CIT Group, Inc.

CIT Group, Inc. belongs to the kind of finance company that makes money by lending and structuring credit for businesses, rather than by being a neighborhood bank branch. By our assessment, its real strength is the commercial-finance side of the business: asset-based lending, equipment financing, and other forms of business credit that sit between a plain bank loan and a more specialized lender. The downside is that this is a narrower, more cyclical corner of finance, so it is not the sort of name people use for everyday banking. In practice, companies like CIT Group, Inc. live on underwriting, paperwork, and risk control, which makes them more technical than friendly. Compared with a retail bank, it is less about deposits and card accounts and more about lending relationships. The name still carries the feel of a finance house first, not a consumer brand.