Case Studies
Industry : Financial
Product : Financier

Glasgow's Singer & Friedlander Commercial Finance Limited is a part of Singer & Friedlander Group, one of the top 250 companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange. The company provides asset finance facilities, including leasing, hire purchase, lease purchase and business loans, to an expanding commercial client base throughout the United Kingdom.

Since 1990 Singer & Friedlander Commercial Finance Limited has invested in systems from Welcom Software. They’ve just gone live with a new version of Financier which will maintain their focus on customer service – key to the successful development of a recently acquired book that increases their base by almost 30%.

“A central part of any CRM strategy is the service you provide," says Managing Director Gordon Rennie. "That's largely down to the calibre of staff and the working philosophy you employ. Underpinning that, though, you have to have a powerful, robust system that relieves the day-to-day administrative burden and provides a simple route to key management information. Financier from Welcom Software allows us to give maximum support to our customers and to our staff. We like their pragmatic approach of working with a customer during development to ensure the product really reflects the changing needs of the industry."

Singer & Friedlander recently replaced their character-based systems with a new Windows-based version of Financier. "It really is a new system, rather than one that has simply been migrated to a different operating system. It means the system is highly intuitive; people quickly feel at home with it because most people have hands on experience of Windows."

Gordon Rennie believes that Financier is a comprehensive finance lease account management system for the commercial sector, with detailed transaction and data capture. "Strong on account administration, it provides such things as status and a full audit trail. It offers highly flexible leasing evaluation capabilities and quotation functionality which help provide a competitive edge in areas such as advanced rentals, irregular payment patterns and balloon payments."

"Its database also makes it ideal for business intelligence and Welcom Software has supplied Brio as the BI engine. This, combined with our knowledge of the finance industry, helps us generate meaningful, useful reports and analyses. Together, the products and the database architecture provide a complete business solution rather than an administrative system. We anticipate increased yield from our customer base and it’s conceivable that it may even lead to new business if it allows us to demonstrate a consistently higher level of customer service than our competitors" concluded Rennie.