Finance Firm ‘DLL’ Targeting Global RV Marketplace | RVBusiness.com

Featured in RVBusiness.com, by: Gary Gerard on Mar 27, 2020

De Lage Landen International B.V. (DLL), a global finance partner for equipment and technology assets, recently announced its entry into the global RV space.

Through its existing commercial and inventory finance business, DLL, based in the Netherlands, will be specializing in dealer inventory financing, according to Mark McGovern, DLL business unit president for commercial finance. And, as one of the largest commercial finance companies in the world, DLL “clearly has the infrastructure in place to succeed in the RV space,” maintains McGovern.

“There’s a lot of muscle at DLL already,” he told RVBusiness.com. “We do commercial finance in similar asset types. We are the largest vendor finance company in the world if you combine our retail services and commercial finance services.”

Moving DLL’s commercial finance business into the RV arena is a good fit because the company “has the right complementary metrics to what our business, globally, wants to achieve,” asserted McGovern, adding, “It’s typically shorter-term finance. It revolves very quickly. It’s a nice financial complement to the ways in which we earn and support our vendors on the term finance side.”

As DLL seeks to expand its commercial finance footprint in the States, McGovern explained, the company wants to work more with assets that are mature and industries that are familiar with commercial finance delivery types. “We want to be able to leverage our vendor finance model,” he noted. “We’re taking the core value of what DLL does and bringing it to new asset types. RVs represent a mature industry, a large industry, an industry that would have real attraction to the DLL vendor finance delivery model.”

DLL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rabobank Group, is looking to take a meaningful step into the RV industry and “make a big splash, if you will, for lack of a better word,” said McGovern.

“We have a unique vendor finance approach,” he said. “That is what we’ve built the company on for 50 years. The way we manage our relationships, the way we interact with our partners and our ability to do that on a global basis, we believe, is truly unique. The fact that we are highly specialized and segmented into our desired industry types means that we can take the expertise we have in our various other business units — namely healthcare or technology or construction or food and agribusiness — and use that same model to create expertise in the RV business.”

“We’re not a bank,” McGovern told RVBusiness.com. “We’re a partner-centric finance company. We are going to our partners and finding out how they want to move goods into their distribution. We are finding out how they want to move goods to their end users, and we are customizing our solutions so that we can be impactful for them as a partner.”

“That is what we would be moving toward in the RV space,” he said. “So, admittedly, in the RV space as an asset type, we’re going to be new, but we have 50 years of experience in how to do this in an impactful way in other industries and we’re going to take it to a new asset (market).”

In bringing its international expertise to the North American RV industry, DLL ultimately plans to provide services to both dealers and manufacturers.

“The RV industry is not unique to any one country,” said McGovern. “It is a globally vibrant industry and provides a real meaningful opportunity for us to make a move into. The typical DLL customers are relationships we have with manufacturers, so we sign them and partner with them on a global basis in as many countries as we can. Through those relationships we will provide lines of credit and support to their dealers to finance their channel.”

In addition, DLL owns its own commercial finance operating system, which has a “stable, attractive, highly functional interface.”

The company also support dealers with rental fleets, which can be financed through DLL, “and then they are renting those assets out to their customers on a daily, weekly, hourly basis, whatever the case may be,” said McGovern. “And through those functions we are billing the dealer for the rental fleet — and carrying the support of that rental fleet — and they’re managing the customers’ day-to-day interaction.”

McGovern said associates from DLL’s construction, transportation and industrial business units will be reaching out to potential RV industry clients. The company also plans to bring in RV industry experts to assist them in pursuit of a strategy, “and that is something that we think – matched to our own organic process and resources we have here today – is going to be successful venture for us.”

Learn more about DLL’s Commercial Finance Solutions.