Leasing Life
Overview and Identity
Leasing Life is a London-published online news service and digital magazine for asset finance and leasing professionals, covering the United Kingdom and European markets for equipment finance. Published within GlobalData, it reports on the companies that lease vehicles, machinery, technology and other business assets, and on the banks, independent lessors, brokers and suppliers who serve them. It is the sister title to Motor Finance Online, with which it shares an editorial team, an awards culture and a readership of finance executives.
The title describes itself as an online resource generating news and feature stories for the industry, commissioning features and comment on topical issues. Its audience is professional rather than general: lessors, funders, brokers, lawyers, accountants, software providers and consultants whose work depends on understanding leasing volumes, regulation, technology and competitive moves across Europe. That focused brief has made it a reference point in a sector that general financial media cover only occasionally.
Ownership and the GlobalData Network
Leasing Life is part of GlobalData and sits within what its about page describes as a network of more than forty proprietary business-to-business websites with a combined readership measured in tens of millions of industry professionals each year. As part of GlobalData, the title states that it has access to over a billion data points covering companies, deals, projects, forecasts and trends, produced by a group employing hundreds of journalists, researchers and analysts across more than eighty markets.
Editorially, the relationship shows in the exclusive articles the title publishes through its partnership with GlobalData on digital disruption and technological transformation in financial services and other industries. The group's data insights appear alongside Leasing Life's own reporting, so a story about a lessor's strategy may be supported by group research on the technology theme or market in question. Commercially, group scale supports the conference, awards and partner content that surround the core journalism.
Editorial Focus on Asset Finance
The central beat is asset finance: the leasing and hire purchase arrangements through which businesses acquire equipment without buying it outright. Coverage follows the major European lessors, including bank-owned leasing arms and large independent groups, their results, leadership changes, acquisitions and product launches. It tracks vendor finance programmes run with equipment manufacturers, broker-introduced business, and the funding markets on which lessors themselves depend to write new business.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are a recurring editorial concern, because access to asset finance is a live policy issue for smaller firms. Leasing Life has carried detailed discussion of research into SME financing, including survey evidence that many smaller businesses consider leasing but few use it, and arguments that better information could unlock investment. That focus connects industry news to wider economic questions about productivity, business investment and the role of alternative finance alongside bank lending.
European Scope and Market Coverage
Leasing Life's geography is the UK and Europe taken together. Its conference history reflects that spread: a conference report from Amsterdam discussed the recovery of European asset finance, citing industry figures putting the European market at hundreds of billions of euros annually and growth across the continent after the financial crisis. National leasing associations, European federations and cross-border lessors all feature, and regulatory coverage follows both UK authorities and European rule-making affecting lessors in multiple jurisdictions.
The biggest European groups dominate much of the news agenda because they set competitive terms for the market. BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions, Societe Generale Equipment Finance, DLL and PEAC Solutions recur in its awards shortlists and news pages, alongside UK names such as Close Brothers Asset Finance, Grenke UK and Lombard. By reporting these firms together, the title gives executives a comparative view of strategy across borders that national publications, focused on a single market, rarely provide.
Digital Transformation, Sustainability and New Themes
Two themes run through modern Leasing Life coverage. The first is digitalisation: online origination, automated credit decisions, asset-tracking technology and software platforms are changing how leases are sold and managed, and the title's awards recognise digital innovation in both asset finance and ESG categories. Provider firms from the software sector regularly appear as finalists and sponsors, reflecting how central technology vendors have become to lessors' operations and customer experience.
The second is sustainability. Leasing is increasingly presented as an enabler of the energy transition and the circular economy, because usage-based models can spread the cost of efficient equipment and support reuse and refurbishment. The awards include categories for sustainability initiatives, circular economy models and energy transition financing programmes, and editorial coverage examines green asset finance, electric vehicle leasing and the residual value risks of new technologies. These themes give the title a forward agenda beyond results and deals.
The Leasing Life Conference and Awards
The title's flagship franchise is the Leasing Life Conference and Awards, described by the publication as a yearly networking event bringing together leading figures in European leasing for a day of discussion sessions, culminating in a gala ceremony recognising achievement through the year. A report on the conference noted that it had run for thirteen years by the late 2010s, covering the market through boom, financial crisis and recovery, which makes the event one of the sector's established fixtures.
By 2024 the awards had reached their twenty-first edition, presented in Milan. Categories included European Lessor of the Year, SME Champion, Vendor Finance Provider of the Year, Distribution Channel Management Champion, Professional Services Provider of the Year and awards for digital innovation, sustainability, circular economy models and energy transition financing. The lifetime achievement award went to Ian Isaac on his retirement after a decade leading Lombard, the UK asset finance company, closing a career of thirty-five years in the industry.
People, Companies and Professional Services
Leasing Life devotes substantial attention to the professional ecosystem around leasing. Its shortlists recognise law firms, consultants and technology suppliers alongside lessors, acknowledging that deals in this market depend on legal structuring, valuation, remarketing and software. People moves matter accordingly: senior appointments and retirements at major lessors are news, and individual awards celebrate personal contribution to the industry in a way that helps define its leadership community.
The editorial voice includes practitioners themselves. The title commissions comment from industry figures, such as a UK managing director of a European lessor writing on SME access to finance, and carries interviews and analysis from advisers. This contributor model is characteristic of mature trade titles: the publication acts as a forum in which the industry debates its own future, with the editor, a role held in recent years by Alejandro Gonzalez across the motor finance and leasing titles, curating and moderating that debate.
Digital Presence and Reader Services
Leasing Life is digital-first. Its website organises news, comment, features and analysis for daily use, supported by newsletters and social distribution, and its long archive reaches back over many years of market cycles, providing a searchable record of deals, crises and recoveries. Older features remain live on the site, so the title functions partly as an institutional memory for an industry whose participants change employers frequently but whose market structures evolve slowly.
The site also serves as the entry point to the group's commercial services: conference registration, awards entry, partner content and GlobalData reports. For the publisher, the value of the title lies in the seniority of its niche audience; for readers, the value lies in aggregation, bringing UK and European leasing intelligence that would otherwise be scattered across national associations, company announcements and general finance titles into one specialist destination checked as part of the working day.
Relationship to Sister Titles
Leasing Life works closely with Motor Finance Online. The two share subject matter at the boundary between vehicle leasing and motor finance, cross-publish awards news, such as the Leasing Life Awards winners announced on the motor finance site, and operate within the same GlobalData financial services cluster as Private Banker International and other banking titles. That cluster gives advertisers a route to several adjacent finance audiences and gives journalists a wider pool of data and expertise than a standalone leasing magazine could sustain.
The overlap is substantive rather than merely corporate. Fleet leasing companies compete in both motor finance and asset finance markets; the same banks own both leasing and motor finance businesses; and the same technology platforms serve both. A joint editorial operation can follow a group such as BNP Paribas or Societe Generale across product lines, and readers who work in one segment can keep sight of developments in the neighbouring segment that may affect their own book.
Significance in the Leasing Industry
Leasing Life's significance is that of the trade title of record for European leasing. Asset finance funds a substantial share of UK and European business investment in equipment and vehicles, yet it is a wholesale, business-to-business market invisible to most consumers and therefore under-reported elsewhere. Leasing Life documents it continuously: its volumes, its regulation, its technology and its people, in terms its participants recognise.
For worldnm.com's directory, the title belongs with the London-published GlobalData financial services brands that combine news, data and events. Its conference and awards, running for more than two decades in award form, and its coverage from the financial crisis through recovery, Brexit, the pandemic era and the energy transition give it a historical depth that newer digital entrants in asset finance media have yet to match.
