US leasing operations & technology accolades awarded to Element Financial and Quick Bridge Funding

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.

Hal Hitch, director of operations for CIT Equipment Finance, US and Subcommittee Chair for the award explained:  “ELFA’s Operations & Technology Excellence Award was established to recognize innovation, creativity and the employment of newer technologies and operational process improvements.

“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,” added William G. Sutton 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 its fleet management customers. Element’s approach and the resulting suite of tools significantly improved customers’ experience by enhancing service quality and expediting service delivery.

Its 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 aims to identify and recognize 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.