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July 5, 2001 Headlines--- Textron Broker “Goodbye” Date Marlin Raises $115.7 Million Securitization Fidelity, PA, Alert???? Comdisco Announces Financial Management Appointments PDS Gaming Terminates P.T. Gaming Agreement Three Major Banks Add Internet ID’s The Price of High Tech—South Florida Sun-Sentinel Article Graneri May-June Lease Closer http://www.leasingnews.org/Lease%20Closer/may-june.htm ### denotes company press release -------------------------------------------------------- ### ########### ################### ########## MARLIN LEASING. COMPLETES $115.7 MILLION TERM SECURITIZATION MOUNT LAUREL, NJ – Marlin Leasing Corp. proudly announces the completion of its third term securitization. Marlin recently sold $115.7 million in asset-backed securities that were rated by both Moody’s and Fitch. "This marks the company’s third securitization to date," said Dan Dyer, Marlin Leasing’s CEO. "As we continue to grow, support from the capital markets remains key to sustaining our successful track record." Headquartered in Mount Laurel, NJ, Marlin Leasing is a major competitor in the small-ticket equipment leasing market, providing creative funding programs to vendors, brokers and end-users nationwide. For more information, call Marlin Leasing’s corporate headquarters at 1-888-479-9111, or visit their web site at www.marlinleasing.com ##### ############## ################################ Textron Financial –Broker “Gone” Date Leasing News reported them as going---going---and did not know the “gone” date. As of now , Textron is accepting applications until August 1 and then funding all approved and back log transactions. A written statement from Textron to key brokers was sent. We are attempting to obtain a copy of it. There are a group of close to a dozen major “funders/discounters/superbrokers” that are trying to keep the unit together as a group. Jim Merrilees who put Gray Rock and then National Credit together after leaving Colonial Pacific as president, after setting up the Pegasus program for “superbrokers,” is reportedly involved, but not “confirmed” nor “denied” at this time. Leasing News suspects there may be denials, but several parties directly involved have given us “off the record” information which we believe to be true at this time. No one wants to “rock the boat” at this time. It is also alleged Textron is in the process of working out terms and conditions for the sale of the $430 million dollar portfolio. They most likely will officially deny this, until you see a negotiator walk in your door or read about it in ELAonline.com. Leasing News has contacted Textron for an official statement, but it appears all in the position to give such a statement are on vacation until Monday, July 9. ~~~ Kit, I just got a call from Kyle Smith * and he has clarified his statement to say they are no longer accepting broker business. I may have misunderstood him originally and I would like for you to either retract the statement from your web site and news letter and contact Kyle Smith directly for clarification. Your immediate attention to this matter is appreciated. Thank you... David Alvey * Kyle L. Smith, Textron Financial, Inc., 4550 North Point Parkway, Suite 400, Alpharetta, GA 30022 ( Mr. Smith referred me to Mr. John Carey, who is on vacation until next Monday. When I called him back, he was gone. Since he referred me to Mr. Carey, it would be best to wait for Mr. Carey for an “official” statement. editor)
July 4th Thank you very much for the "Flag" message. In all my years I don't remember this one. I know I was taught by liberals but I am surprised they hid this one from me. Ted Pierce tpierce2@ix.netcom.com Insta Lease PS--Love your History messages. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- May-June Graneri Lease Closer http://www.leasingnews.org/Lease%20Closer/may-june.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ United Association of Equipment Leasing World Golf Week– August 20-26, 2001 UAEL is holding its first-ever World Golf Week! Get together with members in your region or individually and compete anywhere in the world. The best part of competing, you don't have to go far. No airline tickets or travel needed! Go to your local golf course. Play 18 holes of golf. Have the golf pro sign your scorecard. Mail the signed scorecard and your handicap index card to the UAEL Office in Oakland. Then visit the UAEL website to see if you have placed. Scores will be posted on the website within 24 hours of receipt. Winners will be determined and posted on Monday, August 27th, 2001. Prizes will be awarded for: Men's and Women's Low Net Senior Men's and Senior Women's Low Net -50 or older Hole In One Prizes: 1st Place Men's Low Net: Bettinardi Putter 1st Place Women's Low Net: Bettinardi Putter 2nd Place Men's Low Net: Tight Lies GT-i Wood 2nd Place Women's Low Net: Tight Lies GT-i Wood 1st Place Senior Men: Bettinardi Putter 1st Place Senior Women: Bettinardi Putter Hole In One Award: Complimentary Registration for two (member and spouse/guest) to the 2001 UAEL Annual Conference & Exposition All awards will be presented at the UAEL Annual Conference & Exposition in San Antonio, Texas, October 25-28, 2001. Rules: * All Players Must Be Active UAEL Members * One winner per category, no repeats through catergoies. * Each Player Must Pay $99.00 To Participate * Ties: Winners will be determined at an 18 hole playoff * Golf Fees Are The Responsibility Of Each Player * Scorecards Must Be Signed By Course Pro * Hole In One Must Be: Minimum Of 165 Yards From The Participants Tee Box, A Par 3, A Course Rep Must Be Present At Hole, Winning Swing Must Be Witnessed By Group Playing And Scorecard Signed By Course Pro. *Handicap Index Card Must Accompany Scorecard * Both Cards Must Be Received By August 27 * All play must be completed August 20-26, 2001 *Ties: Winners will be determined at an 18 hole playoff during the ACE golf outing in San Antonio on October 25th
