The Equipment Leasing and Finance Association (ELFA) announces that its 2015 Operations and Technology Excellence Award will go to two companies: Element Financial Corporation and Quick Bridge Funding, LLC. The winners were selected by a subcommittee of ELFA members and will be showcased during ELFA’s Operations and Technology Conference, Sept. 16-18 at the Hilton Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia, PA.

“ELFA’s Operations & Technology Excellence Award was established to recognize innovation, creativity and the employment of newer technologies and operational process improvements,” said Hal Hitch, Director of Operations for CIT Equipment Finance, US and Subcommittee Chair for the award. “The 2015 award applications demonstrated a greater focus on improving the customer experience through the use of cutting-edge technology, and a marked increase in capital spend over prior years, based on the size and scope of the projects submitted. Both winners are inspiring examples of that spirit. We look forward to hearing the sharing of best practices from both winners at the ELFA Operations & Technology Conference in September.”

“ELFA is pleased to showcase innovative uses of technology in the equipment finance industry,” said William G. Sutton, CAE, ELFA President and CEO. “The operational improvements demonstrated by Element Financial and Quick Bridge Funding serve as models on the effective use of technology in our industry, and further demonstrate how ELFA members are ‘Equipping Business for Success.’”

Element Financial Corporation is recognized for engineering an innovative process to dramatically improve title and registration services across 2,700 unique jurisdictions for their fleet management customers. Element’s approach and the resulting suite of tools significantly improved customers’ experience by enhancing service quality and expediting service delivery. Their efforts also improved internal processes, leading to increased employee productivity and reduced operating expenses. Moving forward, Element will be able to leverage this creative approach across other departments, relying on IT and business collaboration and ongoing data evaluation to produce improved results both internally and for customers.

Quick Bridge Funding, LLC is recognized for building an innovative, scalable, state-of-the-art enterprise financial platform to manage its entire business. The financial platform is a real-time, web-based work-flow software system with integrated reporting, an innovative Big Data aggregation and decision/intelligence engine with robust third-party integration. The project demonstrated positive impacts through a significant reduction in application cycle time, conversion to a single repository for customer information, API integration with partners, centralized reporting and significant reductions in scoring model validation time. The project team established key values that allowed the project to stay on target and reach its goals; namely, the ability to inspect and adapt throughout, ensure involvement of all impacted functions, and adoption of a clean-slate mentality. As an important barometer of the innovation and cutting-edge technology, a number of potential patents were identified.

The Operations and Technology Excellence Award identifies and recognizes equipment finance organizations that have demonstrated best practices in developing and implementing innovative uses of technology or creative business processes to improve operations, enhance customer interactions, enter new markets and build overall ROI. The program brings the backroom to the foreground, spotlighting the best in the industry as an example for others.

Previous Operations and Technology Excellence Award winners include:

2014: BB&T Equipment Finance Corporation and Wells Fargo Equipment Finance
2013: TCF Equipment Finance, Inc. and SunPower Corporation.
2012: LEAF Commercial Capital, Inc. and AIG Commercial Asset Finance
2011: First American Equipment Finance and ICON Capital Corporation
2010: Winthrop Resources Corporation
2009: Key Equipment Finance, PHH Arval
2008: Orion First Financial LLC, Trinity Industries Leasing Co.
2007: TCF Equipment Finance, California First National Bancorp, and Xerox Capital Services
2006: Farm Credit Leasing
2005: Styx Capital, Relational LLC
2004: Cisco Systems Capital Corporation
2003: AgStar Financial Services, National Leasing Group
2002: ABB Financial Services, IBM Global Financing, Caterpillar Financial Services Corporation

For information about the 2015 ELFA Operations and Technology Conference, Sept. 16-18 at the Hilton Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia, PA, go to http://www.elfaonline.org/events/2015/OTC/.