She’s not an accountant or from a finance sector background, and she even avoided several years of conventional maths classes in her youth, but Rural Bank boss Alexandra Gartmann knows what makes her country banking customers tick.
The environmental science graduate turned farm research and advocacy boss broke the banking mould late last year, when she took the reins at the farm sector lender - a subsidiary of Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.
Her career had previously been notable for roles with not-for-profit bodies.
She has headed Victoria’s ground-breaking Birchip Cropping Group and bush philanthropy body, Foundation for Rural and Regional Renewal (FRRR), and was a local Landcare worker in West Australia’s northern wheatbelt.
Appointed as Rural Bank’s managing director after Paul Hutchinson’s nine-years in the job, Ms Gartman, was already a board director when she took the helm, but she concedes it was a “left field decision”.
“This sort of job had never crossed my mind,” she said.
“It was probably quite a brave decision by the bank to ask me - someone who’s never been a banker.
“But my appointment is also reflective of how Rural Bank tends to think differently about its position in the agricultural sector and its understanding of its unique customer base.”
“We’ve already got a bank full of very capable bankers so there’s a great opportunity for me to be thinking differently.”
Opportunities on her radar vary from building links with possible equity partners to help connect outside investors with farm enterprises; greater collaboration with regional and ag industry organisations - potentially including players in the mutual and co-operative (credit union) finance sector - and strengthening Rural Bank’s ties with an expanding range of farm services businesses.
Rural Bank is no financial giant, but it has about eight per cent of Australia’s rural banking business, with a $5.3 billion loan book which is strongest in Victoria and WA.
The bank’s unconventional, branch-less business model relies heavily on partnerships with the Elders farm services network and Bendigo Bank branches providing customer contact points for Rural Bank staff.
NSW’s diverse agriculture sector offers particularly strong growth potential, although Ms Gartmann said to enhance the bank’s customer base in specific geographies it was adopting a selective target strategy, rather than a shotgun spray.
The young gun chief executive officer is particularly keen to advance Rural Bank’s relationship with farming’s “generation next”.
“Cultivating and growing the emerging generation of farmers and astute farm sector decision makers to think innovatively is something we’d like to do more of,” she said.
“Australia actually has the second highest percentage of farmers aged under 35 in the developed world - which is exciting - but we badly need a lot more young agricultural industry participants.”
Rural Bank’s Victorian-born division, Rural Finance, has long played a special role providing start-up loans on discounted terms for young farmers and rural contractors.
With its origins dating back to soldier settlement funding initiatives, the former state government-owned corporation still has a strong funding focus on young and new industry entrants, including vocational and tertiary scholarships for students showing a career commitment to agriculture.
“I’d like to think we can embed these Rural Finance systems nationally, promoting new entrants in ag or those already on farms looking at new commodities or geographies,” Ms Gartmann said.
“Thinking differently about farm-scale innovation to lift productivity is something we can relate to.
“After all the community-based model that Rural Bank and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is based around is a pretty innovative approach to banking and there’s a strong appetite to help customers be innovative, too.”
Ms Gartmann’s relationship with Rural Bank actually began through Rural Finance.
As chief executive of Birchip Group for a decade until 2011 her own youthful management experience and farming community insights were sought out by the Victorian government, which appointed her to the corporation’s board.
After five years as a board director, and the sale of Rural Finance to Rural Bank in 2014, she later took up a non-executive board seat with the bank for 12 months before becoming managing director.
Originally from Howlong in the south eastern NSW Riverina, Ms Gartmann grew up as an avid pony clubber (competing to state level in dressage and eventing), but also spent four years travelling Australia and overseas with her parents, before returning to high school at Albury and science studies at university in Canberra.
“It was a fantastic childhood, but between the ages of nine and 13 my education was fairly unconventional - home schooling, exploring national parks, cultural experiences in South East Asia and regular classes at school in Germany, where my father had grown up,” she said.
At university she had a passion for semi-arid environments, volunteering to work during summer holidays with CSIRO wildlife researchers in sweltering western NSW.
She also worked part-time for several years as a student intern at the Murray Darling Basin Commission’s head office.
“I began to learn a lot about the personalities and politics involved in managing rural environments,” she said.
“I realised unless you knew how to work with people it was pointless studying how best to preserve and manage our landscapes.”
Building close relationships with farmers and farming communities soon became a key achievement in her three and a half years with Landcare at Calingiri in WA and then at Birchip.
Everything from crop trials to forums with school students and women’s events was part of her recipe for encouraging people to actively engage in farm production and landscape sustainability issues and plan how to sustain their small communities.
Against the background of the millennium drought and grim climate change predictions Birchip group managed to expand its field research and quadruple its commercial sponsorship support, developing data-based strategies to help farmers plan for changing seasonal prospects with new confidence.
“Birchip taught me you don’t take an industry problem to government or commercial supporter without having a potential solution,” Ms Gartmann said.
“Everybody knows about droughts or GFCs or disappointing market trends, so the challenge is to sell an idea or project that will help us through.”
In 2005 her leadership and initiatives at Birchip won her a rare accolade for somebody from a rural organisation, the Equity Trustees not for profit chief executive officer of the year award.
A succession of part-time rural representation jobs also followed, including a seat on the federal government’s regional telecommunications review panel, several short stints with an AusAid-funded farm productivity project in China’s western province of Qinghai, a long-running position on Victoria’s Agricultural Advisory Council and a seat on Canberra’s Regional Women’s Advisory Council.
“I’ve been lucky to have had a great training ground and learn a lot about what really matters in rural communities.”
