ELFA’s Technology Innovation Working Group continues to monitor technology and innovation trends to help equipment finance industry leaders understand the impacts and opportunities for the future of the industry. The group hosted the fourth Innovation Roundtable of 2022 on Nov. 10. TomorrowZone provided the following recap.

The roundtable was hosted and facilitated by Deborah Reuben, CEO & Founder of TomorrowZone, with panelists from ELFA’s Technology Innovation Working Group, including:

• John Cooper, Director, NAFTA Financial Services Business Solutions, CNH Industrial Capital
• Roman Gajda, Director of Financial Technology Solutions, ENGS Commercial Finance Co.
• Jen Martin, SVP, Strategy/Sales Enablement/Enterprise Technology Support, Key Equipment Finance
• Beckham Thomas, CEO, TRNSACT

The deep-dive discussion centered on two main themes:

1. Top-of-mind trends and the future of equipment finance customer experience (CX)
2. Current challenges and solutions for bringing innovations to life in equipment finance companies.

Panelists shared practical and diverse insights from bank, independent, captive and fintech perspectives. Roundtable participants actively engaged in the discussion, realizing that even though our companies and teams are unique, many of the challenges we face are common to all of us. It was great to get together and share our challenges and insights for overcoming them and being future ready.

Here are some takeaways from the discussion.

Top-of-Mind CX

A shared goal for industry leaders is providing the best possible customer experience. We discussed the importance of understanding the customer (lessee/borrower or vendor/dealer) and their specific needs, context and desired outcomes.

Dealer salesforces are evolving, adopting digital and driving significant changes in customer expectations. With the aging sales force and the changing of the guard, we urgently need to adopt new technologies and training.

Why isn’t equipment finance just as easy as the consumer experience?

How do you take the consumer experience and bring it into commercial finance?

Current Equipment Finance Innovation Challenges

A pervasive theme was the need for C-Suite level support for innovation, but it’s also vital to have a process and straightforward method to harness ideas and bring the most valuable ideas to life. When leaders understand, support and encourage innovation and enable their teams with the capability, skills and behaviors, it promotes a culture empowered to innovate!

Common barriers to innovation in EF:

• Keeping the lights on and sustaining the current business while innovating and creating the future creates tension and is difficult, especially with legacy system limitations. We need to consider new architectures.
• Balancing the need to innovate with workforce exhaustion is a real problem.
• Overcoming business silo mentality
• Dealing with the tensions caused by the need to manage risk and the need to innovate

This left us wondering, “What would it look like to carve out time regularly to focus on innovation?”

We are looking forward to the next discussion. Make sure to save the dates for our 2023 series of ELFA Innovation Roundtables:

• Feb. 16, 12:00–2:30 p.m. CT
• May 18, 12:00–2:30 p.m. CT
• Aug. 10, 12:00-2:30 p.m. CT
• Nov. 9, 12:00-2:30 p.m. CT

Registration is open now at www.elfaonline.org/events! Use up those 2022 dollars!