– Tim Pulleyn promoted to Head of Partner Sales

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions are pleased to announce that Mark Richards has been appointed General Manager and Tim Pulleyn has been appointed as Mark’s successor in his new role, as Head of Partner Sales.

Mark is a highly experienced industry professional with over 25 years’ experience, having previously held roles at both GE Capital and Hitachi. His career has been 100% focussed on vendor and broker financing, building strong long-term customer relationships based on understanding the importance of service excellence & partnership. In his previous role as Head of Partner Sales, Mark has been instrumental in taking the business to the next phase of the business growth and development.

In his new role, Mark will be responsible for the whole Equipment Logistic and Solutions business division, overseeing Sales, Credit and Operations across the following markets – Construction, Food & Agriculture, Materials Handling and Commercial Vehicles.

On his appointment, Mark Richard comments,

“Despite the obvious challenges of the last 18 months due to the pandemic, we have seen strong year-on-year growth across many areas of our business. I would like to say a huge thank you to all our customers for their support and trust in us during this period and to our staff for their commitment.”

“The long-term view of BNP Paribas puts Leasing Solutions firmly at the heart of the group strategy, enabling us to weather the different economic cycles while maintaining consistency in our proposition, and to build lasting relationships with our partners in a mutually beneficial way.”

“This, combined with the strong, talented team I will be working with as we enter this next chapter, makes me feel excited about the future for both us and our customers. For myself and the leadership team, it’s critical we are in constant communication with our customers, hearing them so that we can listen, learn and act to deliver a service that is consistent, reliable and does what they need.”

Tim Pulleyn succeeds Mark Richards, as the new Head of Partner Sales. Tim is also highly experienced within the industry, as a proven credit & sales leader across a range of disciplines including global banking, international leasing and asset finance. Most recently having held the position of Head of Structured Finance at Metro Bank before joining BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK in 2019 as Head of the Broker division. Since 2019, Tim has fostered great relationships with the Brokers, making a significant impact, capitalising on his already extensive network of contacts and knowledge.

Tim Pulleyn says,

“I am delighted to be taking up this new role within the company. I feel proud to work for a business that is one of Europe’s most trusted providers of asset finance. As a team, we are committed to supporting partners with specialist knowledge to help them achieve their growth ambitions – performance through partnership. One of the ways we do this is by building strategic alliances, aligning our expertise to the needs of our partners through a deep understanding of their requirements.”

“In the next few months, one of my priorities will be to continue to talk to our customers, understand where we can really add value in the leasing cycle and make sure we deliver that value consistently, day in day out.”

 

Mark Richards, Equipment Logistic and Solutions General Manager at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK, said:

“Tim’s appointment as Head of Partner Sales further cements our ambitions to keep putting our customers at the heart of everything we do. Tim and his team will continue to build real customer focus, ensuring it remains at the forefront of every decision we make.”

Rachel Appleton, CEO of BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK, comments:

“I am absolutely delighted to welcome both Mark and Tim in their new roles. As General Manager, Mark will be able to build further on his achievements to date. Mark has proven his commitment to both our customers and our business, building a sales strategy, which focuses on adding value at every stage in the leasing cycle.”

“Likewise, Tim has made a significant impact across our broker markets since joining us in 2019, using his wealth of knowledge to build a solid proposition.”

“I have no doubt that these moves will continue to strengthen our commitment to long-term partnerships across the diverse range of markets we operate. This will help us all move forward together, as we emerge from the period of uncertainty the crisis has brought, into a new period of growth and opportunity.“

-ENDS-

For Media enquiries, please contact:

Lauren Goodfellow @ marketing.leasingsolutions@uk.bnpparibas.com

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions are pleased to announce that Rachel Appleton has taken up the role of CEO in the UK as successor to Jean-Michel Boyer following his appointment as CEO of BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions France.

Rachel has over 30 years’ experience in asset finance, 20 of those at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions. She has mastered a broad range of disciplines starting as a founder member of our U.K. Technology Solutions business in 2001.

In 2013, Rachel was appointed H.R. Director for BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions U.K, focused on strong employee engagement, the upskilling of our people and developing a clear employee value proposition. More recently in 2019 Rachel became our UK Chief Transformation Officer, providing exceptional support for the business, responsible for delivering a number of new digital tools designed to improve service to our customers.

