Future Projects

Future Projects

FAST has a number of concepts for future projects based ideas and recommendations brought forward by the FAST steering committee. These projects may be adopted into FAST Operations in the future, based on input and feedback from membership. Equally, it is possible that other initiatives not yet listed may be suggested, approved, and adopted.

Fundraising for the Development of New Initiatives: FAST can play a significant role in identifying sources of and generating the funds necessary to finance costly projects from which the entire membership will benefit.

Sharing Due Diligence: Where lenders are working with the same clients, they currently duplicate their efforts. Sharing the due diligence process between lenders will increase efficiency by helping avoid duplication of work. Producers will also benefit by avoiding repeat visits from lenders and having regular scheduling for diligence processes. Streamlining the process for producers will reduce the distractions that remove them from their day-to-day activities.

Information Exchange: Lenders gather a significant amount of valuable information during their daily operations from both publicly available and privileged sources. All lenders stand to benefit from being able to access this information in a timely manner and to act upon it promptly. A mechanism may be developed for sharing such information amongst FAST members, enabling them to gain speedy access to time critical data while reducing duplication of efforts in collecting data.

Financial Access Portal: Producers wishing to access credit must apply to each prospective lender individually, going through lengthy application processes. A centralized portal, providing information on and a standardized application to a wide range of financial products from socially-oriented lenders, would eliminate the duplicated work. Access to such a portal, made available through FAST, will enable producers to access multiple potential sources of funding through just one application. This will open up new opportunities for a wider range of credit options, as well as provide an outlook on the available lenders and products within the producer business sector.
The project will build upon the basic Consolidated Information Access Point, currently in development.

Syndicated Lending and Larger Facility Sizes: FAST may seek to explore a program working towards standardizing mechanisms for providing producers with syndicated loans. This will enable producers to prepare and apply for larger sized loans than they are currently able to receive through traditional loan products.