Registration: Registration Fee is $99.00 per person. Registration Forms must be received by August 10th. Another great opportunity for networking with industry peers and colleagues! Don't miss out! Join in on the fun. Sign me up for Golf Week! Name Company Address City/State/Zip Phone Fax Payment Method: ____ Check Enclosed ____ Visa/MC ____ Amex Credit Card # Expiration Date Name on Card Signature Joanie Dalton - Managing Director UAEL - United Association of Equipment Leasing 520 Third Street, #201 Oakland, CA 94607 (510) 444-9235 x27 (510) 444-1346 fax joanie@uael.org www.uael.org Fidelity Leasing, PA Alert????? Don’t Think So. ( Leasing News reported that Fidelity Leasing,PA had cut off their broker program last May. Several readers have sent us an “alert.” A broker I have worked with for three years, and respect, told me that Fidelity prospected him a few months ago and in the process of getting them approved, asked him for his "vendor list". I never heard of this practice before and neither had the broker. Anyway, my point is to let brokers who currently work with Fidelity to be aware that they may start to go after the broker's vendors once they cut the brokers loose. Name Withheld I think they were looking to gain vendors in an inappropriate way. My mention of this was in regards to your reporting them out of the broker business. Now that they have these brokers vendors, whose to say they won't poach?? Just trying to warn brokers to keep a watchful eye. By the way, I work for a direct funding source, on the broker funding team. Name Withheld They may be out of the broker funding business but they still do vendor business, so my point was to WARN the brokers about a possible siege against their vendors. Please do not use my name. ( It is not uncommon to ask for a vendor profile, especially on high maintenance equipment or software. We have not received any complaints about Fidelity Leasing, PA. If there is no agreement between parties regarding “repeat” or “vendor” business, there is nothing “illegal” in calling on current customers or vendors. Companies in the past who have done so happen after the company is sold, such as was the practice with assets purchased by Sierra Cities purchased, Unicapital, and others, such as Textron from Nations Credit ( repeat customers ). We are currently working on two such complaints now as a news story. Once the original operation is sold or changed, it is difficult to enforce agreements mechanically for the manager of the portfolio. The only company I have seen give a “guarantee” not to seek vendor or repeat business was from The Manifest Group. They are now USbancorp. I believe they have the same policy, but have not seen a re-issue of their “written guarantee.” editor ) ######## ##################### ################# Comdisco Announces Financial Management Appointments
ROSEMONT, Ill.---Comdisco, Inc. (NYSE:CDO) announced today that Michael A. Fazio has been named executive vice president and chief financial officer and Ronald C. Mishler has been named senior vice president and treasurer. The company also announced that David S. Reynolds, currently assistant controller, has been named acting controller. All the appointments are effective immediately. "We have today named talented and experienced individuals to positions especially important to Comdisco as we look to our future," said Norm Blake, chairman and chief executive officer. "We now have in place the financial and capital market expertise that will enable us to complete our strategic review and then implement our plans. I look forward to working closely with them on our management team." Mr. Fazio replaces John J. Vosicky; Mr. Mishler replaces Edward A. Pacewicz; and Mr. Reynolds replaces David J. Keenan. "The three departing officers made important contributions to Comdisco over many years and we wish them the best in their future endeavors," Mr. Blake said. Mr. Fazio, 39, most recently served as president and chief executive officer of Pretzel Logic Software, Inc. From 1999 to 2000, he was executive vice president/managing director and chief operating officer - Americas for Deutsche Bank AG. Mr. Fazio began his career with Arthur Andersen in 1983, serving in increasingly responsible positions in Andersen's Financial Market Industry Practice, including partner-in-charge of its New York Banking, Brokerage and Investment Banking Industry Practice until 1999. Mr. Fazio received B.S. and M.B.A. degrees from Pace University. Mr. Mishler, 40, joins Comdisco from Old Kent Financial Corporation where he served as senior vice president and treasurer from 1998 to 2001. Prior to this, he was vice president and treasurer at USF&G Corporation from 1996 to 1998, and from 1984 to 1996 he held various financial analysis and management positions at Heller International Corporation. Mr. Mishler holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. Mr. Reynolds, 47, who has served with Comdisco for almost 20 years, has been North American Controller since 1997. About Comdisco Comdisco (www.comdisco.com) provides technology services worldwide to help its customers maximize technology functionality, predictability and availability, while freeing them from the complexity of managing their technology. The Rosemont (IL) company offers a complete suite of information technology services including business continuity, managed web hosting, storage and IT Control and Predictability Solutions(SM). Comdisco offers leasing to key vertical industries, including semiconductor manufacturing and electronic assembly, healthcare, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and manufacturing. Through its Ventures division, Comdisco provides equipment leasing and other financing and services to venture capital backed companies. ######## ########################### ############################ PDS Gaming Corporation Terminates Agreement to Acquire P.T. Gaming LLC
