Assilea: managing data to prepare for the future

Success stories told by our clients

Music and video, cars, but also designer clothing and furniture: today you can have everything without owning anything. This is a further shift triggered, on one hand, by millennials and Gen Z entering the market, and on the other, by economic and social change. Globalisation, shrinking distances, and a more “fluid” job market have led to the loss of the “social value” of ownership, which is no longer seen as a status symbol. Buying a house no longer makes sense if a job requires frequent relocation. It doesn’t pay to buy furniture, clothes or a car if they will only be used for a short time or occasionally.

This change is also reflected by ASSILEA, the Italian Leasing Association (Associazione Italiana Leasing), which represents leasing companies within the sector’s organisations, and which in 2019 recorded clear growth in long-term car rentals and operating lease contracts. The volume of financial leases, on the other hand, remained substantially unchanged.*

ASSILEA, in addition to acting as an intermediary with public and private institutions, works on behalf of its members by promoting studies and research and carrying out initiatives aimed at promoting the leasing product. It was precisely for research and market purposes that ASSILEA turned to Intesa (Havant Group) to create a “Rental Database”, in order to collect data from its member companies on every single rental agreement signed, recording the parties involved, the contracts, the assets and the guarantees. Feeding the database will thus create a special observation point on the trend of contracts, their positioning and their evolution over time. Luigi Macchiola, General Manager of ASSILEA, explained the origin of the project and the collaboration with Intesa (Havant Group) in a recent interview with Digital4Executive; ASSILEA had already worked with Intesa (Havant Group) to create the “Central Credit Register Database” (“Banca Dati Centrale Rischi”). «This experience helped us understand the importance of a database not only from a creditworthiness standpoint, but also for market analysis. Our dream today is to create a single platform to record leasing and rental contracts, as well as an asset database. Once all this information is brought together, we will be able to do our work as an association even better. Intesa (Havant Group) has supported us on the database project for more than twenty years, and is a key technology partner for us».A single platform on which member companies can not only upload data on the contracts they have signed, but also consult the data already available, with particular attention paid to user experience. Macchiola continues: «We needed fast usability, because information only makes sense and has value if it can be easily retrieved wherever you are, without any device or location limits. What matters is finding information quickly, promptly and in complete security».And according to Macchiola, technology played a fundamental role in the project precisely when it came to data security. For this reason, it will also be at the heart of the Association’s future, which has already launched a project on blockchain technology and sees predictive algorithms as the natural continuation of the work carried out so far: «We have already identified some predictive algorithms and carried out some analyses, combining the data in our databases with other data external to the platform, from GDP to local macroeconomic data. We don’t just want a snapshot of the current and past situation, but we also want to try to look towards the future».

* Source: Lease 2020 press release