A long-standing player in the Property Leasing industry, Crédit Mutuel ARKEA has, in just a few months, created and launched an equipment leasing offering within its ARKEA Crédit Bail subsidiary.

Crédit Mutuel ARKEA is a co-operative and mutual bank born out of a partnership between the Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne, the Crédit Mutuel du Sud-Ouest and the Crédit Mutuel du Massif Central. With its industry-specific subsidiaries (e.g. Fortuneo Banque, Federal Finance, BPE, Suravenir, Suravenir Assurances, ARKEA Banque Entreprises et Institutionnels, Financo, ARKEA Crédit Bail), Crédit Mutuel ARKEA caters to the banking, financial and insurance needs of its 3 million members and customers. Crédit Mutuel ARKEA products are directed at individual users as well as economic and institutional organisations. Created in 1992, ARKEA Crédit Bail is the Leasing Finance subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel ARKEA. The core business of ARKEA Crédit Bail is Property Leasing. ARKEA Crédit Bail leases professional buildings to companies, real estate firms and self-employed individuals, whether for their own use or for renting to third parties. On 15th January 2011, ARKEA Crédit Bail expanded its product offering to include Equipment Leasing, which is used to finance the acquisition of equipment or commercial and industrial assets.

To create this new offering, Crédit Mutuel ARKEA rapidly put in place an IT system that could create and manage new products. "I joined ARKEA Crédit Bail in order to create and develop this new offering", says Olivier Prot, Managing Director of ARKEA Crédit Bail. "The critical success factors of this project include quick time-to-market, flexibility and speed of deployment. This is why we chose Linedata Ekip to create and manage our new Equipment Leasing contracts".

"This project was completed in a few months which is an excellent performance in terms of software project implementation in the leasing sector," adds Olivier Prot. "We particularly appreciated the robustness and the reliability of the software, as well as the support provided by the expert Linedata teams. Linedata Ekip is also easy to master. Its key features meant that our offering got off to a flying start and 500 contracts were dealt with in the first 100 days."

Linedata Ekip is interfaced with a proprietary extranet portal which collects the information required for contract creation. This information is then directly handled by the software. Fifteen people, ranging from salespeople to contract managers, use the software on a daily basis; about 2,000 contracts were managed by Linedata Ekip in the first year. With the stabilisation phase completed, Crédit Mutuel ARKEA is now able to provide additional services to its partners in the form of fully packaged products.

"Over the last 20 years, we have been delighted to support European and North-African financing companies with their projects in the asset finance, consumer credit or vehicle finance industries. Our Linedata Ekip and Linedata ProFinance software solutions are currently implemented at 150 financial institutions in 32 countries", says Alain Mattei, Chief Operating Officer of the lending and asset finance activity for Linedata. "Not only do we offer robust and reliable software solutions, we also offer a state-of-the-art product soon to be released in a new major version: Linedata Ekip 360 will be a more intuitive, more flexible and more user-friendly solution that will cater to the ever-evolving needs of the lending, leasing and asset finance industry players".