The third way

This shows that in the competition
between generic and specialist suppliers, lessors sometimes prefer
a third, in-house developed alternative.

ING Lease Netherlands MD, Peter-Jan
Bentein, said that since the introduction of e-Lease, which was
rolled out at the end of 2007 and which became operational in
January this year, the company has reported a “double-digit” growth
in the production volume, more than one-quarter up compared to last
year.

The use of e-Lease has increased
production particularly in the SME sector. According to ING Lease
figures, as a direct result of the introduction of e-Lease, the
volume of business financed to the SME sector by ING Lease
internationally has grown by an impressive 62 percent.

“We immediately had a quite large
e-Lease ratio in the SME segment because the user-friendliness of
the new system was so enormous that people immediately took it up,”
Benstein said.

e-Lease’s system enables all sales
people, some of whom “are not educated lease specialists”, to
understand “the logical build up of the whole process [and] not
lose their way going forward”, according to ING Lease.

The increased speed, according to the
company, has considerably reduced the length of time spent
processing deal applications. It has, for instance, a
credit-scoring model that is able to generate “green light” for new
leases “in minutes”, and proposals and contracts are made
immediately available.

“By the use of a fully auto-mated
straight-through process, which includes a link with the ING
customer database, a credit scoring module and a document
generator, it has become possible to realise a new lease within a
time frame of 15 minutes,” Benstein said.

By contrast, the previous system used
by the company was a fully manual process and therefore the
lead-time was several days, and the sales force had to switch
between various software applications.

The introduction of e-Lease, however,
took many months because it was necessary to overcome several
technical problems. As Benstein explained, the main challenge for
the implementation of e-Lease has been the interfacing with the
existing system and database, a process described as “extremely
costly and complex”.

The introduction of e-Lease also
required a thorough “rethinking” of the existing business
processes, with a redesign of the front-office, mid-office and
back-office.

But ING Lease Netherlands said that
its efforts have been compensated by the results that e-Lease has
been bringing to the company. Since January, there have been 5,000
contracts totalling around €460 million. The company has already
put e-Lease on the market and said it will be extended with
functionality for use by vendors, making the system available
through the internet.

ING Lease plans to roll-out e-lease
across other countries in which it operates.