This year’s Monitor 101+ group is smaller than last year’s — 23 companies instead of 25 — but don’t mistake that for contraction. Every metric that matters moved in the right direction: net assets up 17.7%, new business volume up 22.6%, headcount up 8.7%. After a 2024 that tested the industry’s patience, 2025 rewarded it. This issue is, in many ways, a study in what recovery actually looks like up close: uneven, concentrated in some places, broad-based in others and driven as much by people as by portfolios.
You’ll see that unevenness in our asset class rankings. In Trucks & Trailers, Wells Fargo Equipment Finance vaulted from third place to first. Technology, meanwhile, kept concentrating — Dell Financial Services and Cisco Systems Capital remain firmly on top, even as challengers like PEAC Solutions posted significant growth beneath them. And AI is no longer a subplot in any of these stories. It’s the plot: a record $350 billion in AI infrastructure investment last year and hundreds of billions more projected for 2026 are reshaping demand for everything from data center racking to trucking capacity tied to grid buildouts.
But the numbers only tell half the story. This issue is full of people betting on relationships in an industry that keeps getting told to automate them away. Chris Hobbs built SouthState Equipment Finance from nothing in 2022 on the idea that clients want specialized structuring without leaving their primary bank. Dan Castellini and Mark Scardigli left two decades at Marlin Leasing to build Trio Capital around the same conviction: that customers remember who answers the phone. Tom Depping, having built and sold two of the industry’s largest independents, came out of retirement to do it again at Fox Ridge Capital — not despite AI but because he believes culture and technology can reinforce each other rather than compete.
That same instinct shows up off the balance sheet, too. Channel’s work with the STRIPES Leadership Program and PEAC Solutions’ new employee resource groups both make the same bet: that investing deliberately in people pays off in ways a spreadsheet can’t fully capture. Gary LoMonaco’s piece on field audits makes a related point from the credit side — in a tighter lending environment, the lenders and lessors who invest in transparency and discipline are the ones who keep earning trust. And George Parker’s essay on our industry’s persistent “I fell into it” origin story is, I think, the quiet thesis of this whole issue: our workforce challenge was never a lack of opportunity. It’s a lack of visibility. The same could be said of everything else in these pages — recovery, relationships, culture — none of it is hiding. It just needs someone willing to point at it.
As always, thank you to the companies that participated in this year’s Monitor 101+ survey and to the contributors who took the time to share what they’re seeing on the ground. I hope this issue gives you as much to think about as it gave us to report.
