He has brought a lot of organization to that team, and they’re currently focused on many tactical projects, but two huge strategic projects, and I’ll let Aparna comment on them. The first is what we call stars which we expect to finish this year, maybe even halfway through the year. And the other is an update to a hugely important and huge legacy platform here at Farmer Mac called ag power. But Aparna you want to provide an update on that and why it’s so important. And then, Zach, you too.
Aparna Ramesh: Yeah, sure. Let me give you a bit of a sense about this treasury platform that we’re embarking on. It is the most significant overhaul I would say of platforms at Farmer Mac. It impacts about two thirds of the balance sheet, both on the asset side as well as the liability side. Something that most people don’t know is that we have a significant amount of payments that really course through loan payments as well as debt holders. So we actually transact anywhere between half a trillion to three quarters of a trillion in terms of just payments in addition to different securities. We have hedging and reporting, etcetera. As well as what we do with our wholesale financing. All of that really goes through these platforms.
These have been platforms that have been in existence and really commend the team at Farmer Mac are the founding team that has really layered on and built these functions. But today we have options and we have commercial products that are out there. So we’ve been working with a consultant who’s helped us through this journey over the last two years. And we’ve really selected two key vendors who are going to really provision platforms for both our front end, our middle office, as well as our cash management systems. And this is going to create a lot of dependencies internally in terms of overhauling, how our data flows through, as well as how our different capabilities with respect to hedging and reporting really connect in. So it’s a massive effort with lots of people, touches a lot.
And this is an initiative that, I’ll just say is anywhere between, we foresee somewhere between 16 million to 20 million in cash expenses. Obviously, it gets capitalized and there’s a P&L impact that we continually recalibrate towards. But as, as Brad mentioned, it’s going very well as any large scale initiative might. And we expect to see this come to fruition optimistically in the middle of this year. But certainly no later through I would say the third quarter or so, but tremendous partnership across the organization. And I echo Brad, Sean has been a tremendous addition to the Executive Team and a tremendous partner as well on this initiative. And then the second initiative is really the loan origination platform. So I’ll just turn to Zach, he can give you a little bit more color on how we’re really innovating around some of those technologies that drive our business lines.
Zachary N. Carpenter: Yeah, DeForest, I’ll be quick, but Brad mentioned Ag Power. That’s our infrastructure that our community banks and our sellers use to interact and transact with Farmer Mac. Our goal is to dramatically change that infrastructure to be cheaper, more customer friendly, more effective, and drive down the time of us purchasing a loan from our sellers as quickly as possible. So that’s better technology, that’s more efficiencies, that’s leveraging collateral enhancements and really providing a state-of-the-art infrastructure platform that all of our sellers can use that can transact as easily as possible with Farmer Mac. And, on the positive side, I think, Sean and I feel buy into 2024. We’ll be rolling something out. And I think we’re very excited and we’re receiving a lot of positive reinforcement from our customers. So again, this just be a state-of-the-art infrastructure, loan origination platform for our sellers.
DeForest Hinman: Okay. Great. And then just a final comment, the idea of adding equity compensation across the entire employee base. I think you said that, that’s a very good idea and should probably help with retention and your mission based focus. That’s very helpful. So thanks for taking all the questions.
Bradford T. Nordholm: Good. Yeah, we appreciate that sentiment very much. We do think it’s important. It resulted in about a doubling when we went to Equity for All. It was about a doubling in the number of employees who were eligible for awards. And it allows us to have conversations about stock, stock performance, the relation of that to overall financial performance, and the relation of that to overall service admission. So we think that it’s just one more thing that contributes to a really healthy and very passionate, mission focused culture at Farmer Mac.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Brad Nordholm. Please go ahead.
Bradford T. Nordholm: Great. Well, thank you everyone for joining us today. We really appreciate your participation, your interest, and many great questions which we hope we’ve addressed to your satisfaction. If you have follow-ups, of course, get in touch with Jalpa. But otherwise we will be having our next regularly scheduled call in May to record our first quarter 2024 results. And we look forward to that very much. Hope you have a great day, and please stay in touch. Thank you.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.
