Data on Demand

To enable his sales team, Jeff Bell uses ELFA’s Survey of Equipment Finance Activity (SEFA) Interactive Dashboard. As Vice President of Sales Operations at Key Equipment Finance, Bell zeroes in on sales-volume charts and other data to glean industry insights, study trends and compare his company’s progress to that of its peers. 

“I look at the data in reference to our own challenges and successes,” says Bell, who serves on ELFA’s Research Committee. “Are our peers experiencing the same ones we are? Whether the data says yes or no, I can drill deeper to learn more. The Dashboard lets me look at the industry as a whole and also get a relevant picture of my peers. Then, depending on what I’m curious about, I can drill down by organization type, market segment, organization size or business model to find answers to my questions.”  

“In 2019 Spreads improved for the first time since the Great Recession.”

- Ray James, Ivory Consulting Corporation

SEFA Says…

The SEFA Interactive Dashboard is a powerful online tool available to all ELFA members at no charge. Showcasing executive summary data from years of SEFA reports, the Dashboard tracks such measures as New Business Volume; Yield, Spread and Cost of Funds; and Delinquencies to reveal the state of the equipment finance industry each year from 2006 through 2019. Tabs and drop-down menus let users segment data in multiple ways as Bell describes. 

ELFA’s annual SEFA Report, by comparison, is a PDF document charting the most recent two years of lease and loan data from 100 or more participating ELFA-member companies. A recurring survey conducted for over 25 years, the SEFA report has grown to more than 300 pages of tables and graphs as features and categories have been added. Included is information relating to respondents’ volume and type of leasing business, productivity measures and residual experience. Also presented are balance-sheet data, financial ratios and profitability measures.

Survey participants receive a free copy of the report with their company’s data highlighted to facilitate comparisons and analysis. The report is available to non-participating ELFA members for a discounted rate. 

Kevin Prykull, a member of ELFA’s Research Committee, explains the significance of the tools. “The SEFA is the preeminent data source for the nearly $1-trillion equipment finance industry,” he says. “This year, 100 leasing companies participated, capturing a who’s who of the industry and submitting lease and loan data in a variety of forms. With guidance and assistance from experts at PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers), this information is collected, scrubbed to remove company-specific identifying factors, and reconfigured in a variety of ways to allow users to slice and dice it to extract the data they need. And because it’s historical, users can drill down into the finer points of their observation, hypothesis or perception to learn even more.”

“Go in and experiment with the Interactive Dashboard to see how it works. You can’t break it.” 

- Maria Nejeschleba, Wells Fargo Equipment Finance

Annually Increasing Value

Ray James, Senior Consultant at Ivory Consulting Corporation and ELFA Research Committee Chair, says the Dashboard is particularly useful for spotting and studying long-term trends, and that its value increases annually as data for the current year is added. “Unlike the SEFA Report, which uses two years of data for each measurement, the Dashboard uses only the most recent data compiled for each year of the Survey and goes back to 2006, the first year the Survey was conducted in this format,” he observes. “This means that the Dashboard numbers for 2019 will differ from those in the current SEFA report, but will span a much longer period of time. The 2020 Dashboard spans 13 years—one entire business cycle and nearly half of a second cycle. Each year, users will have more historical data, enabling more insights and analysis than ever.”



James points to the 2020 Dashboard’s “Yield, Spread, Cost of Funds Overall” chart as particularly insightful. “This year, we see something quite significant—that in 2019, Spreads improved for the first time since the Great Recession,” he says. “But we also see that that the Pre-Tax Yield, or overall rate on a transaction, went down in 2019, even as the Spread went up. Looking further at this chart, we see that the Cost of Funds in 2019 fell further than Pre-Tax Yields. This means that companies lowered the rates they charged their customers, but not by as much as the decrease in their Cost of Funds. This is how they achieved wider spreads—and if we look at 2009, we’ll see that the same thing happened then.” 

He cites data in “Year-Over-Year Growth Rates in New Business Volume” as an example of the varying ways a trend can affect different types of companies. “One of the first things we notice in this chart is that Independents experienced a huge drop in new business volume in 2009. Memory tells us that this was during the Great Recession, triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis. Independents did not have direct access to federal capital, so they had to borrow their money from banks. When banks stopped lending, many Independents could not add new business and some closed their doors completely.”

Yet, the same chart shows that by 2015, Independents were back and starting to thrive with a 59.9% year-over-year increase in NBV, more than four times the overall average of 12.4%. “This was the result of Independents being a very small portion of NBV and thus having little impact,” says James. “Concurrently, there were some new Survey participants.” 

