FIC wrote a just published report titled Going Digital: Current Activities and Future Expectations for the Equipment Leasing and Finance Foundation. The focus of our report extents to all aspects of business lending today.

Some of the key take-aways from FIC’s research include:

Digital is critically important, but lenders are in different stages of understanding and addressing digitalization.  In general, small dollar business lenders see digitalization as critical both to reducing their cost structure and meeting customer demands while some lenders to middle market companies see less need for immediate change, perhaps because the end customers are still grappling with digital transformation. Lenders to larger companies have been, in effect, forced to meet the digital requirements of their largest borrowers related to invoicing and reporting, among other areas.

Lenders define digital differently and the pace of transformation varies. Some lenders focus on changes to internal processes while others emphasize the “customer experience,” with, for many, an initial push for a front-end digital application. Few lenders look at digital in a holistic way, meaning an approach that reviews the entire lending ecosystem and is open to more dramatic and fundamental change.