The Challenge
ENGS Commercial Finance Co., a full-service commercial finance company and one of the oldest, most innovative specialized lenders in the U.S. (founded 1952), wanted to expand its equipment finance, working capital finance, and insurance offerings into small ticket lending. They wanted to pursue new business opportunities by empowering dealership vendors to complete more good quality deals. With so many commercial equipment buyers working with reduced cash-flow, the solution to underwrite more loans faster would need to be automated, flexible, and give valuable time back to underwriting agents without sacrificing quality assessments.
ENGS had already implemented Salesforce in 2018 to automate loan/lease origination, along with a combination of third-party and home-grown tools for back-end lease accounting and credit scoring. Yet ENGS still found themselves having to manually verify the legitimacy of equipment buyers; a cumbersome process that prevented them from reaching a full-automated state. They needed a vendor that could integrate their product and iterate faster than the industry standard.
In order to meet these needs without burdening their underwriting agents, ENGS needed to deliver a rigorous and touchless end-to-end small ticket loan application process so time from underwriting agents and vendors could be spent on the most fruitful and complex opportunities.
The Solution
Frank Swann, Senior Vice President of InformationTechnology at ENGS, knew that to compete for loan size applications under $100,000 at scale, they needed to quickly verify applicant information for accuracy, make adjustments, generate, and upload documents so vendor dealers could be better supported in real time. That is when he began investigating Middesk, an agile solution to digitally pull business identities, run KYC/KYB checks, screen against sanctions lists, verify relevant application data, and seamlessly integrate into Salesforce. Middesk was uniquely qualified because its API solution works from proprietary data pipelines that are pulled directly from all 50 Secretaries of State.
Within a month, ENGS integrated the Middesk API and entered the first of a three-phased approach: pull Middesk reports into the Salesforce module, overlay data when inaccuracies are detected, and define business rules to pull additional documents or take other actions. During phase one, key ENGS stakeholders together in close partnership with Middesk’s team analyzed data outputs and tweaked module rules to deliver complete information for 97% of applications. As a result, ENGS is now prepared to power small ticket lending for dealers / vendors. On average, that entails pulling more than a thousand business identities a month to process new small ticket lending applications. With each application taking on average 5 minutes to process manually, Middesk is helping ENGS save over 50 plus hours per month.
The Outcomes
Middesk’s integration closed the loop for end-to-end, automated small ticket lending for ENGS and powered growth into significant new markets. By enabling underwriting agents to feel confident in Middesk’s outputs, they regained over a hundred hours a month for SLAs on larger, more complex cases.
More importantly, with Middesk’s support ENGS can focus on fostering relationships with their vendors that will shape the business equipment financing industry by empowering agility at points of sale. In time, vendor sales professionals will be able to adjust dealer applications based on risk profiles in part powered by Middesk, generate, or change documents without slowing down the process waiting for underwriters’ response, eliminating the back-and-forth that impedes sales. Vendors will even be able use the PropelPortal as a marketing tool to look into their pipelines and upsell their clients based on when leases or loans are coming to term for those in excellent standing. By integrating Middesk’s solution, ENGS has added an additional agile and viable business model to support entry into robust new market.
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