Mitsubishi HC Capital America moves to AI for predictive pricing, marketing

Mitsubishi HC Capital America has integrated its first artificial intelligence predictive pricing model for sales, with plans to expand its AI use to include marketing predictions.  

The U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese lender is investing heavily in AI as part of its larger efforts to digitize the company, Vice President of Digital Transformation Isabelle Barbeau told Equipment Finance News.  

The lender uses Salesforce’s Mulesoft technology, which leverages AI to automate administrative processes at scale. Mitsubishi HC Capital America chose the tool to integrate more systems and processes rapidly after its April 2023 merger with ENGS Commercial Finance. The merger created Mitsubishi HC Capital America as its own financing entity.  

Mulesoft’s AI can predict when sales are going to happen based on data the company purchases and feeds into it, Barbeau said. Prior to the integration, the lender mainly tracked predictions and sales via Excel, Barbeau said.  

“Once a month we run the bots and they make all this happen without any manual intervention,” Barbeau said. “So, it generates opportunities, leads for our team to act on. And [we are] basically generating revenue, gaining some efficiency and getting rid of a lot of manual tasks.”  

Mitsubishi HC Capital America’s focus on AI is not unique, Barbeau said, noting that other equipment financing firms are looking into using the technology. But, she said, the company’s focus on predictive marketing is new and could influence its bottom line.  

“The next step for that project would be to automate and personalize even more the offers we give to our clients,” Barbeau said. She added that Mitsubishi HC Capital America is already using payment and equipment finance [exploratory data analysis] but said there are many more data sources to feed the AI in order to better target customers.  

“It’s not so much about the AI but what kind of data we can also leverage from third parties,” Barbeau added, noting that the AI model is only as effective as the data sets it receives.  

Additionally, Barbeau said Mitsubishi HC Capital America has ambitions to connect the purchase-prediction model it recently began using to the company’s marketing cloud. This would enable the automation of some of its marketing when it identifies a customer likely to make a purchase, including co-branded offers with vendors.  

“We always include our vendors and brokers, to make sure that they’re part of the opportunity we’ve found,” Barbeau said of the company’s new embrace of AI. “It’s a revenue generation for both the vendor and us.”  

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