Asset finance for your capex:
leasing, operating leases
and sale and leaseback

Capital expenditure always poses the same equation: the asset costs money today and pays back tomorrow. Paying cash for a EUR 2 million production line ties up cash that will be missed elsewhere — for working capital, for an opportunity, for the unexpected. And a conventional bank equipment loan, while still relevant, uses up your overall borrowing capacity and often comes with extensive security. Another common situation: a well-equipped business that owns its property or its machinery, whose value sits idle on the balance sheet while cash is running short. In both cases, the asset itself is the key to the financing.

Leasing (French crédit-bail: equipment leasing for machinery and vehicles, property leasing for premises) rests on a simple principle: the leasing company buys the asset and leases it to you, with an option to purchase at the end of the contract. The financing can cover the whole investment, the main security is the asset itself, and under French tax rules the lease rentals are deductible expenses. An operating lease (location financière) follows the same logic without a purchase option — suited to equipment that is replaced frequently. Finally, sale and leaseback reverses the movement: you sell an asset you already own — often your operating property — to the leasing company and immediately lease it back. Your use of the asset does not change one bit; the value tied up in it becomes available cash again, to fund growth, an acquisition or a rebalancing of the balance sheet.

Between an equipment loan at 4%, a lease quoted as a quarterly rental and an operating lease with bundled services, an instinctive comparison is impossible — and that is exactly where the nasty surprises hide: residual values, arrangement fees, mandatory insurance, return conditions. We bring every proposal back to a discounted all-in cost, factor in the tax effect and the impact on your ratios, and give you a comparison you can read in ten minutes. We then consult the bank-owned and independent leasing companies in our network according to the type of asset — some funders are outstanding on machine tools and absent from property, and vice versa. You choose with full knowledge of the facts, with no exclusivity, and we stay at your side until the financing is in place — including negotiating the end-of-contract clauses, the ones nobody reads and everybody regrets.