Société Générale Equipment Finance UK has many years experience assisting companies to find the right financial solution for a wide range of equipment lease or purchase agreements but it is its expertise working within the agricultural sector that prompted it to look at new ways to support their Agricultural Finance brokers.

Giles Turner, Managing Director - Société Générale Equipment Finance UK, said: “We wanted a web-based system with the functionality that would allow us to deliver automated underwriting and manual decision making in real time”.

Steve Symons, Operations Director - Société Générale Equipment Finance UK added: "We chose Oyster Bay Systems to create an innovative broker point of sale and application processing system.

The system we call Connect lives up to its name. It allows our Business Partners to work on or offline while maintaining all of the necessary links required to allow straight-through processing, one time data entry and full automated document production. Connect is delivering all of the business advantages that we wanted”.

Connect, had to address day to day working practices and improve on system responsiveness and flexibility. With Connect in place, David Walton, Head of Agriculture, explains what it has been able to deliver: “Connect presents so many advantages to our brokers; they can manage their entire customer database without risk of loss and manage transactions through Société Générale Equipment Finance UK and their other finance providers as well”.

"The workflow used in Connect means that a broker can enter an application in minutes and submitted to underwriting without the need for paper. Decisions can be fed back immediately and I am happy to say that we have received some tremendous customer feedback, which is exactly what we had hoped for."

The system did present development challenges however, as Giles Turner acknowledged: “We gave Oyster Bay a particularly tough brief and timeframe to work to and, looking back, they have achieved the almost impossible, as well as delivering to budget”.

Connect was also built to assist Société Générale Equipment Finance UK 's entrance in to the  Flow Business market and user partners can now access a complete quotation and proposal management system, including a calculation engine for both on and offline. Full documentation is automatically produced in PDF format, ready for printing or e-mailing. In addition the e-mail a notification is automatically produced with the underwriters’ decision.

John Harman, Sales Director – Oyster Bay Systems added “We are delighted to have been selected by Société Générale Equipment Finance UK  to deliver this very special piece of software that we believe includes one of the most sophisticated loan and lease quotation tools available, thereby enabling Société Générale Equipment Finance UK  to transact business efficiently and swiftly. Connect can also be used to support Société Générale Equipment Finance UK 's other sectors such as Communications Technology, IT, Medical Equipment, Commercial Vehicles, Construction and much more”.