LAS VEGAS, / -- PDS Gaming Corporation (Nasdaq: PDSG), today announced that it has terminated its previously announced agreement to acquire P.T. Gaming LLC, which owns and operates the PT's Pubs chain of "sports bar" gaming and pub establishments in the Las Vegas, Nevada area. The parties were unable to agree to an extension of time in the definitive agreement, during which PDS Gaming would finalize its debt financing for the acquisition. "We are grateful for the courtesy and cooperation extended to us by the management and employees of PT's during our due diligence," stated Johan Finley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PDS Gaming Corporation. "They have a great team and an excellent franchise. While the formal agreement has been terminated because of the inability to meet certain time constraints, we continue to negotiate with the principals of P.T. Gaming LLC, to determine if a new agreement might be reached, although there can be no assurance that a new agreement will be reached. We are also continuing our strategy of reviewing other opportunities to expand our casino operations division." PDS Gaming Corporation provides customized finance and leasing solutions, used and reconditioned gaming devices and digital table game products to the casino industry in the United States. The Company also operates a casino in Reno, Nevada. PDS Gaming Corporation is headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, and its common stock trades on The Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol "PDSG". For additional information, please contact: Peter Cleary, Chief Operating Officer of PDS Gaming Corporation at (702) 736-0700, or RJ Falkner & Company, Investor Relations Counsel at (800) 377-9893 or via e-mail at info@rjfalkner.com. ######### ######################## TECH WEB Magazine Banks Add Digital Ids By Rutrell Yasin Three major banks earlier this week started offering services that let business customers make secure B2B transactions using digital certificates based on the Identrus standard. The addition of the banks--Royal Bank of Scotland, Sanwa of Japan and Wells Fargo--is a milestone for Identrus Global IDs, which are poised to become the standard way to authenticate e-business transactions involving multiple financial institutions and trading partners. ABN AMRO Bank, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and HypoVereinsbank earlier this year became the first banks to offer Indentrus Global IDs, digital certificates based on a common format. In addition to providing a common interchange standard, Identrus Global IDs let business customers identify trading partners on the Internet, prove data hasn't been altered in transit and compile an auditable record of their transactions. Still, while the roster of banks offering Identrus Global IDs has nearly doubled, it remains to be seen how widely the standard will be used. For one, banks have been slow to offer Identrus-based services, and those that have are offering them for a limited number of customers and applications. As a result, it's uncertain how well Identrus Global IDs will scale once they're used for large volumes of transactions. "They are building volume reasonably slowly," said Burton Group analyst Phil Schacter. "As they watch how the system behaves and scales, they can expand it to more and more accounts. It will be a bootstrapping process." Andy Hunter, head of online payments at Royal Bank of Scotland, said his company will let customers digitally sign documents, with the goal of speeding up processing. The document-signing system lets employees of Sixt Kennings Ltd., a subsidiary of a rental car company, sign leasing documents online with Lombard, the asset finance arm of RBOS. "A lot of businesses haven't gotten past using outdated [SSL-based] user ID and password systems," Hunter said. Wells Fargo recently went live with its WellSecure Identrus Certificate Authority. The company will issue digital certificates to corporate managers who need to transfer funds via Wells Fargo's corporate treasury and institutional credit portal. And Sanwa of Japan said it will provide customers with its Financial Gateway service, which will let corporate customers identify trading partners, make payments, factor accounts receivable and escrow funds securely online. ------------------- Small businesses lease technology BY CHRISTINE WINTER South Florida Sun-Sentinel High-tech services at affordable prices You're a small business owner, dazzled by the technology that's available these days: the latest do-everything software, superfast hardware, wireless Internet access, tetrabytes of storage space, mobile everything. The only downside is the huge price tags and the short life span of state-of-the-art technologies that become passe faster than a new car depreciates. The application service provider