Exclusive Networks expands in-house leasing to UK

Exclusive Capital to act as a 'flexible' leasing broker for UK resellers

Exclusive Networks has launched its own in-house leasing division in the UK that is designed to hand resellers more flexible financing options.

Last January the pan-European distributor bought French finance house Fibail System and created its own financing sister company Exclusive Capital in France. Exclusive said it was planning on expanding this to the UK, possibly through another acquisition, but it has now launched it off its own back, Graham Jones, the distributor's UK country manager, said.

"We were looking at a couple of companies in Q3 of last year but frankly we couldn't find one that fitted our bill, so we decided to do it ourselves," Jones (pictured) told CRN.

Previously in the UK, Exclusive would introduce resellers to different lending houses, but with the launch of Exclusive Capital, it is acting as the leasing broker. Exclusive Capital does not have any money on its books but is being run by Chris Armitage, who will organise the financing options for VARs through various lenders and it will then take a cut of the margin.

Jones said using its own capital would make for a rigid model, but with the broker system it can provide resellers with flexible financing options, which suits today's channel.

"It gives us the ability to go to different lenders for different types of opportunities," he said. "With the advance of MSSPs (managed security services providers) there are still quite a few different [payment] models; there is pay-as-you grow, pay-as-you go and it's the same for vendors - they have the same issues.

"We did a multimillion-pound deal with one of our vendors last year and the tech was the first thing to work out, but who is paying for what - and when - was the second thing to work out," he said. "If we'd had this finance option, we could have got that deal through a lot quicker. But now, so long as the end user is credit-worthy, we can come up with different strokes for different folks."

As well as being flexible, Jones was hopeful the launch would help reduce payment times and remove currency headaches.

"Imagine if you do a deal in dollars with the vendor and it's a three-year deal invoicing [the customer] quarterly in pounds and the dollar goes down 10 per cent; [having] this ability to get all that upfront tends to rule out currency risks," he said.

The in-house financing option will also help support resellers moving to cloud-based subscription models, Jones said.

"We haven't seen cloud take off yet, but it's bound to at some stage," he said. "But one of the biggest issues has been the payment terms. If you take a £10m revenue and switch to a subscription model where you are only getting £100,000 a month, that's a bit of shock to some people so hopefully this will help buffer that."

Exclusive Capital is vendor agnostic and will help resellers lease technologies which are not in Exclusive's portfolio, even if they make up 100 per cent of the deal, Jones said.