The Equipment Leasing and Finance Association announced that its 2012 Operations & Technology Excellence Award will go to two companies: LEAF Commercial Capital and AIG Commercial Asset Finance. The winners were selected by a subcommittee of ELFA members and will be showcased during ELFA’s Operations and Technology Conference, September 10-11 at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“AIG Commercial Asset Finance and LEAF Commercial Capital demonstrated close business and technology alignment in their creative application of technology solutions to enhance customer and partner interactions, streamline internal operational processes and enable business growth,” said Deborah Reuben, product manager, HCL CapitalStream, and subcommittee chair for the award. “Both winners are inspiring examples of the spirit of ELFA’s Operations & Technology Excellence Award.”

“We are pleased to showcase innovative uses of technology in the equipment finance industry,” said William G. Sutton, CAE, ELFA president and CEO. “The best practices demonstrated by AIG Commercial Asset Finance and LEAF Commercial Capital serve as models on the effective use of technology in our industry, and further demonstrate how ELFA members are effectively ‘Equipping Business for Success.’”

LEAF Commercial Capital is recognized for the state-of-the-art redesign of its originations portal and cost-per-usage product. The redesign allows dealers to originate and close leasing transactions in an expedited manner by moving their customers through the sales cycle faster, without delays. The new solution includes online and mobile enabled capabilities to streamline credit applications and documentation turnaround in the origination process, allowing the user to easily submit, track and close leasing transactions in real-time from virtually any location. It also includes an automated and integrated solution that allows LEAF to automatically retrieve meter-read data directly from a dealer’s in house systems, thereby eliminating data entry and the errors that go along with it. For those dealers who still wish to upload meter-read data, automated validation and online exception resolution were designed into the system to dramatically improve accuracy and decrease the labor costs related to the cost-per-usage billing process.

AIG Commercial Asset Finance is recognized for its innovative approach to leveraging the salesforce.com platform to automate repetitive tasks, streamline workflow and enable better business intelligence. This progressive approach to business and technology strategy implementation has enabled AIGCAF to reap the benefits of a unified business processing platform, providing the flexibility to evolve the solution as business needs change. AIGCAF’s evolutionary methodology led to dramatic improvements in pipeline tracking and reporting, cross-functional sharing of transaction data, portfolio monitoring, customer service, employee communication and real-time collaboration, allowing more focus on sales and revenue-generating activities while reducing development and maintenance costs and reducing compliance risk.

The Operations & Technology Excellence Award identifies and recognizes equipment leasing and finance companies 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.

Previous Operations & Technology Excellence Award winners include:

2011: First American Equipment Finance and ICON Capital
2010: Winthrop Resources
2009: Key Equipment Finance, PHH Arval
2008: Orion First Financial, Trinity Industries Leasing

2007: TCF Equipment Finance, California First National Bancorp and Xerox Capital
2006: Farm Credit Leasing
2005: Sytx Capital, Relational LLC
2004: Cisco Systems Capital
2003: AgStar Financial, National Leasing Group
2002: ABB Financial, IBM Global Financing, Caterpillar Financial