Rachel joined the BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK board in 2019 and has consistently built and delivered strategies across all BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions business divisions aimed at enhancing service delivery and thus supporting our growth ambitions. She has a reputation for putting our customers and our people first whilst executing on business plans which deliver tangible results.

In her new role, Rachel will steer the UK business as we look to the future, one of ambitious growth in existing markets and expansion into new markets by adding value to our customers and helping them achieve their goals.

“I am absolutely delighted to take up the role of CEO in the UK. From a Group perspective asset finance sits firmly at the core of our broader strategy which enables us to give our customers the confidence to develop long term strategic alliances with us.

To support them we must continue to put our customers at the very heart of everything we do.

We have a talented team and are committed to providing them with the tools and skills they need to deliver outstanding service and expert support where and when it’s needed.

Our own growth plans must be closely aligned to those of our customers and our aim is to continually challenge ourselves to ensure we are the number one lessor of choice based on consistent service delivery. We look forward to sharing more detail about our plans over the coming months”

– Rachel Appleton, BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK CEO

“I am delighted Rachel has agreed to take up the role of UK CEO for BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions. Her broad experience and excellent leadership skills combined with a passion for delivering great customer service and inspiring our people to achieve their full potential is a powerful combination which gives Rachel a unique view of what is needed to lead our teams, enabling them to deliver for our customers.”

– Raf Ramaekers, Country Supervisor BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions

For Media enquiries, please contact:

Lauren Goodfellow @ marketing.leasingsolutions@uk.bnpparibas.com

Finance Unlocked went bite-sized

The early weeks of lockdown were spent converting content designed for face to face training, normally involving sessions lasting a minimum of two hours, to a series of short modules lasting about 30 minutes each.

Our partners were provided with a catalogue of topics and selected one or more for their teams, each being tailored for the market in which they operated. Where a number of modules were selected, delivery tended to be on a weekly basis over up to eight weeks.

Given this was a new form of training delivery we were very keen to receive feedback from those taking part. Participants are invited to complete a survey on the quality and relevance of the training they receive and we are delighted to have received very high satisfaction scores, similar to the positive feedback we have always received after face to face training.

Will Finance Unlocked stay bite-sized?

The big lesson learned since March is that effective finance training can be delivered via webinars and that many people have become very comfortable with the idea of video-conferencing in both their personal and working lives.

Face to face training remains the best option where increasing sales-team knowledge about business finance is identified as a mission-critical priority, or where there are significant knowledge gaps amongst a number of the team.

There is however a place for digitally-delivered training where experienced team members are looking to refresh their knowledge in specific areas, such as regulation and compliance or understanding financial statements, or new team members want an intro to the basics of selling using leasing in their market/sectors.

Bite-sized webinars can be conducted at a time and place convenient to individuals, can be tailored to suit specific requirements, can be cost-effectively delivered and achieved without the loss of valuable ‘selling time’. It is therefore a logical conclusion that webinars will remain an important element of future training, even as we move toward a more normal way of working. With important additions to both content and means of delivery, Finance Unlocked is within easy reach of everyone and will prove a very useful way of refreshing knowledge after an extended period of reduced sales activity.

Andy Milsom, Head of Partner Training & Development at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions

Andy is an experienced sales and finance professional with over 25 years’ experience in sales aid leasing. Andy is widely recognised as an expert in business finance and has in recent years focused his attention on developing partner sales teams develop an understanding of how businesses secure project financing. His training programme – Finance Unlocked – is a highly rated customisable course and is offered at no cost to partners.

If you’re interested in helping your sales team overcome finance-related hurdles during the selling cycle, please get in touch with Andy on 07966 114 243 or email here.

Five years ago I lent my son £1,000 and as I never really expected to see my money again and had forgotten about the loan, it came as a nice surprise to suddenly find that he had recently credited my bank account for the full £1,000 borrowed all those years ago.

The loan was repaid in the same week that the Office for National Statistics published data showing that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was standing at just over 3%. The CPI measures the rate at which the prices of commonly purchased goods and services have changed over the previous twelve months. Consequently, 3% is quite high in comparison to previous years.

So what has the inflation rate got to do with my loan being repaid? The answer is that whilst I was very happy to have my money repaid, the fact that prices are now higher than they were when I lent the money means that the buying power of my newly returned £1,000 is somewhat less than it was five years ago. Accountants have a way of calculating the value of money to be repaid in the future in today’s terms, this is called Present Value. To complete a calculation they need to assess the interest earning potential and the inflation rate that applies during the period of any loan. The higher an interest or inflation rate, the lower the value in the future.

