My current research looking at the technology strategy of leasing companies is throwing up some interesting questions, particularly in the overlap between transaction based leasing and retail banking.
Both sectors are highly consolidated, having relentlessly chased scale to improve profitability.
Both face similar technology problems of multi-jurisdictional operations; automation; on demand data; and new innovations from outside their sector that need to be accomodated.
While neither leasing nor retail banking manage to keep their core applications entirely coherent and up to date, one can at least point to the roll out of ATMs, the spread of online banking; the pipeline of customer focussed innovations designed to increase what the customer can control directly, and to facilitate straight through processing where-ever possible.
In leasing there is what can only be described as a defensive mentality …. less innovation, transaction rather than business process based systems design , and erosion of competitive advantage and barriers to entry.
Retail banking is much bigger so it’s appropriate that it gets a lot of attention. Retail banking also trumpets its spend on technology as a measure of its fitness for the future. Leasing does not.
But somewhere there’s a CIO who owns both a retail and a leasing operation. I’d like to hear their perspective.
