InformationWeek

Sept. 11, 2000

CIT Group Gains Worldwide Presence In E-Commerce

By Sam Dickey

ohn Fischer of CIT Group Inc. a Livingston, N.J., commercial and consumer lending company, is a satisfied man. During the past year, he has helped steer the acquisition of a larger competitor, Newcourt/AT&T Capital Finance Co. and consolidated the two companies' data centers into a single facility. In addition, CIT Group named him president of one of the lender's operating companies, CIT Technology Financing Co.

Though CIT Group is among the most innovative users of technology--it ranks No. 2 on the InformationWeek 500--Fischer says technology can't replace the human factor. "In financial services, you have to have a voice at the end of the line when someone calls with a complaint," he says. "You have to have a human being talk to that person, make the customer feel you care about him and that he isn't lost somewhere in an online system. All the discussion about pure E-business is passé. Quite a bit of the bloom is off the rose."

Under the leadership of chairman Al Gamper, CIT Group has grown to more than $50 billion in assets last year from $13 billion in 1992, when Fischer joined the company.

The acquisition of Newcourt gives the company a much-coveted international presence and the opportunity to expand its investments in the fast-growing domestic and foreign technology market, establishing the company that Fischer heads.

Consolidating the CIT and Newcourt data centers proved to be a challenge, based on size alone, but it was made easier because both companies shared an HP-UX computing environment, with some Sun Unix and IBM OS/390 and OS/400. "We now have an HP platform that's five times bigger than it used to be," Fischer says. "We've gone from 10 HP Series 9 servers, the biggest box HP makes, to 38."

CIT Group's systems are geared to handle pure E-business transactions. For example, when a shopper buys a PC system from Dell Computer, a request for a lease, loan, or line of credit is beamed to a credit system operated by CIT under the Dell Financial Services name. The shopper is asked to fill out a credit request, if it's a first sale, and can be approved within 35 seconds--a process that once could have taken several days. After the sale, the shopper is billed monthly by the CIT system.

CIT was among the first to market with this kind of partnership, Fischer says, and has variations of this model with other partners such as Computer Associates and Lucent Technologies Inc.

Fischer's respect for people may be why CIT has one of the lowest turnover rates for IT employees in northern New Jersey. "We go out of our way to recognize, reward, and train our executives," he says. "We want them to have an upward momentum, as well as feel that they're as good as the best financial salesperson."

IT employees at CIT are offered stock options, two weeks' training every year, and a performance review every quarter. The IT group also conducts weekly town meetings of 100 people, randomly selected for a variety of input, at which they discuss problems they may have, technical and related to the work environment.

In one example, after a town meeting last winter, CIT abandoned its formal business dress code for IT personnel. "Suits and ties for men, and business attire for women when they're not meeting with customers, is a tough requirement for a technical team," Fischer says. "We're now 100% business casual. That may not seem important, but it meant more job satisfaction for the technical team."

Return to main story, "Wireless Technology Pays Dividends"

Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher

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