Asset Finance

Technology

Business-Building Agility Awaits

CUTTING COSTS AND IMPROVING Efficiency ARE TABLE STAKES — THE REAL VALUE IS IN NET-NEW GROWTH

Moving to the cloud offers twofold benefits: Not only can it have an immediate impact improving operations, but it also prepares organizations for agile business expansion. When cloud computing first went mainstream, the benefits of transitioning from on-prem to cloud were largely focused on IT. Moving to the cloud greatly reduces the cost and complexity surrounding both hardware and software — especially in terms of initial investment costs. Instead of buying software applications and servers and incurring all of the costs of maintaining them, cloud offers the opportunity to simply pay for the functionality and capacity you use.

The financial argument in the context of IT is compelling. But it’s not the only reason to move to the cloud. Many of the supporting platforms and services — such as Salesforce and DocuSign — are optimised for the cloud. Collaboration with these platforms and services is faster, smoother and more effective when you are connected with them in a cloud environment. Which means key processes, from originations and approvals to portfolio management and asset resolution, moves faster and smoother.

Another key point to consider: there is mounting evidence of lenders and other businesses leveraging cloud to not just improve, but also expand their operations. For example, the information, insights and partnerships required to move into new vertical markets are more accessible when working in a connected cloud environment because of the aforementioned platform and service integrations — and business processes are often easier to adapt to the specific needs of a market as well.

Business Benefits

While we’re on next-level benefits, the holy grail for many lenders, regardless of size, is analytics. There are incredibly valuable insights buried deep in every lender’s origination and portfolio management data. Extracting those insights requires analytics tools based in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). While it’s possible to apply AI and ML to uncover and interpret analytics in an on-prem environment, it tends to be a cumbersome task. Most of the new analytics tools are built specifically for cloud or SaaS environments. So, applying them to a real-world business model is likely to require a strong move to the cloud.

At IDS, we’ve made our powerful Origination & Portfolio Management solutions — long proven at scale — available in the cloud to any size equipment finance company. And we’ve created a process to make a cloud transition quick and painless.