In an increasingly competitive and digital leasing market, agility has become a key success factor for companies. Faced with demanding and volatile customers and a constantly evolving environment, leasing players must be able to quickly configure and bring to market new innovative financial products. However, many still struggle to gain flexibility and responsiveness in creating their offers.

Stuck in rigid systems and cumbersome processes, many leasing companies are struggling to keep up with the fast-paced changes in the market. Yet, agility in product configuration can become a real competitive advantage to stand out and gain market share. So what are the keys to gaining flexibility and speed to market? How can new technologies be leveraged to boost agility?

Current Challenges in Configuring Leasing Products

The Rigidity of Existing Systems

Many leasing companies still rely on aging and inflexible IT solutions to manage their products. These tools, often developed in-house several years ago, are no longer suited to today's market challenges:

• Difficulty in quickly configuring new offers
• Lack of flexibility to adapt to the specific needs of customers and partners
• Need for heavy IT developments for each evolution

This rigidity considerably hinders the innovation capacity and responsiveness of leasing companies. They struggle to launch new products and adapt to market expectations, which penalizes them compared to more agile competitors.

Time-Consuming Manual Processes

The use of non-integrated and poorly automated tools generates many manual tasks in the management of leasing contracts:

• Multiple re-entries of data between different systems
• Non-dematerialized editing and sending of contractual documents
• Tracking of collections and invoicing in separate files

These manual processes waste valuable time for teams and are sources of errors. They impact productivity and service quality, with lengthened delays for customers. Automating and streamlining these tasks is a key challenge to gain efficiency.

The Difficulty of Integrating Partners

To widely distribute their offers, leasing companies must rely on a network of prescribing partners: suppliers, dealers, business contributors... But the integration of these partners is often complex:

• Multiplication of communication channels (phone, email...) and contacts
• Lack of shared tool allowing joint monitoring of files
• Difficulty in personalizing offers and journeys according to partners' needs

This creates friction in the partnership relationship and does not allow for optimal collaboration. Having a dedicated platform to easily interact with its distribution network is essential to boost sales.

Faced with these challenges, modernizing its leasing management system is a strategic priority. The challenge is to gain operational and commercial agility, to continuously adapt to market changes. This requires more flexible and integrated solutions, capable of automating processes and streamlining interactions with partners.

Keys to Gaining Flexibility and Speed to Market

Adopting a Flexible and Configurable Leasing Platform

To meet the challenges of agility, leasing companies need to equip themselves with a flexible technology platform that allows them to easily configure offers. This involves:

• Intuitive tools for creating and modifying products, ideally in "drag and drop" mode, without requiring technical skills
• Fully customizable management rules and workflows to adapt to the specifics of each lessor
• The ability to configure data fields, document templates, notifications...

Thanks to this flexibility, business teams can design new products autonomously and deploy them quickly to market. Like Leascorp, which can now configure in a few days new flows and custom fields precisely matching the needs of its partners.

Automating End-to-End Processes

Automating operational processes is a key lever for gaining efficiency and speed of execution:

• Dematerialization of contractual documents with electronic signature and automatic archiving
• Automated calculations of rents and invoicing schedules based on contract parameters
• Automatic debits, unpaid reminders and end-of-contract management via configured workflows

By eliminating time-consuming manual tasks, teams can focus on higher value-added activities. As at Calvin, where dematerialization has optimized each process, even avoiding the hiring of a dedicated back-office employee.

Offering a Digital Portal to Partners

To streamline interactions with its ecosystem, setting up a partner portal is strategic:

• Digital space allowing business contributors to make simulations, build files and monitor the progress of contracts
• Customizable journeys and graphic charter according to the partner's profile
• Real-time access to file information and notifications of key steps

With this single portal, exchanges with partners are simplified and more qualitative. As at Solfiz, which was able to quickly migrate its existing partners to its new platform, while having the ability to easily add new ones.

To succeed in this digital transformation, choosing an open and modular technology solution is essential. This makes it easy to interconnect its leasing system with the internal and external tools of its ecosystem, and thus create a seamless end-to-end digital ecosystem.

How to Leverage New Technologies to Boost Agility

Leveraging the Cloud for More Flexibility

Cloud computing is an agility accelerator for leasing companies. By migrating its system to the cloud, several benefits are gained:

• Flexibility and elasticity of the infrastructure to adapt to activity peaks
• Rapid deployment of new test or production environments
• Access to new technological capabilities: AI, machine learning...

The cloud brings flexibility and responsiveness to support business growth. As for Orion Leasing, which was able to easily extend its solution to several countries while integrating with multiple local data platforms via APIs.

Exploiting Data to Personalize Offers

With digitalization, leasing companies have access to a growing mass of data on their customers and assets. The challenge is to exploit this data to offer a more personalized service:

• Analysis of asset usage data to adapt offers and pricing
• Predictive scoring based on customer history and profile to adjust risk
• Recommendation engine to suggest the most suitable product for each need

By leveraging data, leasing offers gain relevance and approval decisions are faster. This is what Orion Leasing has implemented with a custom scoring engine based on over 30 data points, allowing a response in less than 20 seconds.

Integrating Your Ecosystem via APIs

To gain agility, it is essential to be able to easily integrate your leasing system with your partner ecosystem. This requires an open architecture and APIs to:

• Retrieve asset data directly from manufacturers and distributors
• Integrate third-party services: KYC, electronic signature, insurance...
• Interconnect your tool with internal systems: CRM, accounting, decision-making...

