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.