Ognjen Radovic, Head of Leasing and Factoring at Tietoevry Banking, gives advice on choosing the right kind of leasing solution at the point of expansion.
According to our experience, the company can simplify things by selecting a proven and scalable solution and implement it with key drivers for success.
This story is the first part of Ognjen Radovic’s article “How can you speed up the implementation of a multi-country solution for leasing companies?" published in the World Leasing Yearbook 2023.
A cloud-based multi-country solution allows a growing multinational company to scale and helps to keep focus on the business instead of IT. A cloud-based solution enables to deliver functionality faster, with a rich set of add-on services that are typically not available in on-premise installations so the go-to-market time can be reduced significantly.
Since we talk about a global solution, contract volumes tend to be huge and bring complexity and cost. Besides technical scaling, the solution should use digitalization and automation, i.e., process more items without adding the same amount of manual work. This means that the more contracts you have, the less work you have per contract and the solution allows you to grow and process contracts with less work.
Automation should be used when making credit decisions, running reports, generating invoices, sending reminders, making payments, and other use cases.
In a world of constant need to exchange and synchronize data with external parties and solutions, the ability to integrate the solution with other solutions becomes critical. As we know, most of the external integrations are usually completely different in new markets, for instance, just think about different credit bureaus, accounting systems and e-signature solutions.
There has been a big emphasis on APIs for ten years, but during the last few years producing consumable events from systems has become equally important in real-time integrations.
The nightly batch job to crunch data or even worse, the manual work needed to extract and transform data, is a big cost for global companies. Therefore, a multinational leasing company should seek a solution that can generate and publish the correct data in real-time. This will enable access to data on demand and without any lead times, leading to more informed and faster business decisions and savings.
Data decisioning is empowered with real-time data.
Large-scale international leasing businesses operate 24/7 including work performed in different geographies, time zones and legal entities. To support this, the solution must have a proper design that enables around-the-clock operations and does not require time-consuming batch jobs. Also, the infrastructure platform should scale up and down without a need for downtime as that would have a negative impact on business operations.
To launch operations in a new market, lease companies frequently struggle to understand all parts of the local market context including local regulations, local products and terms as well as integrations with local service providers.
Finding a suitable partner can help to provide the missing local context. In this case, the lease company needs a partner-ready solution. It must enable quick implementation by using a pre-configured country template and solid documentation that is easy to understand and use by all parties.
We have witnessed many times that solid plans and design and system documentation form the basis for successful implementation, and this is especially true when seeking help from local partners.
In the past, lease companies frequently made huge upfront investments involving internal resources and assets to implement new software. These investments have been dropping for several years to mitigate that up to 50% of implementations fail. Challenges include time, budget or fulfilling requirements.
In our experience, the best way to resolve challenges is to be well-prepared in the requirements phase and select off-the-shelf solutions with standardized onboarding, rich functionality and configuration options paired with ready-made country templates to speed up the implementation. Country templates typically bring out-of-the-box functionality for local processes, products, language, currency and data providers such as credit decisions and asset liability management.
Off-the-shelf solutions also allow to work agile with iterative phases where the solution is configured step by step towards the full requirements baseline.