Lendscape, a global commercial finance technology provider, announced Aug. 17 that it had named Liventus its implementation and data migration partner for U.S. equipment finance customers. Liventus will handle configuration, data migration, integration, testing and go-live alongside Lendscape’s delivery team, and it will get direct access to Lendscape’s API-first platform to build new products and services for the industry.
In a joint interview with Monitor, leaders from both companies explained why they chose each other, what an open architecture changes for lenders and how they hope to make migrations less painful.
Product Company, Services Specialist
Lendscape’s strategy is to build software and leave professional services to someone else. “We want to be solely focused on being a product company, so we’re not looking to make professional services dollars or anything,” Steve Taplin, chief product officer at Lendscape, says. “We want to be very strong at delivering good product that serves the whole market, and then we just need a high-quality partner to help us deliver it.”
Taplin says most vendors in the space take the opposite path, working through one customer’s customization requests after another. “It actually drowns your engineering team,” Taplin says. “It ends up developing things for individual customers only, one after the other.”
Dan Levin, president and co-founder of Liventus, says the model is hardly unusual. “We are partnered with many software companies in this capacity because many rely on partners to implement and support their software, so they can focus on what they do, and that’s the software piece” Levin says, pointing to companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, and others even within equipment finance.
The two companies also have history. Taplin says he has known the Liventus team for the best part of two decades while supporting the U.S. equipment finance market, and that its experience with both vendors and lenders is invaluable as Lendscape brings its platform to the U.S. Scampton says has worked with Liventus for almost a decade and has watched it grow over the past several years into the most comprehensive equipment finance technology consultancy he has seen.
Why APIs Matter
Lendscape began building its platform in 2019, Taplin says, and the technology industry didn’t settle on APIs as a standard until about 2015. “Any system built before then would have been doing APIs as an afterthought,” he says. Lendscape’s APIs are fully documented and cover all its data and functions. “Having these APIs fully documented and 100% available for all the data and functions turns out to be its strongest feature,” Taplin says.
That openness, he says, is also why the industry’s long-promised best-of-breed technology stack is finally realistic. “On paper you get the best of all worlds, but you couldn’t get the systems to communicate with each other,” Taplin says of the pre-API era. “Now it really is possible to just select the best tools for the job and then connect them using standard API protocols.”
For Liventus, the payoff is practical. Levin says Lendscape’s user interface runs on the same APIs Liventus connects to, which makes integrations with CRM systems, tax engines, document systems and third-party bureaus more straightforward. It also changes how a rollout can work. “You can bridge the gaps through APIs and phase out the adoption of the technology over time,” Levin says, rather than doing a traditional lift-and-shift all at once.
Customers have used the openness in ways Lendscape did not expect. Taplin says the first piece of the system to go live at a customer was not planned: Someone noticed the pricing engine and used it to validate proposals in an onboarding platform before they reached the back office. More recently, British independent funding source Simply Asset Finance built an AI agent it named Kara that handles customer and broker requests such as payoff quotes and payment date changes, with Lendscape simply presenting itself as APIs for the agent to use.
Knowing the Business, Not Just the Software
Levin says lessors are not the problem when it comes to technology change. “Lessors aren’t afraid of new technology. I think they’re afraid of the migration or the implementation,” he says. Migrations can be long, expensive and hard work, and they dig up “every workaround someone’s hard-coded in their workflows, built 15 years ago, and custom rules hidden in programs that no one has any idea about,” Levin says, all while deadlines, boards and month-end closes loom.
That is where Liventus aims to differentiate itself. “You need a team that knows the business and a team that knows the software,” Levin says. Mapping fields is only the start; his team also needs to understand how pre-computed schedules respond when a payment arrives early or late and how that flows through cash application, delinquencies and tax treatments.
Mitch Peterson of Liventus says the firm has “well over 300 years of equipment finance industry experience” across its team and has seen “literally hundreds of business models” in the industry. The goal, he says, is to preserve each client’s business process so that the system becomes an afterthought rather than an inhibitor.
Beyond Implementation
The partnership is meant to reach past go-live. Levin says servicing systems are just one part of a lender’s operations, and Lendscape’s open APIs make it faster and cheaper to improve the rest. Liventus’ own products, including Credit MindTM, which sits upstream on origination and underwriting, and DataConsoleTM, can plug in easily, he says. Custom AI agents can connect through the MCP server Lendscape ships.
Peterson points to the data side. The platform generates a rich data set every day, he says, which lenders can mine for insights, scenario planning and anomalies so they can get ahead of trends.
Taplin says the MCP server exists mainly so AI agents can reach Lendscape’s capabilities, through APIs and reporting database. Many equipment finance companies are both excited and uncertain about AI, he says, and Lendscape is building its own agents to bring “more of the mind of the operator” into the work, so lenders can focus on customer relationships and bringing on more business.
Asked whether Liventus is positioned as the long-term go-to partner for the platform, Levin is direct. “That’s the agreement, that’s the intent,” he says. “We’re Lendscape’s implementation partner.”
What Comes Next
Levin acknowledges that Liventus has not yet gone live on a Lendscape implementation, so his examples come from its years of work across the industry. Taplin says he expects a series of successful implementations, and he sees an opportunity to change the narrative around migrations in the U.S. “I think it’s been described as being traumatic,” he says of the market’s experience. But data migration, he says, has been the smoothest and most satisfying part of Lendscape’s previous implementations. “It doesn’t have to be a drama,” Taplin says.
Peterson says the two companies talk weekly, trading notes on functionality and unusual customer needs, and that Lendscape is open to folding Liventus’ feedback into its product. Levin says customers will get a unified front: software, implementation, integration and support from one team working in their best interest.
Sean Scampton, vice president of sales for Lendscape, says he believes 100% API-first architecture and real-time data exchange will be the industry expectation within the next few years. “I’m really excited that Liventus is our partner in bringing that vision to life,” he says.
