Rl: THE COMBINED STRENGTH OF WHOLESALE AND RURAL RETAIL BANKING COVER STORY THE REVISED STRATEGY Growth 12 ISSUE 19 APRIL 2009 THE WORD Rl Strategy in short Our focus needs to be squarely on F&A, which is where our real strength lies. Our professional products should have a greater connection with F&A clients. We should always strive to establish market leadership in the Netherlands. We need to further strengthen our retail operations. We must extract more value from our brand and from our market position. Remain focused, seize opportunities and allocate resources effïciently. Rabobank International is a fundamental driver of Rabobank Group's strategy for growth. The international network that Rl provides, creates the platform for us to become the global leading financial organisation in the Food and Agribusiness (F&A) sector. On top of that, the network supports our clients who do business on an international scale. Rabobank's key competences are our knowledge and cliënt intimacy regarding F&A. We exist because Dutch farmers wanted to help their less solvent colleagues some 100 years ago. We have always committed ourselves to agriculture development and, along the way, we specialised to become a respected advisor and financier of the food chain. In other words, the chain of farmers/primary producers (rural banking), processors, traders, wholesalers, and retailers. It led to Rabobank being acknowledged as the expert financier of the F&A sector worldwide. Rabobank started its international operation to support Dutch (F&A) clients worldwide with their payments and trade finance and their tax capacity needs. Servicing Dutch clients alone appeared not to be a sustainable business (because of relatively low volumes), so new markets had to be found. Rabobank was one of the first European cooperative banks that made this step abroad to explore new markets. Although cooperatives abroad appeared to be differently organised than in the Netherlands, alignment to foreign agricultural companies was quite easily found. By servicing the whole F&A chain, and also targeting the smaller farmers and middle market/SME business, further growth of the organisation was established.

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blad 'RI The Word / The Word' (EN) | 2009 | | pagina 12