Fifth Third Bank Streamlines Leased Equipment Tracking with Asset Panda on AWS

About Fifth Third Bank

Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, Fifth Third Bank is one of the largest commercial banks in the United States, with more than $200 billion in assets and a national footprint in retail, commercial, and wealth banking. Its equipment finance organization, consistently ranked among the top bank-owned equipment finance and leasing companies in the country, holds roughly $8.5 billion in assets and originates more than $2.5 billion in new loans and leases annually.

That business leases physical assets such as forklifts and other material-handling equipment to commercial clients across the country and books those leases in its InfoLease system of record. Managing that leased fleet, knowing where each serialized asset is, how heavily it is being used, and where it sits in its lease lifecycle, is core to their profitability and risk management.

The Challenge

Fifth Third Bank’s equipment finance team had relied on an internal tool known as LAMP to track leased equipment deployed across client sites. When LAMP was retired and divested to a solutions partner, the team was left without a system to track thousands of serialized, leased assets in the field, a gap that directly threatened its ability to manage lease terms, plan maintenance, and make end-of-lease decisions.

The LAMP replacement effort ran into a hard security constraint. Bank policy prohibits external, third-party data from flowing into systems inside the bank’s network. As the Program Lead put it, “This bank is not going to allow me to have outside data flowing into a system within the bank.”

Yet the most valuable operational signal for the leasing business—telemetry from hour meters on leased forklifts reporting annual usage hours by serial number—is exactly that kind of external data. Any solution that required piping device telemetry into internal bank systems was a non-starter, and any solution that ignored telemetry would leave the bank blind as to how its leased assets were actually being used.

Without a proper leased equipment tracking system, Fifth Third Bank faced various risks such as:

• Leased assets being scattered across client sites with no authoritative tracking system
• Lease and maintenance decisions being made without usage data
• Manual workarounds that do not scale across a multi-billion-dollar origination business.

For a regulated financial institution, operating a material line of business without a compliant system of record for its collateral was not a sustainable position.

Partner Solution

Asset Panda partnered with Fifth Third’s equipment finance team to build TrakMate, a leased-asset management solution delivered as an overlay on the Asset Panda platform. Rather than introducing a new system inside the bank’s network, TrakMate inverts the data flow to satisfy the security constraint: lease-booking data is fed nightly from the bank’s InfoLease system into Asset Panda’s cloud environment, and external forklift telemetry (usage hours reported by serial number) is matched to the corresponding asset records inside Asset Panda, entirely outside the bank’s network. No third-party device data ever crosses into internal bank systems, and the leasing team gets a single, current view of every leased asset, its location, and its usage.

The solution centers on three configured components:

1. Each leased asset is modeled as an Asset Panda record, containing the fields that matter to the leasing business, including serial number, asset type, client site, and lease status.
2. A nightly automated feed from InfoLease keeps those records synchronized with the bank’s system of record, so TrakMate always reflects current lease bookings without manual data entry.
3. External hour-meter telemetry is ingested and matched by serial number to each asset record, giving the team the annual usage hours it needs for lease pricing and maintenance planning.

TrakMate is delivered on Asset Panda’s fully managed, cloud-native SaaS platform running on Amazon Web Services in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. Because the entire solution operates in Asset Panda’s AWS environment, the bank consumes it with no infrastructure to provision inside its own network and no inbound external data flows to defend. The primary AWS services underpinning the solution are: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which runs Asset Panda’s containerized web, API, background-processing, and scheduled-job workloads, including the nightly jobs that ingest the InfoLease lease-booking feed; Amazon RDS for MySQL, the managed relational database that stores leased-asset records, lease attributes, and status history across a primary writer and read replicas; Amazon S3, which provides durable object storage for asset attachments, generated reports, and data exports, with report downloads delivered to authorized bank users through time-limited pre-signed URLs; Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, which backs application caching and the queued background jobs that process the nightly InfoLease imports and match external telemetry to asset records by serial number; Amazon OpenSearch Service, which indexes platform API activity so that data changes can be searched and audited, an important control for a regulated financial institution; and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) with AWS CodeBuild, which form the automated container build-and-release pipeline Asset Panda uses to deliver platform updates without downtime.

Because Asset Panda operates as a managed service provider for this deployment, its support spanned both pre- and post-implementation. Before go-live, the Asset Panda team worked with the bank to design the TrakMate data model, establish the nightly InfoLease feed, and validate that lease bookings and serial-number matching populated correctly.

After deployment, Asset Panda has provided ongoing platform support and continues to hold regular account and technical reviews with the bank, including active working sessions between Asset Panda’s technical team and the bank’s Program Lead to scope the version 2 API integration and telemetry enhancements. This ongoing engagement has turned the initial replacement project into an expanding, multi-phase enterprise relationship.

The Results

TrakMate is now serving as Fifth Third Bank's compliant system of record for leased assets, restoring the tracking capability the bank had lost after retiring LAMP. With all external data flows terminating in Asset Panda's AWS environment, the equipment finance team is able to effectively track leased equipment without violating the bank's data security policies.

Since its implementation, the nightly InfoLease feed has eliminated manual data entry for lease bookings, and serial-number matching gives the leasing team usage visibility that it previously had no compliant way to obtain.

Fifth Third Bank is expanding its partnership with Asset Panda with a version 2 of TrakMate. The enhanced platform will add direct API integration for annual hours per serial number, invoicing and auto-pay, tax-relocation notices, and a city and state field on dashboards to make asset-by-location views more usable for bank staff.

About the Partner

Asset Panda, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is an asset tracking, inspection, and audit platform used by organizations across financial services, government, education, healthcare, and enterprise IT in more than 140 industries to manage the full lifecycle of their physical and digital assets. Delivered as a SOC 2 Type II compliant, cloud-based SaaS application with native iOS and Android mobile apps, the platform lets customers model any trackable item with custom fields, photos, status workflows, and scheduled data integrations such as the nightly InfoLease feed described here, making it adaptable to use cases well beyond traditional asset management, including leased-asset portfolio tracking for one of the largest banks in the United States. Asset Panda is an AWS Partner whose platform is built and operated entirely on AWS, running its production workloads on Amazon EKS with Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon OpenSearch Service, and delivering software through an AWS-native CI/CD pipeline built on AWS CodeBuild and Amazon ECR.