Commercial Finance & Equipment Lending

The shape tilts toward Digital Maturity (68.4) and away from Data & Tracking (60.6). That tilt tells you where the industry's marketing dollars have gone and where they haven't. The businesses that correct the tilt first will see outsized returns because they're fixing the constraint that's holding everything else back.

Dimension Breakdown

Why the best equipment lenders are quiet marketers

Commercial finance does not look like a marketing-driven category. The composite of 66.0 says otherwise. The lenders and brokers who invest in systematic marketing, even if it is modest in scale, consistently outperform those who rely purely on referral networks and broker relationships.

The balanced weighting (25/25/25 across acquisition, conversion and retention) tells you something about the business model. This is not a one-shot category. A single equipment finance deal might be worth $50,000-$500,000, but the lifetime value of a commercial client who finances multiple assets over a decade is ten times that. Marketing needs to work at both ends.

Acquisition at 65.1 is dominated by two channels: broker networks and Google search. The lenders winning on acquisition have invested in broker portals (making it easy for introducing brokers to lodge deals) and SEO content targeting industry-specific equipment finance terms. Generic advertising rarely works in this space.

Conversion efficiency at 67.9 reflects the quality of the application process. In commercial lending, conversion is not a website problem. It is an operations problem. The lenders with digital applications, automated document collection and fast credit decisions convert at higher rates. Every extra day in the approval process is a chance for the borrower to go elsewhere.

The retention score of 66.6 separates the best from the average. Top performers treat their loan book as a marketing asset: proactive contact before lease expiry, equipment replacement planning conversations and cross-sell into insurance and fleet management. The lenders who wait for inbound refinance requests are losing clients to more proactive competitors.

A 20.4-point spread between Commonwealth Bank Business and Shift (formerly GetCapital). That's not one industry. That's two separate leagues operating under the same name. The leaders are playing chess. The challengers are still learning the rules.

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Frequently Asked

Where does your business sit in this picture?

Commercial Finance & Equipment Lending scores 66 on average. That's one number across 6 dimensions. Your number will be different, and the breakdown will tell you exactly where to invest and where to stop wasting money.