Navigating the Tariff Storm: How Small Equipment Lenders Can Leverage Technology to Compete and Thrive

The equipment finance industry stands at a pivotal crossroads. With $1.4 trillion in assets under management, this sector faces unprecedented challenges as tariffs introduced in 2025 threaten to impact 30 to 40% of equipment, fundamentally altering cost structures and market dynamics. While these policy changes present significant and obvious hurdles, they also create unique opportunities for agile lenders who can harness technology to thrive in this new landscape.

The Tariff Reality: Challenge Meets Opportunity

The immediate impact of tariffs on equipment financing is undeniable. As equipment prices surge, buyers are increasingly gravitating toward used options and rental agreements, while credit markets experience notable tightening. This shift creates challenges that can make traditional lending approaches struggle to address effectively.

However, within this disruption lies opportunity. The very factors that challenge established market leaders — pricing volatility, shifting demand patterns, and evolving customer preferences — create openings for smaller, more agile lenders to capture market share. The key lies in leveraging technology to make smarter decisions, automate manual processes, and adapt quickly to changing conditions.

For small lenders, this moment represents a unique chance to level the playing field. While larger competitors may be constrained by legacy systems and bureaucratic processes, smaller organizations can implement cutting-edge solutions rapidly, positioning themselves as the preferred choice for customers seeking flexible, responsive financing options.

Data Analytics: The Foundation of Strategic Decision-Making

In the tariff-affected landscape, data analytics serves as the cornerstone of competitive advantage. The ability to transform raw information into actionable insights becomes crucial when market conditions shift rapidly and traditional forecasting models lose reliability.

The power of data analytics unfolds across three critical phases:

1. Descriptive analytics: Provides the foundation by helping lenders understand current tariff impacts, such as equipment cost increases across different categories. This baseline understanding allows organizations to assess their exposure and identify areas requiring immediate attention.
2. Predictive analytics: Takes this understanding further by forecasting future trends and market behaviors. Analyzing historical data alongside current tariff schedules can reveal patterns indicating increased demand for used equipment, shifts in customer financing preferences, or emerging opportunities in specific equipment categories. These insights enable proactive positioning rather than reactive responses.
3. Prescriptive analytics: Represents the ultimate goal — transforming insights into concrete actions. This might involve setting competitive rates based on predicted market conditions, optimizing inventory to align with forecasted demand, or identifying promising customer segments to target.

By mastering these three phases, lenders gain comprehensive control over demand forecasting, supply chain management, and pricing strategies.

AI: The Game-Changer for Credit and Risk Management

As tariffs simultaneously drive financing demand while tightening credit availability, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as the decisive factor separating successful lenders from those left behind. The ability to make accurate, rapid credit decisions becomes paramount when market conditions create both increased opportunity and heightened risk.

Enhanced credit scoring represents one of AI’s most transformative applications. Traditional credit scoring models, often based on limited data sets and static criteria, struggle to capture the nuanced risk profiles that emerge in volatile markets. AI-powered systems can analyze vast amounts of customer data — from traditional financial metrics to alternative data sources such as payment histories, business performance indicators, and operational patterns — to identify creditworthy borrowers with unprecedented accuracy.

This capability proves particularly valuable in tariff-affected markets where conventional risk indicators may provide incomplete pictures. A manufacturer facing tariff-related cost increases might appear risky under traditional metrics, but AI analysis could reveal strong underlying business fundamentals and effective adaptation strategies, identifying them as an excellent lending opportunity.

Portfolio monitoring represents another critical AI application. As tariffs create market volatility, the ability to track loan performance in real-time and identify potential issues before they become problems is essential. AI systems can continuously analyze and monitor portfolio data, identifying patterns that indicate increased risk and triggering proactive interventions.

CRM: Building Unbreakable Customer Relationships

In an environment where manufacturers increasingly offer creative financing options to offset tariff impacts, small lenders must differentiate themselves through superior customer relationships. Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM), particularly robust platforms like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, provide the tools necessary to compete effectively against well-funded OEM financing programs.

