Delivering the Future

Each group had been tasked with dreaming up a new project that would be clearly innovative, profitable and with additional benefits flowing from it if put into practise. The audience listened with interest to the three presentations, and asked searching questions.

The first was a scheme christened EcoReward, a novel idea to encourage the takeup of telematics in leased cars, and to reward lessees and their drivers for subsequent improvements in more frugal fuel use and better “green” behaviour. The motivation was to achieve a Win-win situation, with a greener Europe as the macro-outcome, achieved by telematics guiding drivers to drive more economically, thus saving on C02 emissions, corporate fuel bills, increased customer loyalty, improvement in the perception of the leasing industry, decrease in TCO cost, and the benefits all round of copious telematics data.

The second scheme was Creating a community and subscription based model for making equipment available. One way to express this in a shorthand way would  be to call it the creation of a pool of relevant equipment for SMEs to have access to on terms of short-term hire. The equipment would be second-user, but assured through supporting asset services such as maintenance, insurance, fuel, transportation, and even possibly an operator – effectively a pay-for-use model. The benefits were proposed the service would attract new customers, increase customer awareness and loyalty, and generate additional revenues and earnings.

Running a Pool of rental items can be a surprisingly complex business, and the presentation was very good at showing how subscribers could interact with the scheme with membership passes, for example.

The third scheme was Applying a peer-to-peer platform to leasing, certainly the most ambitious proposal.
The whole session was the result of much well-organised and planned hard work on the pate of Leaseurope and Invigors. The project had only been launched in  May 2013, after which Individual ideas had to be generated by the teams, the best ideas had to be selected, presentations had to be prepared and polished, leading to the final presentations in Rome.

Bill Dost, D&D Leasing with Jukka Salonen, Nordea Finance

The project brief had been to consider, research and prepare a presentation on a product or process innovation, recruitment or retention strategy or a more positive way of promoting sustainable and profitable growth within the leasing industry during the next five years.

The final three ideas were chosen from an intriguing list of concepts:

• Outsourcing financing in a car leasing company
• Leasing for urban areas
• Adding transparency to pricing
• Hybrid lease: short lease & cash-back
• New product development: energy efficiency
• Car lifecycle leasing
• Cross-selling governance in a leasing company
• Image campaign for the leasing industry
• My-tender.com: An online tender platform
• A new recruitment strategy for the leasing industry
• CrowdLeasing
• From classic leasing to a lease broker
• Taking intermediary relationships to the next level: providing them with the means to become lenders

And let’s not forget that these speakers were young and did not necessarily have the experience of getting up in front of a large and expert audience, and pitching their presentations to hundreds of people. Well done Leaseurope, and well done lnvigors.