Annual marketing survey for the asset-based financial services industry

This year represents the 25th anniversary of the Commercial Finance Association's Annual Marketing Survey Report of its members' assetbased lending activities. In 1976, the CFA began by reporting on the volume of their outstanding asset-based loans, commercial finance packaged loans, and on factoring.

Since 1976, the compound growth rate in outstandings has averaged 15.01 percent. Their volume has continued to rise every year for the last ten years, with double-digit growth occurring continuously over the last eight of them. In 2000, total outstandings grew by $48.9 billion to nearly $342.7 billion. Since 1992, these outstandings have grown by nearly fourfold to over a third of a trillion dollars!

These figures indicate that this segment of the financial marketplace provides one of the largest sources of commercial-industrial short term credit in this country. Based on Federal Reserve figures, nonfinancial business outstandings totaled $6.45 trillion in 2000, up $565.20 billion (or 9.61 percent) from Federal Reserve revised 1999 figures. Of the former, $5.08 trillion was in the form of long-term debt. The remainder, $1.37 trillion, was comprised of short-term bank debt and commercial paper. Using these estimates, asset-based lenders accounted for 21.22 percent of all new short-term lending in the United States. This is down 3.63 percentage points from 1999 and back to about the same proportion that was attributable to the industry in 1998, i.e., 21.3 percent.