Embracing innovation and incorporating it into the day-to-day agenda represents a new way of doing business. However, today’s cutting-edge differentiator has only a seat at the table tomorrow, according to the 2019 Industry Future Council (IFC) report, “Embracing Innovation – Positioning Your Business for Future Success,” released today by the Equipment Leasing & Finance Foundation.

The 2019 IFC report summarizes the discussions and experimentation of a group of equipment finance industry executives who convened in Washington, D.C. in February this year to focus on issues that equipment leasing and finance firms may want to consider as they plan for future growth.

IFC participants agreed that leaders of traditional equipment finance companies must respond now to growing digital disruption by embracing innovation and using it to create value—and they must do it while also growing their core businesses. To thrive in this environment and achieve positive change, the report outlined a number of steps today’s equipment finance industry leaders must do including:

• Understand the ever-evolving landscape of digital disruption
• Reframe company strategies and process maps to align this new environment to a more diverse workforce, as well as to a new customer base with evolving expectations
• Navigate their companies through the altered landscape safely and profitably, innovating and managing core businesses all the while

To meet these challenges, the 2019 IFC report presented an innovation method specially designed for finance companies called FIRE, an acronym for “Fast, Iterative, Responsive Experiments,” developed by FinTech Forge. FIRE combines elements of Agile, Lean, and other modern business methodologies to provide a quick, effective, and repeatable process to help companies build value with every iteration. IFC participants’ experimentation included applying FIRE to the customer experience, utilization, and efficiency.

“While executives are more comfortable prioritizing and planning for items that produce immediate, tangible benefits, companies that are not continually innovating today will have to play catch-up tomorrow,” said Jeffry D. Elliott, Foundation chairman and senior managing director of Huntington Equipment Finance. “The 2019 IFC report provides insights and tools to enable equipment finance companies to not only create a competitive advantage but invent their own future.”

The 2019 IFC was co-sponsored by PayNet and IDS.