Using an online calculator and assuming an average annual inflation rate of 3% and an average building society interest rate of 1.5% had applied during the five years in which the loan was outstanding, I calculated that the £1,000 repaid had cost me nearly £200 and that I would have needed the repayment to be about £1,225 for me to ‘break even’ on the deal.

Lending money to members of one’s family is rarely a commercial success but the principles outlined above are highly significant in the business world.

Leasing is one of the most popular means by which businesses acquire capital equipment and one important feature of most equipment leasing agreements is that rental payments are fixed for the duration of the contract, commonly up to five years. The key here is that all future payments will be based on the value of money applying when the deal was activated, no matter what happens to inflation or interest rates in the future.

By way of example, if a company signed a leasing deal involving monthly rental payments of £500 over a 5 year period, the total amount repaid would be £30,000 (£500 x 60 months). But assuming that the inflation rate applied during the period of the lease was 3% every year, the real cost (present value) of all the rentals being repaid over the five years would be reduced to £27,895. If we further assumed that our company could generate a return on its cash that equates to 12% per annum (the average return on capital for UK businesses) the real cost of the lease would fall to just £21,280.

Whether you’re borrowing money from a relative or signing a lease agreement to acquire capital equipment, any deal on offer could be considerably enhanced if payments are fixed at the outset.

Andy Milsom, Head of Partner Training & Development at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions

Andy is an experienced sales and finance professional with over 25 years’ experience in sales aid leasing. Andy is widely recognised as an expert in business finance and has in recent years focused his attention on developing partner sales teams develop an understanding of how businesses secure project financing. His training programme – Finance Unlocked – is a highly rated customisable course and is offered at no cost to partners.

If you’re interested in helping your sales team overcome finance-related hurdles during the selling cycle, please get in touch with Andy on 07966 114 243 or email here.

A growth rate of 2% is considered to be about the maximum sustainable for a mature economy such as our own. Despite concerns about the level of personal credit and an over-reliance on private consumption, the UK had a good year.

The Finance and Leasing Association (FLA) recently released a large amount of information about the contribution leasing made to the overall performance of the economy. The most significant statistic is that of all capital investment made by UK businesses in 2016 32.9% was through an asset finance agreement. This is the highest ‘market share’ since 2008 and leasing by businesses has now grown for six consecutive years.

So far as 2016 is concerned the total amount of leasing business transacted was just above £30bn, a 5% increase on the previous year. So with an economy growing by just under 2%, a 5% growth in leasing illustrates the growing popularity of this method of acquiring capital equipment.

Why is leasing growing in popularity? The answers are many but probably prominent amongst them is that the whole concept of paying for the use of equipment rather than owning it has been gathering real traction over recent years. As evidence, one only has to look at how we acquire mobile phones and increasingly cars, music and software. We now live in a subscription economy. Behind the bigger picture, leasing companies have been busy developing finance products tailor-made for the markets in which they operate. It is interesting to note that within the overall headline growth in business leasing, activity was particularly strong in the agricultural and construction markets and this trend has continued in to 2017.

Light commercial vehicles represent another market where both overall sales and the number of units acquired on lease grew rapidly in 2016. A comprehensive range of finance products are available to businesses acquiring vans, but the growth in the number of self-employed contractors whose turnover is below the VAT registration threshold has encouraged the use of ‘finance lease’. Unlike outright purchase and ‘hire purchase’ the fact that ‘finance lease’ does not entail the customer having to pay 20% of the vehicle cost upon taking delivery is a very important factor where VAT cannot be recovered.

The leasing industry will continue to provide the products that facilitate business investment and this will prove particularly important as the UK faces the challenge of increasing its productivity for the years ahead.

Andy Milson, Head of Partner Training & Development at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions

Andy is an experienced sales and finance professional with over 25 years’ experience in sales aid leasing. Andy is widely recognised as an expert in business finance and has in recent years focused his attention on developing partner sales teams develop an understanding of how businesses secure project financing. His training programme – Finance Unlocked – is a highly rated customisable course and is offered at no cost to partners.

If you’re interested in helping your sales team overcome finance-related hurdles during the selling cycle, please get in touch with Andy on 07966 114 243 or email here.