Moto Tohda, Vice President of Information Systems at Tokyo Century USA, cuts to the heart of it: “This is not about technology; it’s about a mindset. It requires us to rethink how we do things and reimagine the workflow.”
First Principles
For equipment finance firms, AI has made one thing clear: the old ways of doing things are no longer sufficient.
“We're trying to take a first principles approach to an old business. The industry has been talking about solving these problems for years. The trouble is that the old systems still work.”
Elevex Capital
“We’re trying to take a first principles approach to an old business,” says Cory Damm, Elevex Capital Chief Marketing Officer. “The industry has been talking about solving these problems for years. The trouble is that the old systems still work.”
“Being a new entrant to the market means that we can take a point-of-sale experience and deliver it to large deals,” he continues. “Helping vendors sell more equipment faster to more customers is our driving objective.”
“We see innovation as the process of unlocking data’s full potential; turning insights into actionable intelligence that empowers organizations to optimize asset performance, manage risk more effectively and make proactive lifecycle decisions,” says Brian Holland, Fleet Advantage President and CEO.
Innovation is an an operational discipline, says Jeremy Gillam, Senior Vice President and Head of Technology, Amur Equipment Finance. “We start with one question: what decision are we trying to improve and for whom?” he says, “whether that’s a credit decision or how quickly Amur can respond to a customer.”
“The focus on who the work is for carries through to how we plan and build,” Gillam adds. “If users see the value in their everyday work, adoption follows. The moment they need to be reminded to use a tool, that adoption has already broken down.”
“Partners want speed, clarity and consistency. The difference now is that we can prove it in the workflow, not just promise it in a conversation.”
Amur Equipment Finance
“Our innovation drivers are multi-phased,” says Lilian Starr, Director of Operations for Customer Service, First Citizens Bank Equipment Finance. “We center on customer needs and operational opportunities to improve efficiency, scalability and resiliency. We are attentive to market dynamics in emerging technologies while remaining true to our relationship-driven model.”
Rather than chasing technology, start with unsolved problems and ask whether AI can finally close the gap, relates Tohda. This slower, more deliberate approach demands buy-in and alignment, but it delivers faster and better results in the long run.
“Partners want speed, clarity and consistency,” Gillam says. “The difference now is that we can prove it in the workflow, not just promise it in a conversation.”
Head Turning Numbers
The companies we interviewed had some striking results from their innovation initiatives: a 60-day reduction in timelines, an up to 20-fold increase in the number of credit transactions underwriters could review daily, and a 20%-25% decrease in credit processing times.
Amur Equipment Finance
The company’s first phase of Amur Intelligence Core (AIC) debuted over the past year. Designed to embed intelligence into its core deal workflow, and focusing on credit and partner communication, Amur wanted to go beyond automating tasks to improving how decisions are made and communicated.
By streamlining credit workflows, reducing back-and forth and improving deal status visibility, Amur was able to respond faster and more consistently throughout the lifecycle of a transaction. “The impact was measurable,” Gillam says. “Credit processing times declined by roughly 20% to 25% and teams were able to support higher volumes.”
On the credit side, Amur introduced AI-assisted processing to improve speed and consistency, all while keeping the decisions in human hands. “The goal is to strengthen judgment, not replace it,” Gillam relates.
Elevex
Established in 2025, Elevex is relying on technology, using AI to analyze lease documents against base leases in secondary market transactions, and automating due diligence searches for missing documents. This allows staff to focus on more high-level decisions. “Our vision is a digitally enabled funding platform that meets the customer where the customer is,” Damm says.
With the July launch of its digital lending program “Rock,” Elevex hit the ground running – immediately processing deals while laying the groundwork for embedded finance, automation and AI capabilities.
“We’ve developed agentic (job-specific) AI agents that allow customers to upload documentation and give us the ability to create a credit summary and create a set of follow-up questions,” Damm says. “We’re not completely reliant on these agents, but it gives our mid-ticket underwriters the ability to go from one or two deep reviews of a credit transaction a day to 10 to 20 times that kind of throughput.”
“We focused on simplifying processes, reducing risk, and delivering strong customer outcomes. Now we have one single platform that allows us to handle specific customer requests from end to end in one place.”
First Citizens Bank Equipment Finance
First Citizens Bank
First Citizens launched a its new collections and servicing platform in 2025. “It was a major milestone, involving a cross-functional effort,” Starr says. “We focused on simplifying processes, reducing risk, and delivering strong customer outcomes. Now we have one single platform that allows us to handle specific customer requests from end to end in one place.”
First Citizens is also examining its origination processes and making sure they are aligned with systems more downstream. “There might be one system running the front of the house and a different one at the back of the house requiring your people to swivel between the two,” Starr points out. “Instead, the process must flow efficiently across the board.”
Fleet Advantage
This transportation asset management and specialty finance solutions provider has focused on transforming both ends of the equipment cycle with two products: OffLease Reimagined and its Capital Cost Avoidance Program (CCAP). “Together these solutions address two of the industry’s most persistent challenges: managing lease-end complexity and mitigating rising equipment acquisition costs,” Holland says.
OffLease Reimagined, winner of ELFA’s 2025 Excellence in Innovation Award, is a digital, asset-oriented platform that streamlines the traditionally manual, fragmented lease-end surrender process.
