Thank you.
Historically, many years ago FCC was a lender of last resort, and in fact, they went under and got a large capital injection from the federal government. At that time the government requested that FCC be a self-sustaining crown corporation and be competitive in the marketplace. That is, I would suggest, exactly what we've done since then. We are not out there trying to be the lowest-cost provider. Contrary to that, I would say a few things of evidence.
We have a custom pricing pool in which we track all competitive business. We have a committee, and two-thirds of it are the banks and the credit unions seeking to have FCC clients switch and the other one-third is us attracting new business. In 70% of those cases, on $660 million in the past year, our interest rates were higher than those of our colleagues around the table here. In 23% of those cases we matched the interest rate to retain our customer, and in only 7% of those cases was our interest rate lower than another offer by the other members around this table.
We are not able to take deposits. When we were requested to borrow from the consolidated revenue fund, from the government, we did not change the transfer pricing rate to our staff. So that means we have continued to behave exactly as we have in the years past in terms of our price setting to staff, so that they did not have an unfair competitive advantage compared to the banks or credit unions. Our clients are telling us they deal with FCC because we understand agriculture, our staff are totally dedicated to agriculture and aren't asked to be involved in many other different small businesses, and we are there through their good times and the bad times. In fact, there was a brief mention of the hog industry earlier. We just received a reward from the Manitoba Pork Council, as a friend of the industry in April of this year, for sticking with them if they're not perceiving that others are.
So we are out there to support our customer base and to help them succeed in growing their operations, and 50,000 customers have a choice of anywhere to do business--and we are not a full-service institution--and they choose to do business with us because of our staff's knowledge and dedication to agriculture, not because we're providing the lowest price in town.