industry was born to put an end to this dilemma. Unfortunately, ASPs have run into their own hard times, making this solution riskier than it used to be. But for those small business owners who do their homework and are careful, the concept of leasing software applications, computer and even telephone services from a remote provider can be one way to play in the same high-tech league as the big guys, only at an affordable price. According to the ASP Industry Consortium, an advocacy group, the most popular ASP applications are communications, which includes e-mail and messaging, and financial, accounting and e-commerce solutions. ASP services can be as routine as office productivity software and document management, as flashy as a telephone system that follows you wherever you go, or as useful as an intranet for employees to interact online from different locations. There are few statistics available on the actual savings inherent in using an ASP, except from the industry's own trade group. According to the ASP Industry Consortium, ASP customers can save "between 33 percent and 53 percent" by leasing applications rather than purchasing and managing the hardware and software for those applications. "It's very expensive to buy your own computer servers," said Jason Donahue, chief executive of Telecomputing, a Fort Lauderdale-based company founded in Norway in 1996, which claims to be one of the first ASPs. Telecomputing offers different software products - mostly Microsoft office applications - and can accommodate companies as small as 10 users or as large as 1,500, but its average customer has about 50 desktops. Donahue says experts estimate it costs from $7,000 to $9,000 for a small company to support each desktop per year. In 1997, Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm, put the cost as high as $11,900. "You have to look at the cost of running an IT operation, such as the costs of the computers, buying software, supporting and upgrading it and storing data," he said. On the other hand, he estimated a full suite of ASP software and maintenance services could run as little as $2,500 per desktop per year. And that's not even putting a price tag on the down time and lost data much more common to a small operation than to an ASP hosted in a large data center with security and redundancies built into the system and guaranteed reliability built into the contract. But there is a downside. You are sending sensitive company data over the Internet and it is being managed by a third party in an immature industry that is still in the midst of a brutal shakeout. If your ASP goes out of business, you could be left scrambling to recover your data in a form you can use and searching for a substitute to provide the computing services you can't do without. One such ASP company is Intelogistics, a Fort Lauderdale-based telecommunications outfit, which has a service called FasTrack. "It is designed to make a small business look like a medium-sized business and a medium-sized business look larger," said Andy Sackheim, vice president of engineering and one of the founders of the company. Basic FasTrack service costs $12.95 a month with no upfront costs, and each user or extra service costs $9.95 a month. Everything goes through the Intelogistics switching facility, and the user needs only a business line, or perhaps a multiple-line system from the telephone company. An automatic attendant can answer the phone with the company's name, provide a directory, and forward calls to whatever number employees have listed on the Web site. Not only will their calls and voice mails follow them, e-mails can be converted to voice and read aloud over any phone and faxes can be converted to computer files and e-mailed. For Shepherd's Way, a nonprofit homeless shelter in Fort Lauderdale, the FasTrack system provided the most cost-efficient way to get services they didn't have and couldn't afford. "The best part is that it gives us what we want without a lot of upfront charges," said Paul Freels, the executive director who has spent 45 years in the telephone business. Freels estimated that a system complex enough to provide similar services for Shepherd's Way's various locations would cost as much as $10,000. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leasing News Policy Statement http://www.leasingnews.org/policy.htm -----Nothing is sent out that is not "fair." Always unbiased reporting. Fairness always. If it is questionable, we will ask the writer's permission to quote them. We will print information without attribution, but feel as long as we do not name the person who sent it, we can use the information. Any information we think is suspicious, we try to have if substantiated first by at least two reliable people. We will not purposely send out "negative" news. We prefer "positive" news. We have no "axe" to grind or are not paid or seek or accept any remuneration for product or promotion. We do not spam anyone. To be added to the mailing list, you must request it. We do not send anything about our company or personal e-mail or jokes to the leasing news list. We do not share our mailing list with anyone. We try not to send more than one report a day, if at that, unless an "alert." We follow Internet Netiquette at all times. Our sole purpose is to provide communication to improve our profession. We reserve the right to deny sending the newsletter when requested. We reserve the right to edit or delete an opinion that is not in good taste or is outright derogatory. Leasingnews.org
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