The relationship forged between Digital Recognition Network (DRN) and Pelican Auto Finance, a subprime auto finance company operating in California and Pennsylvania, is proving to be beneficial for both operations.

The companies shared this week that Pelican reports increased asset recovery rates, reduced charge-offs and avoided losses due to unreported stolen or impounded vehicles by leveraging DRNsights, which can combines DRN’s exclusive vehicle location data and analytics to help locate and recover assets finance companies sometimes rarely find, make right party contact to cure contracts, and locate legacy charge-offs.

“When customers begin avoiding contact, we need to find those vehicles as quickly as possible. DRNsights pays for itself because we are finding vehicles we otherwise weren’t able to, including legacy charge-offs where we had zero leads,” said Chris Mitcham, senior vice president of servicing and analytics at Pelican Auto Finance.

“We also use the Loss Alerts feature to notify us of impounded and stolen vehicles. With these alerts, we find out earlier that a vehicle is in impound, lost or has been stolen. Just one Loss Alert can result in significant dollars saved in impound fees or vehicle depreciation; and now we are finding four or five a month that we would have to wait on notification, meanwhile racking up fees or not have found at all,” Mitcham continued.

Pelican uses DRNsights daily in the collections and recovery processes. In collections, DRNsights can help confirm a customer’s given address and alerts Pelican about changes that may warrant action.

Using the vehicle location data, Pelican can identify new addresses to make right party contact.

“Having new addresses to make contact is especially important in early stage delinquency and can help avoid further delinquency or a repossession,” Mitcham said.

Once a vehicle is out for repossession, Pelican used DRNsights to help recover the vehicle faster. The finance company found that the data makes recovery efforts more efficient using vehicle location data to direct recovery agents to the right location, date and time for successful recovery.

As a result, Pelican said it immediately realized reduced charge-offs due to “skipped” accounts and is recovering more vehicles faster.

“DRNsights has revolutionized the repossession industry by helping lenders recover up to 35 percent more vehicles and avoid charge-off losses. Pelican’s results show the power of our data and analytics to mitigate risk and reduce losses,” said Jeremiah Wheeler, vice president financial services for DRN.

The system is powered by DRN’s vehicle location data and analysis, all of which is collected by a network of license plate recognition (LPR) cameras located nationwide. The data is instrumental in helping many finance companies in their collections process, providing alerts of possible risk, protection from lien losses, new locations for making contact on 40 percent or more accounts and the ability to collect earlier to reduce charge-offs, and a 50 percent reduction in days to recover vehicles out for repossession.