Lenders and lessors are no different from other businesses: their success strongly depends on their capacity to attract and retain customers. Increasing their loan or lease portfolio requires convincing, onboarding and becoming the preferred financing partner of a vendor. And this on a regular basis.… Already, boosting the number of onboarded and managed partners can seem arduous. But it really becomes a challenge when they rightly demand innovative, personalized, and easy-to-implement services… In banking and financing, conversations about ecosystem-based business models and fully digitalized customer journeys have been going on for years. Despite this, very few institutions have really seen this through. So what are the 7 keys to building partnerships truly profitable for both parties?

1. Build a truly 100% digital partner journey – no compromise allowed!

Your mental representation of this fully digital, paper-free, seamless partner and customer journeys was crystal clear. It was like a dream come true. And then, reality kicked in… Because of the flawed integration of 2 or more systems, you have started making compromises. Paper and manual data entries were back... And what had seemed acceptable when dealing with just a few partners has soon become a bottleneck. Sound familiar? Well, frankly, software should not keep you from going 100% paperless, not in 2021!

2. Make the life of your partners’ sales team easy-peasy!

Even captives often suffer from competition in what could be their private turf. Sales teams can easily compare leasing and lending offers on the 2 dimension that matter the most to them: how much of their time will be necessary to close the sale, and how much money they will make. The time spent to simulate a leasing, prepare the contract, exchange documents counts. Work on both dimensions, not just on the commission.

3. Be transparent and enable innovation on both remuneration and profit-sharing

Being able to calculate in real-time the margin on each contract helps achieve a new level in transparency. By giving your partners, in real time, the answer to those 2 questions :

• What the size of the cake?
• How big a piece will I get?

you actually enable them bring innovation to their sales incentives plans. They can incentivize their sales teams on the actual margin and empower them to maximize revenue by exercising the best volume / value balance.

4. Leave room for personalization, innovation, and even testing

Each partner has specific requirements and issues. On top of full digitalization and seamless partner journeys, your ability to propose a tailored solution can make the difference. Product, process, fees, incentives… everything must be fully configurable within minutes rather than months! Being able to demonstrate your flexibility and agility even before entering a new partnership, will only make its signature much easier. And once the vendor has been onboarding, if you are the partner who enables to test new products or incentives very easily and at a very low cost, guess who will become his “go-to partner”…

5. Fit into your partner’s business model, not the opposite

At the end of the day, the vendor is the one closing sales with end customers and facing their requirements and objections. While staying in control of the parameters that matter to you in a contract, let vendors be in the driver’s seat when it comes to packaging a turnkey solution.

6. Onboard partners at scale

Build a seamless partner onboarding and be ready to enter 1, 10 or 50 new partnerships a month. Again, the showstopper should never be your software. A fully API-native and configurable system makes it all possible.

7. Integrate seamlessly into your partners’ ecosystems

Whenever required, let your partners access your financing solutions in their CRM, ERP, Intranet portal, websites… Providing a hassle-free solution “only” takes a full set of APIs 😊

Are you up for the challenge? For more information on how Basikon’s customers made it happen, read Solfiz story.