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Customer story

How One Commercial Finance Equipment Lender Solved Touchless Small Ticket Lending with Middesk

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Supporting agility in an increasingly automated world, Middesk API supports end-to-end loan origination for ENGS Commercial Finance Co. into new market opportunities.

Industry

Commercial Equipment Financial Services

Company size

100–500 Employees

Location

Itasca, Illinois

97%

Middesk’s team analyzed data outputs and tweaked module rules to deliver complete information for 97% of applications.

50 hours

Middesk is helping ENGS save over 50 plus hours per month.

The Challenge

ENGS Commercial Finance Co., a full-service commercial finance company and one of the oldest, most innovative specialized lenders in the U.S. (founded 1952), wanted to expand its equipment finance, working capital finance, and insurance offerings into small ticket lending. They wanted 
to pursue new business opportunities by empowering dealership vendors to complete more good quality deals. With so many commercial equipment buyers working with reduced cash-flow, the solution to underwrite more loans faster would need to be automated, flexible, and give valuable time back to underwriting agents without 
sacrificing quality assessments.

ENGS had already implemented Salesforce in 2018 to automate loan/lease origination, along with a combination 
of third-party and home-grown tools for back-end lease accounting and credit scoring. Yet ENGS still found themselves having to manually verify the legitimacy of equipment buyers; a cumbersome process that prevented them from reaching a full-automated state. They needed 
a vendor that could integrate their product and iterate 
faster than the industry standard.

In order to meet these needs without burdening their underwriting agents, ENGS needed to deliver a rigorous and touchless end-to-end small ticket loan application process so time from underwriting agents and vendors could be spent on the most fruitful and complex opportunities.

The Solution

Frank Swann, Senior Vice President of InformationTechnology at ENGS, knew that to compete for loan size applications under $100,000 at scale, they needed to 
quickly verify applicant information for accuracy, make adjustments, generate, and upload documents so vendor dealers could be better supported in real time. That is 
when he began investigating Middesk, an agile solution to digitally pull business identities, run KYC/KYB checks, 
screen against sanctions lists, verify relevant application data, and seamlessly integrate into Salesforce. Middesk 
was uniquely qualified because its API solution works from proprietary data pipelines that are pulled directly from all 
50 Secretaries of State.

Within a month, ENGS integrated the Middesk API and entered the first of a three-phased approach: pull Middesk reports into the Salesforce module, overlay data when inaccuracies are detected, and define business rules to pull additional documents or take other actions. During phase one, key ENGS stakeholders together in close partnership with Middesk’s team analyzed data outputs and tweaked module rules to deliver complete information for 97% of applications. As a result, ENGS is now prepared to power small ticket lending for dealers / vendors. On average, that entails pulling more than a thousand business identities a month to process new small ticket lending applications. 
With each application taking on average 5 minutes to 
process manually, Middesk is helping ENGS save over 50 
plus hours per month.

The Outcomes

Middesk’s integration closed the loop for end-to-end, automated small ticket lending for ENGS and powered growth into significant new markets. By enabling underwriting agents to feel confident in Middesk’s 
outputs, they regained over a hundred hours a month 
for SLAs on larger, more complex cases.

More importantly, with Middesk’s support ENGS can focus 
on fostering relationships with their vendors that will shape the business equipment financing industry by empowering agility at points of sale. In time, vendor sales professionals will be able to adjust dealer applications based on risk profiles in part powered by Middesk, generate, or change documents without slowing down the process waiting for underwriters’ response, eliminating the back-and-forth that impedes sales. Vendors will even be able use the PropelPortal as a marketing tool to look into their pipelines and upsell their clients based on when leases or loans are 
coming to term for those in excellent standing. By integrating Middesk’s solution, ENGS has added an additional agile 
and viable business model to support entry into robust 
new market.

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