While traditional equipment finance companies may avoid writing leases or loans to customers with C, D, or story credits, NFS Leasing sees the opportunity and provides a solution for its vendor and manufacturer partners in serving those customers.

Here’s why:

Quite simply, NFS Leasing specializes in making credit decisions and crafting funding solutions based on a non-investment grade customer’s potential—not just its current circumstance. In doing so, we are able to take the weight off of credit decisioning for our vendor and dealer partners so they can remain focused on their business and closing sales. This allows them to gain new customers through innovative funding that our competitors won’t even consider and maintain and grow their market share with customers even though their creditworthiness may have slipped.

In short, NFS Leasing helps vendors increase sales and strengthen relationships with their customers. And we help them maintain customers, preventing them from going elsewhere for funding. We know that when customers with challenged credit are unable to obtain traditional loans or financing, they are frequently forced to move on to a competitor that offers captive financing or is otherwise willing to work with them, or they just sit tight and do not buy the equipment. Obviously, these scenarios represent missed opportunities not just for the customer, but for the manufacturer or vendor who wants to make the sale, earn customer loyalty, and move product. At NFS Leasing, we want to enable our vendor partners to seize these opportunities. We want their customers to secure the mission-critical equipment. That’s why we offer vendor financing programs.

Customized Vendor Finance Partnerships for Challenging Credits

NFS Leasing’s vendor programs come in many shapes and sizes. They all offer a fast and efficient process to help get your customer the equipment they need … fast. We create a financing solution focused on winning the sale, retaining the customer, and serving their customers—all very efficiently. And NFS has done this for its vendor partners on the full spectrum of transaction sizes—from $25,000 to $15 million. Our small-ticket program serves vendor transactions up to $250,000, making the process from application through funding quick and easy. And we offer flexible customized solutions that are personalized/tailored for mid to large ticket size customers up to $15M. NFS Leasing offers other funding options to help its vendor partners retain customers and increase sales.

For example, NFS could serve as the recipient of a simple referral from its vendor partner. In this case, the vendor refers the customer to NFS, and we document the lease on our own paper. The next step might be a private-label vendor financing agreement, in which financing is offered by the vendor at the point of sale, with the vendor’s branding attached, but the financing is fully administered by NFS. A final option would be syndication, in which NFS serves as an independent finance company that purchases leases directly from a captive leasing arm of the vendor or manufacturer. In any of these cases, we would work to create the best possible financing solution for our vendor partner to leverage their strengths and do so without encumbering that vendor partner with any aspect of financing.

In addition, NFS Leasing offers a vendor portal to help its vendor partners access and track data generated between their customers and NFS. This information is invaluable for our partners to use in projecting product needs and generating marketing strategies.

Listening to a Customer Story to Craft a Funding Solution

The first step we maintain is listening intently. We have found that potential customers of our vendors with C, D, or story credits are eager to explain their circumstances and their potential. We are just as eager to listen—because we have found that often a customer’s unrecognized strength, under-appreciated skill, or hidden product benefits are all that lies between the financing this customer needs for success and that customer looking elsewhere or holding off on equipment acquisition indefinitely. And we know that these unseen strengths and hidden skills rarely show up on a balance sheet; they are only found by lenders who know how to listen to the customer’s story. In hearing their story, NFS Leasing can then lay the foundation for building a winning funding solution.

With 16 years of experience in listening to customers’ stories, we know what their undervalued or unrecognized strengths look like and how to quickly identify them. We then craft a funding package that ensures our vendor partners can close their sale.

Vendor Finance Partnerships: Three Steps Toward Success

In many cases, the financing solutions we craft for the customers of our vendor or manufacturer partners provide at least three distinct advantages.

First, financing with NFS Leasing provides customers with non-investment-grade credit  “trickle-up” benefits far beyond the primary goal of enabling vendors to focus on improving customer retention, growing sales, and increasing revenue. Much of the equipment we finance for our vendors’ customers is essential-use equipment. When these customers obtain financing for such equipment from us, they not only are assured of obtaining the equipment they need to generate revenue, but their purchase generates sales revenue for our vendor partner.

Second, vendors whose customers finance through NFS Leasing eliminate the risk of default. Yes, we take that risk off the vendor plate so they can focus fully on their business. After all, financing is our business, so we know the questions to ask and the structures to apply to any lease or loan paper to ensure its successful repayment and minimize any chance of default. That’s our expertise.

Third, we have proven experience in managing the off-lease process for our vendor partners. Our vendors deal with equipment coming off lease from their customers occasionally; at NFS, we deal with this every day—and have a specialized protocol to ensure it is handled efficiently and cost effectively. Again, allowing NFS Leasing to handle the off-lease process frees our vendors to do what they do best: market and close sales on their equipment or products.

When customers with non-investment-grade credit obtain the equipment their business needs through funding NFS Leasing supplied with one of our customized financing solutions, we know their success also is fueling the success of our vendor or manufacturer partner who sold them the equipment. NFS Leasing is committed to the notion that finding the strengths in every customer’s story is the first step toward financing their success—and, ultimately, the success of the vendors and manufacturers that partner with us.

Contact us today, to learn more about the NFS Leasing vendor and manufacturing partner programs.