Thanks to these integration capabilities, data exchanges are streamlined and processes are automated from end to end. Like Calvin which was able, via Basikon, to quickly interface with the information systems of its partner banks.

By leveraging these technological levers, leasing companies can significantly improve their operational and commercial agility. They give themselves the means to configure innovative offers, automate approval decisions and seamlessly integrate their ecosystem.

Concrete Examples of Leasing Companies that Have Gained Agility

To concretely illustrate the benefits of greater agility in leasing, here are some examples of companies that have successfully completed their digital transformation with Basikon:

Orion Leasing: A Successful International Expansion

Orion Leasing, a major leasing player in the Baltic countries, needed a solution to support its international development ambitions. Thanks to Basikon, they were able to:

• Quickly deploy their offer in new countries, easily integrating with local data platforms via APIs
• Automate their processes from end to end and gain operational efficiency, with for example a time-to-yes reduced from 10 minutes to 20 seconds
• Offer a digital portal to their reseller partners, allowing them to increase their distribution network by 80% in less than a year

Basikon's unique and flexible platform has been a true growth catalyst for Orion Leasing in new markets.

Calvin: A Fast-Growing Start-Up

As a young leasing company, Calvin needed an agile IT tool to support its rapid development in the Swiss market. With Basikon, Calvin was able to:

• Implement a 100% digital and seamless journey for their customers and partners
• Easily interface with the systems of their partner banks, a complex prerequisite
• Automate all processes and eliminate time-consuming tasks, allowing teams to focus on partner relationships

By relying on a SaaS technology platform, Calvin found the agility needed to build and deploy its offer at the speed of a start-up.

Leascorp: Enhanced Partner Loyalty

To support its strong growth, Leascorp needed to develop its partner network, without losing agility. Thanks to Basikon, Leascorp was able to:

• Offer personalized portals to its partners, for real-time monitoring of operations
• Configure custom workflows and document templates, precisely meeting the needs of each partner
• Design and deploy new products in a few days, by simply configuring the platform without development

With Basikon, Leascorp was able to increase the loyalty of its existing partners and win new ones, by offering them an agile and personalized service.

These examples show how a flexible and integrated leasing platform can become a real competitive advantage. By digitizing their processes from end to end and streamlining the journeys of their customers and partners, these companies have gained responsiveness and commercial efficiency.

Next Steps to Make Agility a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Gaining agility in configuring leasing products is an essential first step, but to make it a true long-term competitive advantage, other projects need to be undertaken:

Developing a Culture of Agility and Innovation

Beyond tools, the entire company must become agile, by evolving its organization and culture:

• Implement agile working methods such as Scrum or Kanban
• Create autonomous multidisciplinary teams, from marketing to risk to IT
• Establish a right to make mistakes and a culture of test & learn
• Give more autonomy to the field to adapt the offer locally

It's about creating the conditions for continuously generating new ideas and quickly making them a reality. This also involves reviewing management methods, giving more power to teams.

Making Data the Driver of Personalization

In an increasingly competitive market, finely personalizing one's offer becomes key. This requires a more advanced exploitation of data, at all levels:

• Better understand customer behaviors and usage to adapt offers
• Track asset performance in real time to adjust contracts and prices
• Measure the results of commercial actions to optimize them
• Identify new segments and new business opportunities

This requires connecting data, equipping oneself with the right predictive analysis tools and spreading the data culture at all levels of the company.

Creating Strategic Partnerships to Serve the Customer Experience

To differentiate, the challenge is to go beyond the product by offering customers an augmented experience, integrating complementary services:

• Partner with fintechs to integrate innovative services: split payment, usage data analysis...
• Form partnerships with manufacturers and distributors to offer packaged product + financing + services offers
• Integrate its offer directly into the digital journeys of its partners and customers via APIs

It's about rethinking its business model by opening up its ecosystem to co-create value around customer usage.

By activating these different levers, leasing companies will give themselves the means to transform agility into a sustainable competitive advantage. This will allow them to constantly reinvent their offer and lead the race in a constantly evolving market.

Conclusion: Making Agility an Essential Growth Lever in Leasing

Agility has become a major business issue for leasing players. In a hypercompetitive and constantly evolving market, the ability to quickly configure new offers and continuously adapt is a key differentiating factor.

By relying on a flexible technology platform and digitized processes, leasing companies can significantly improve their time-to-market and operational efficiency. They gain responsiveness to meet the new expectations of their customers and partners, as illustrated by the examples of Orion Leasing, Calvin and Leascorp.

But beyond the technological dimension, a real transformation of the company is necessary. Agility must be anchored in the culture and working methods of the organization. This involves breaking down silos, empowering teams and encouraging initiative-taking. Leasing must become a learning organization, in constant motion.

Exploiting data is another lever to strengthen agility. By analyzing customer usage and feedback in real time, the offer can be continuously adapted and personalized. Data also allows automating decisions and processes to gain responsiveness.

Finally, agility requires more openness and collaboration with its ecosystem. By creating strategic partnerships, leasing companies can co-create new innovative and flexible services, closely aligned with market expectations. The challenge is to evolve its business model to deliver an augmented experience to its customers.

By successfully transforming towards agility, leasing players will give themselves the means to sustainably support their growth and competitiveness. In an economy of usage and subscription, agility will be the key to constantly reinventing oneself and leading the race!