Worthy Considerations

Carol Ann Fisher, Consultant at PwC, says the SEFA Dashboard provides food for thought and a framework for best use. “Because it is data provided by Survey respondents, it includes blips that are the result of unique phenomena, such as the Great Recession or GE Capital leaving the ranks of Independents to sell off most of its portfolio,” she says. “Depending on what you’re looking for, you may want to discount such blips by dropping the outliers to see the real trend,” she adds. “But hunting for data this way can be educational and enlightening—as well as fun.”

Also important to keep in mind is that the SEFA respondent base changes yearly. “This is why, in the SEFA Report, we ask for two years of data only and show two years of data when reporting dollar amounts or actual number counts,” says Fisher. “It would be misleading to report these over a longer period. But we do feel comfortable showing percent changes over a longer time, because percentages reflect industry trends. That’s why you’ll see percentage measures in the Interactive Dashboard.” 

Indeed, percentages are great storytellers and can unearth as many questions as answers. Listen to Jeff Bell talk about the way he uses the Dashboard’s Delinquencies charts. “If we look at ‘Current to 30 Days Past Due,’ we can see that something is happening because of changes that occurred in 2017-2018,” he says. “The overall percentage of accounts in this category fell sharply, from 98.2% to 95.5%. But then a recovery occurred in 2019 when the percentage of accounts in this segment improved to 97.9%.”

Bell notes a similar occurrence in “Net Full-Year Loss (Charge Offs).” “We see a similar blip as charge-offs more than tripled in 2018, from 0.3% the previous year to 1.1%. And as in ‘Current to 30 Days Past Due,’ we see a recovery in 2019 as charge-offs fell back to 0.3%. What happened, and how do my company’s numbers look in comparison? I can dive deeper into end-user or equipment type to more closely compare our values at Key Equipment Finance with those in the Dashboard. And depending on my findings, I might then ask if we’re targeting the right businesses that are still a strategic fit for our company. This is the thought process I go through.”

Where to Start

Maria Nejeschleba, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Wells Fargo Equipment Finance and a member of ELFA’s Research Committee, says the Dashboard is easy to use and requires only a short time to become familiar. “Just go in and experiment with it to see how it works,” she suggests. “You can’t break it—and by taking some time to click around and get comfortable with it, you’ll know where to find data when you need it.” 

Asked how she uses the Dashboard, Nejeschleba gives this example: “Let’s say I want to look at vendor organizations, and I want to see results both for those companies that only use vendors, and those that have a mix of origination methods. I can click to narrow the results. And if I’m trying to forecast for the next three to five years, I might also look at the last downturn in 2009 to see the Spreads and Head Count for those companies to learn what occurred in those areas before and after the downturn.” She adds, “It’s important to look at the past because we don’t have a playbook for today. We can use the Dashboard to spot past trends, become alert to them, and work to assure they don’t happen again in your company.”

“The SEFA tools provide insight into our industry that’s not available anywhere else.”

- Jeff Bell, Key Equipment Finance


Prykull agrees. “The Dashboard not only provides a benchmark for the last economic downturn on all industry segments, components and transaction styles; it also enables users to consider what-if situations,” he says. “What if your company specializes in large-ticket transactions but wanted to entertain entering a small-ticket product? What if you wanted to establish a vendor program: how would that look, and how might you model the results to show executive management the impact? To do these things, you can utilize the SEFA data from either the Report or the Dashboard in your own financial projection model.”

Prykull acknowledges that some find the SEFA tools intimidating and hesitate to use the Dashboard as a result. “But you don’t have to be a data geek to use it,” he stresses. “You can use it to look broadly at trends or to get into the weeds whenever you want to by drilling down into any question or concern you have about your company’s performance. It’s designed so that companies can go through the data in different ways and use it to run their business.”

“You can…drill down into any question or concern you have about your company’s performance.” 

- Kevin Prykull


“The SEFA tools provide insight into our industry that’s not available anywhere else,” adds Bell. “The way ELFA has built them, they improve as management tools every year as features are added and the amount of data grows. And if you participate in the Survey, you get the Report for free, and your data is embedded in it for easy comparisons. What started as a small survey in the 1980’s has grown into a robust instrument that you can manipulate to find the specific data you care about.” 

Nejeschleba offers a parting thought. “Those who don’t use the SEFA are missing out on valuable data they need to help them plan for the future,” she says. “They’re not using tools at their disposal that their competitors already have.”