At a Glance

• 52% of brokers cannot accurately name their current tier with their top-three funders and 38% are not certain a tier structure exists (Secured Research)
• The differential between tier benefits at most funders is too small to alter submission patterns at the broker level
• Resentment scales with the granularity of disclosure — brokers tier each other long before funders tier brokers, and they notice when the math feels arbitrary
• The funder programs that successfully shift submission mix share three features: visible criteria, monthly recalibration, and benefits tied to economics rather than service

The Three Failure Modes of Funder-Built Broker Tiering

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The post Every Funder Has a Broker Tiering Program — Almost None of Them Actually Change Broker Behavior appeared first on Suite, by Monitor.

At a Glance

• 54% of middle market borrowers carry owned equipment on the balance sheet that meets the basic criteria for a sale-leaseback, but only 19% of their incumbent equipment finance providers have ever proactively proposed one (Secured Research)
• The trigger conditions are observable in public disclosures, M&A activity, treasury leadership changes and capital expenditure cycles
• The most productive sale-leasebacks originate from incumbent relationships — cold sale-leaseback marketing has the lowest conversion rate of any middle market product
• Internal coordination between RM, credit and structured products determines whether the proposal arrives in five days or five weeks — and most middle market firms have the answer set at five weeks

The Product That Is Sold Reactively When It Should Be Identified Proactively

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The post Your Best Sale-Leaseback Candidates Are Already on Your Customer List — You Just Stopped Looking at Their Balance Sheets appeared first on Suite, by Monitor.

At a Glance

• 56% of vendor finance leaders report tightening at least one credit parameter in the prior 12 months, but only 22% have a written protocol for communicating those changes to top-tier dealers (Secured Research)
• Dealers who discover a tightening through a declined application cite that experience as the single largest driver of relationship erosion
• Funders that publish program guidelines and refresh them quarterly retain dealer mindshare during downturns at materially higher rates
• The principals who navigated the 2008–2010 cycle remember which funders called early and which funders went silent — and that memory shapes flow for the next decade

The Mistake Nobody Names: Letting Credit Communicate Through Decline Letters

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The post Tightening Credit Without Losing the Dealers Who Built Your Last Two Years of Growth appeared first on Suite, by Monitor.

At a Glance

• Most middle market annual reviews follow a default agenda that confirms what the customer already knows and surfaces nothing the customer didn’t already plan to share
• The accounts that grow year-over-year share a common pattern: the annual review is run by the lender as a strategic planning session, not a portfolio status update
• Customers who participate in a structured strategic annual review report 3.2x higher likelihood of expanding the relationship through additional capital products in the following 12 months
• The conversation that converts a single-product account into a multi-product platform almost always happens in an annual review — and almost never happens accidentally

The Default Annual Review Is Almost Useless

Most middle market annual reviews run on muscle memory. The RM walks in with a deck. The customer hands over the audited financials they already shared three months earlier. The credit officer asks the same five questions about concentration, liquidity, and capital expenditure plans. Everyone confirms what is already in the file. The meeting ends. Nobody learns anything they did not already know.

This is not an annual review. It is a portfolio status update with a customer in the room. According to Secured Research data drawn from a survey of 215 middle market borrowers, 62% of customers describe their lender’s annual review as ’a confirmation of what we already filed in the data room’ rather than a strategic conversation. The customers are right. And the RMs running these meetings have built a comfortable habit out of the lowest-value version of the most important customer interaction on the calendar.

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The post The Annual Review Most RMs Run Is a Status Update, and it’s a Reason the Account Hasn’t Grown in Three Years appeared first on Suite, by Monitor.