E-sign, data, tech adoption crucial for equipment finance industry, experts say

Equipment dealers and lenders are expecting technology to play a crucial role in driving growth in the second half of 2025, but they also urged against overzealousness during today’s Equipment Finance News webinar “Technologies to Advance Your Equipment Financing Business.” 

With the return of 100% bonus depreciation as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act, dealers are anticipating a “big, booming fourth quarter,” said John Boy, finance and sales administration manager at Bridgeville, Pa.-based Anderson Equipment Co., in the webinar.  

Watch the webinar here.  

A potential demand surge heightens the need for technology to accelerate sales and financing processes in a competitive market, Boy said. 

“E-sign is going to be critical, because the speed of these transactions and the ability to get these transactions done is going to be the important part.”

— John Boy, finance manager, Anderson Equipment Co.

“If we can get working with companies that are using [technology], where they’re integrating IT, they’re speeding up their turnaround times, everything’s just going to flow start to finish digitally,” he said. “That’s going to make the difference between us as a dealership closing versus one of our competitors” 

Starting slow 

As tech adoption increases amid the AI revolution and evolving consumer behaviors, starting slow and prioritizing strong “internal operations and efficiency” can help lay the foundation for successful tech deployment, Jeffry Elliott, founder and chief executive of Elevex Capital, said during the webinar. 

“When we get those efficiency gains, we’ll reinvest those into more marketing approaches and lead generation and that kind of more exciting stuff that people want to see with AI,” he said. 

Elevex plans to continue interacting with AI, studying AI information security and implementing it “into our daily process behind the scenes” for the rest of 2025, Elliott said. For the next few years, financiers will be “thinking about adoption, thinking about efficiencies, improving your internal processes,” he said. 

Data matters 

Equipment lenders should also focus on data quality as they turn to AI to automate certain tasks, Tawnya Stone, vice president for strategic technology at GreatAmerica Financial Services, said, noting that customer value is a major focus for the company in 2025 and beyond.  

“With all the conversation about AI, it depends on data,” she said. “That is sort of the food that feeds it. Automation done right not only helps with that efficiency but helps with the data quality. So, just ensuring that we are able to have a clean data set so that we can utilize AI in a way that is effective, both internally and externally, is super important.”