The platform consolidates inspections, documentation, cost estimation and communication into a cloud-based environment. Beta testing let Fleet Advantage stress-test the full workflow, tighten up the interface and automate what was still manual, all while getting stakeholders comfortable with the platform early. By the September 2025 launch, the company had worked out the kinks and had everyone aligned.
“The results have been transformative,” Holland remarks.
For example, a large, national retail fleet historically averaged 92 days to complete the surrender process, which often begins after a vehicle is taken out of service. Using OffLease Reimagined, inspections were pre-scheduled based on lifecycle data, documentation was uploaded in real time, and condition reports were standardized and immediately visible to all parties. Automated workflows flagged discrepancies instantly, eliminating prolonged reconciliation cycles. The result: the average timeline went from 92 to 28 days.
As Fleet Advantage developed OffLease Reimagined, “it became increasingly clear that many of the same inefficiencies and opportunities existed upstream in procurement planning,” Holland says. “That realization directly informed the development of CCAP.”
CCAP gives organizations with transportation fleets forecasting and procurement tools to make proactive equipment purchase in the face of tariff uncertainty and looming EPA 2027 emission regulations.
As with OffLease Reimagined, CCAP comes with head-turning cost efficiencies. By securing assets before Q3, Fleet Advantage says clients can save a minimum of $900,000 on 100 trucks. Furthermore, delaying these purchases could cost them that $900,000 plus an additional $1.78 million.
Tokyo Century
The first step of the company’s Customer 360 project was recognizing that critical information – customer calls, emails, Excel-based workarounds – remained trapped within the teams that created it. Tokyo Century is using an AI agent to make that data available company wide.
“We’re now examining how can we achieve a better customer experience now that the data is available at our fingertips,” Tohda says. The goal: to reduce or streamline the teams’ routine interactions by 50% so that their expertise is directed where it truly matters.
“It always comes down to the people. You can’t just run on technology. You must have a mission and know why you think technology will help.”
Tokyo Century USA
Start With People
Start a technology journey first with the people who are closest to the process you want to improve, advises Starr. “True innovation begins when you look at the insights and experiences of the people who are doing the work. You will get valuable insight into what you want to make better,” she says.
“We don’t build in isolation,” Gillam says. Instead, success comes down to clear intent, tight collaboration and keeping it simple. There is agreement on what needs to improve, and teams stay in constant contact to make sure the solutions fit how people actually operate day to day.
“It always comes down to the people,” Tohda says. You can’t just run on technology. You must have a mission and know why you think technology will help.”
Once a project is over, he says, a team must review lessons learned, so progress builds over time instead of resetting with each initiative.
“Innovation in equipment finance extends far beyond the financing structures themselves. It requires modernizing the operational infrastructure that supports asset lifecycle management.”
President and CEO
Building on Gains
Building on AIC, Amur is embedding decision-support intelligence into the deal workflow. “The goal is intelligence embedded in the workflow, surfacing the right information at the exact moment a decision is made,” Gillam says.
Another focus is operational leverage, Gillam notes. “As complexity increases, the goal is simple: design workflows that absorb it – so it never shows up as friction for the team,” he says. This includes streamlining partner interactions, improving deal visibility and making it easier to deliver clear, consistent answers with fewer touchpoints.
Also on Amur’s plate: building flexible approval pathways for specialized equipment segments, creating an opportunity to better serve small and mid-sized businesses.
“Innovation in equipment finance extends far beyond the financing structures themselves,” Holland says. “It requires modernizing the operational infrastructure that supports asset lifecycle management. By addressing inefficiencies at every stage, from acquisition to remarketing, innovation can simultaneously improve financial performance, enhance transparency and strengthen trust among all stakeholders.”
Outcomes Over Activity
There’s a tendency in most industries to measure innovation effort by activity rather than outcomes, Gillam notes. How many projects launched? How many tools deployed? How many features added? A more honest test is whether the work reduced friction, made decisions faster without creating new risk, and whether people used it without being forced.
Don’t let perfection get in your way. “You don’t have to wait until it’s perfect, because that could really slow you down,” Starr says. “Take a phased approach.”
Tohda’s advice: Don’t get lost in AI programming, learn design flow instead and incrementally refine the prompts for accurate and consistent results. “It’s your new employee. Train it, and be ready to catch mistakes,” he says. “The same automation that you apply to customer service today can be applied to accounting tomorrow.”
“This industry is geared toward personal touch, and technology can enhance that at a much larger scale,” Tohda continues. “But we can’t think through the lens of what we’ve done prior to this. It’s a completely new process.”
“The organizations that get this right won’t be the loudest about innovation,” Gillam sums up, “they’ll just be the easiest to work with.”
Clean Data First
Where to start? The adage of “garbage in/garbage out” is multiplied immeasurably when introducing AI to your workflow. Legacy systems mean siloed information. Getting data from disparate sources to become part of your workflow is an initial step to putting AI capabilities to work.
“AI needs correct data, so data governance is key,” Moto Tohda says. Previously, data represented historical reporting; now its integrated into future workflows.
Then consider these steps:
- Go after obvious pain points. What do you want to achieve that you don’t think can happen with your current technology or business flow?
- Take a deep dive: Where are the gaps? Is it a people problem or a technology issue or both? Involve all levels, from field personnel to management.
- Examine which technology tool will help solve a specific issue, then create a project timeline.
