-America can now deliver all of this while supporting the compliance and quality it needs to grow its operation.

“We can pull in customer data and any type of loan servicing action,” Fred explains. “We can provide real-time updates on servicing events and allow users to easily access information when serving our borrowers.”

He continues: “Farm Credit Mid-America colleagues really love the visibility into their day-to-day. They can create and view dashboards and trigger automatic actions. We used to rely on tribal knowledge; now everyone has a clear view of what they need to do.” This visibility and automatic action have reduced resolution times to less than three hours while customer satisfaction has risen to an amazing 4.85 out of 5.  

“Our internal audit team can also see immediately, and effortlessly which tasks have been completed and, more importantly, which haven’t,” he adds. “That in itself is a very good win for us―we can meet the regulatory needs we have by automating these compliance processes.”

Extending the benefits of ServiceNow

Farm Credit Mid-America was immediately impressed with the benefits delivered by ServiceNow. Rebecca notes that the onboarding and training of a phone service agent once took three months. FSO has cut that time to just two weeks, decreasing onboarding and training times by 83%. And while Farm Credit Mid-America has recorded 35% business growth in the past five years, Rebecca’s team member staffing has remained unchanged as ServiceNow has increased its efficiency. “That’s an absolute game-changer in terms of team experience and recruitment,” she adds.

“We’re also seeing major improvements in supporting our business partners; customer self-service has contributed to an 87% reduction in calls. Knowledge content views soared to more than 220,000 in 2024, while ticket volumes have fallen from around 38,000 in 2020 to around 12,000 in 2024. That 68% decrease in ticket volumes provided significant time and resource savings, moving the team from highly reactive to more engaging proactive work, highlighting the importance of focusing on people, not just platforms, when embracing change.”

As Farm Credit Mid-America expanded its use of ServiceNow, Change Management played a critical role in ensuring successful adoption. By embedding enablement and communications efforts into each phase of deployment, Farm Credit Mid-America was able to reduce onboarding times and drive platform engagement across the enterprise.

The implementation of FSO also acted as a springboard to extend Farm Credit Mid-America’s ServiceNow portfolio, with two other tools slotting straight into its complex and specialized environment.

Boosting legal efficiency with Legal Service Delivery

Farm Credit Mid-America implemented Legal Service Delivery (LSD), in just a few months. The effort paid off immediately, with Farm Credit Mid-America’s legal teams moving away from legacy email-based workflows in favor of a consistent, structured intake process for conflict-of-interest policy acknowledgements and disclosures enabled by LSD. For Fred, the ability to build granular and high-level oversights was a highly important―and exciting―outcome.

“LSD gives the legal team great reporting capabilities. For the first time ever, people can see exactly what's going on with any process in real time,” he explains. “We’ve also created workflows that send reports and updates straight to our board.”

LSD now quickly, efficiently, and consistently handles a growing range of tasks for Farm Credit Mid-America’s legal team, helping to ensure that the business remains compliant with no conflicts of interest.

“We have a legal section on our service portal where users can kick off a dedicated standard-of-conduct workflow and leaders can track disclosures and approvals,” Fred notes. “It’s all at their fingertips.”

By replacing scattered email requests with centralized, trackable workflows, Farm Credit Mid-America’s legal team saw a dramatic increase in efficiency―handling more than 16,000 standard-of-conduct requests in in the first quarter of 2024 alone, up from less than 2,000 in all of 2023. That’s a 700% increase, driven by automation, accessibility, and visibility into every stage of the request lifecycle.

“Rules and regulations change constantly, but the workflows are fluid and dynamic so we can implement updates easily,” Fred adds. “Plus, the scalability is exactly what we needed.”

Creating a scalable integrated solution that improves collaboration

Building out Farm Credit Mid-America’s platform even further was ServiceNow Integrated Risk Management (IRM), which, Rebecca explains, extends the benefits to new users and more use cases with key applications including Risk Management and Corporate Compliance.

“We had an opportunity to improve collaboration between our risk teams, internal audit, compliance, legal, and my team,” she adds. “We wanted to enhance these key risk management workflows and enable a unified approach and continued growth. IRM gives us that.”

Farm Credit Mid-America’s strategy with IRM provides an integrated infrastructure with expansive risk and compliance capabilities that allow disparate teams to connect and share information.

“We’re expanding our policy and procedure information within IRM, so we have much greater traceability―bringing our regulation, policies, processes, and testing together,” Rebecca adds. “In addition to this, data integration and automated testing are providing 60% reduction in manual work items.”

Farm Credit Mid-America can now build common frameworks and more robust and effective approaches to risk evaluation. “Previously, assessing the criticality of a particular risk could be confusing because we weren’t using the same language,” Rebecca says.

“With enterprise-level views and comprehensive reporting we can share better information with our leadership teams. IRM enables our collaboration. That’s exciting to be a part of.”

Harnessing AI for increased cost efficiency

Perhaps most excitingly, Farm Credit Mid-America continues to add to its ServiceNow portfolio, with AI support from Now Assist for ITSM and Financial Services Operations as the next step in their journey. For Tiffany, it’s a logical enhancement to Farm Credit Mid-America’s growing ServiceNow environment.

“ServiceNow used our own data to demonstrate Now Assist, and time after time it came up with the right answers,” she says. “While the ServiceNow AI Platform gives us value as a single source of truth, we are really excited about the lift Now Assist will give to our teams.” The Farm Credit Mid-America team is looking forward to leveraging Now Assist for FSO to make data-driven decisions in real time, supporting self-service capabilities and breaking down communication silos within internal teams. And always with the customer in mind, Tiffany shares “Now Assist will allow us to respond to our customers quickly and efficiently, enhancing the customer experience, which is a top priority.”

True partnerships deliver real value

Farm Credit Mid-America’s success was significantly bolstered not only by ServiceNow but also by their strategic implementation partner, NewRocket. It expertly managed the deployment of Financial Services Operations (FSO) and Integrated Risk Management (IRM), offering strategic guidance, clarity, and a focus on user experience. NewRocket’s expertise in integrating existing systems and providing custom solutions ensured a seamless transition and alignment with Farm Credit Mid-America’s unique business objectives.

“We're not your standard financial company; we do things a little differently, and they get that,' Fred explains. 'They’re not just vendors; they’re effectively part of our team. To us, that’s a true partnership.” Rebecca adds, “They listen to our needs and really dig in. It’s been a tremendous partnership.”

The partnership between Farm Credit Mid-America, NewRocket, and ServiceNow signifies a commitment to innovation and excellence, setting the stage for a future where Farm Credit Mid-America not only meets but exceeds the evolving needs of its customers and the demands of their industry.