Every industry has a segment its economics quietly abandoned, and equipment finance’s sits in plain sight: the transactions from roughly $250,000 to $2 million. Below that band, two decades of automation built a genuine machine — scorecards, app-only processes, same-day decisions, cost-to-originate measured in the low hundreds of dollars. Above it, deal teams compete with full structuring, negotiated documentation, and relationship coverage, because the ticket carries the cost. Between them lies a band that is too large for the scorecard’s confidence and too small for the deal team’s economics — and the industry’s operating data shows exactly what that produces: the segment’s cost-to-originate per funded dollar runs the highest in the business, its decision times are the longest relative to ticket size, its win rates are the most erratic, and its customer experience generates the outsized complaints.

The strategic irony is that the band is neither small nor unattractive. Mid-ticket transactions (above small ticket but below the headline-grabbing sizes of larger middle market and corporate finance deals) represent a large share of industry volume by dollars and an even larger share of the lower middle-market economy’s actual equipment needs — the production line addition, the fleet refresh, the facility automation project. The obligors are established businesses with real financials; the collateral is substantial; the spreads, where the segment is served well, run meaningfully above small-ticket. The middle is not missing because it is bad business. It is missing because the industry built two operating models and the middle fits neither — and most platforms respond by forcing it into one of them anyway.