Personalized financing represents the first line of defense against manufacturer competition. By leveraging comprehensive customer data, CRM systems enable lenders to create highly tailored financing offers that match or exceed OEM deals. This personalization extends beyond simple rate matching to include customized term structures, payment options, and service packages that address specific customer needs.

Customer retention through deep relationship building becomes equally important. CRM systems enable lenders to maintain detailed profiles of client needs, preferences, and business cycles, ensuring that every interaction adds value and strengthens the relationship. This approach transforms one-time transactions into long-term partnerships, creating sustainable competitive advantages that transcend simple price competition.

The integration of CRM with data analytics and AI creates powerful synergies. Customer data feeds predictive models that anticipate future needs, while AI-driven insights inform personalized communication strategies. This combination enables small lenders to deliver experiences that rival or exceed those provided by industry titans.

The Agentic AI Revolution

The next frontier in equipment finance technology lies in Agentic AI — autonomous agents capable of orchestrating complex, multi-step workflows across data, AI, and CRM platforms. These systems represent a quantum leap beyond traditional automation, offering the potential to transform how lenders operate in tariff-affected markets.

Early adopters are already deploying agents to scrub and prioritize at-risk assets, ensuring that potential problems receive immediate attention. These systems can analyze and monitor vast portfolios continuously, identifying assets that require intervention based on multiple data points including payment history, equipment utilization, and market conditions.

Auto-adjustment of lease pricing in response to tariff announcements represents another powerful application. Rather than requiring manual intervention whenever tariff schedules change, Agentic AI systems can automatically recalculate pricing across entire portfolios, ensuring that rates remain competitive and profitable regardless of market volatility.

Perhaps most significantly, these systems can trigger multi-system tasks with minimal human intervention. When tariff changes affect specific equipment categories, an Agentic AI system can automatically update credit decision criteria, notify sales teams of new opportunities, adjust marketing campaigns, and modify inventory management strategies, within minutes of the tariff announcement.

Capitalizing on Tariff-Driven Opportunities

While tariffs create challenges, they also generate new opportunities that technology-savvy lenders can exploit. The shift toward domestic manufacturing and supply chain restructuring creates demand for new equipment categories and financing structures.

Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS) models are experiencing unprecedented growth as rental demand increases in response to tariff-driven price increases. These models are flexible pay-per-use financing that appeals to cost-conscious customers. Industry partnerships with platform providers are enhancing these solutions, creating opportunities for lenders to expand their service offerings beyond traditional financing.

Supply chain optimization represents another significant opportunity. AI-powered systems can predict disruptions and ensure inventory aligns with high-demand equipment categories. This capability, proven during events like COVID-19, becomes particularly valuable when tariffs create sudden shifts in equipment demand patterns.

The Path Forward

Beyond tariff navigation, compliance remains a fundamental driver for technology investment. The regulatory environment continues to evolve, requiring lenders to maintain robust Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) capabilities while managing operational efficiency. Emerging technology solutions powered by compliance platforms are addressing these challenges by combining compliance capabilities with Data + AI + CRM functionality.

The urgency of technological adoption cannot be overstated. Lenders who fail to adopt AI and integrated technology solutions risk obsolescence. The pace of technological change, accelerated by tariff-driven market disruption, means that competitive advantages can evaporate rapidly for organizations that fall behind.

Early adopters offering seamless, end-to-end digital experiences will dominate the post-tariff landscape. These organizations will attract customers seeking efficiency and convenience while operating with cost structures that traditional lenders cannot match.

Conclusion: Embracing the Future

The tariff-driven transformation of the equipment finance industry represents both the greatest challenge and the most significant opportunity in decades. Small lenders who focus on leveraging Data + AI + CRM will not only survive this disruption but emerge as leaders in the new market landscape.

The path forward requires commitment, investment, and strategic thinking. However, the rewards — sustainable competitive advantage, improved profitability, and market leadership — justify the effort. In an industry where technology increasingly determines success, the choice is clear: innovate or become irrelevant.

The storm is here, but with the right technology and strategy, small lenders can not only weather it but use it to power their ascent to industry leadership. Don’t shelter, instead be the rider on the storm.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Rohan Marfatia is Chief Executive Officer and Kent Rarick is Business Development Executive with DataCRaiM.