SME Champion of the Year
Amstel Lease
Operating in the Benelux region,
Germany and the UK (and soon in a fifth European company, according
to the company’s CEO Frank Stienstra), Amstel Lease is owned by ABN
Amro, the Netherlands’ second-largest SME bank.
Some 94 percent of Amstel’s 12,000
customers are SMEs – and the company in the last three quarters
recorded a 10 percent increase in new SME clients.
Amstel has been pushing hard for
business among ABN Amro customers, with the aim of switching them
over from current account financing. This forms a part of ABN’s
‘grip on risk’ campaign.
The current strategy includes radio
adverts on the top Dutch radio stations, expounding the benefits of
equipment leasing, and the development of simplified web-based
leasing tools for SMEs (as part of a wide scale SAP implementation
in 2008).
Retention of existing clients has
been prioritised, with a free magazine introduced for smaller
customers and frequency of visits doubled for larger customers.
Additionally, extensive effort has
been made to restructure and lengthen lease terms, with staff
moving from the front end of the business to manage the change in
the profile of receivables.
All the while, Amstel has remained
prudent, with its portfolio experiencing bad debt levels of only
0.65 percent.
The company has also signed an array
of innovative deals in various sectors (pet food packaging, pop
concert equipment, ferries) to counterbalance the decrease in
agriculture and transport.
It expects 2009 business volume and
net profit to be unchanged from last year.
ING Lease
ING Lease, with some 72 percent of
its €22.5 billion asset portfolio with SME clients, is one of the
largest lessors of vehicles, equipment and commercial real estate
to small European businesses.
The Dutch lessor, which operates in
16 European territories, has increased the SME market’s share of
its leasebook by 5 percent in the last year. More than half of
deals written have been greater than €500,000 in size.
As well as offering equipment
leasing, ING lease has acted as a means for the introduction of ID
and factoring sales for ING’s commercial bank, with a new Fast
Track Factoring system offering factoring to small companies
through automated credit scoring.
On the same theme of integration, in
Poland, ING has worked extremely closely with its parent, offering
leasing products as part of a branch banking service.
Great efforts have been made to make
small ticket business processing more secure, with anti-fraud
training now mandatory for all personnel. Meanwhile, greater
automation of sales channels for car and equipment leasing has
improved access and response times for SME business inquiries.
ING has also been willing to
restructure a significant number of existing lease contracts to
preserve SME customer liquidity.
Parfip Lease
Although small in size compared to
some of the giants featured in this year’s nominations, Belgian
Parfip Lease has built up its €400 million lease book very rapidly
through expansion into the small ticket sector.
With operations in 11 European
territories, Parfip writes 70 percent of its business with SMEs.
Many sales are conducted through resellers and distributors, with
high technology assets in the under €50,000 bracket making up 93
percent of deals.
The company wrote €210 million of
business in 2008, and expanded staff from 130 to 280 over the year,
including the development of a back office support facility in
Mauritius. It confidently expects results for 2009 to demonstrate a
business volume increase of more than 10 percent, with profits
increasing at a similar rate. Over 2009 as a whole, it expects to
have provided equipment leasing to more than 25,000 new business
customers. Bad debt levels stand at 3 percent.
Parfip also cites its rapid rate of
vendor partnership growth as a means by which it has supported
smaller resellers and distributors. For example, more than 70 new
partnerships have been signed by French regional division Parfip
Lyon since the beginning of this year alone.
UniCredit Leasing
For Italian giant UniCredit Leasing,
SME financing was an integral part of 2008’s strategy. As a result
of an agreement with the European Investment Bank, the UniCredit
banking network was charged with making new funding available to
businesses both in Italy and across the CEE region.
Funded by this agreement, UniCredit
Leasing wrote €2.7 billion of leases for Italian SMEs in 2008 –
more than half of annual business volume in the country.
Similarly, the lessor was tasked to
write €400 million of business across its CEE region, funded by the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Specifically in the CEE, UniCredit
has worked hard to keep distressed clients afloat – in Romania, for
example, contractors left unpaid by local government have been
offered payment holidays of as long as one year.
Whereas UniCredit has had to cut
business volumes drastically, it managed to achieve a two-digit
percentage increase in profits, while overseeing a complete
overhaul of its company structure.