A wide array of technology providers in the auto finance space — including EFG Companies, F&I Express, RouteOne, National Credit Center and eLEND Solutions — all recently either formed new partnerships or rolled out enhancements to their solutions aimed at helping dealerships and finance companies.

The latest development spotted by SubPrime Auto Finance News was the enhanced partnership forged by EFG Companies and F&I Express. The organization created the partnership to better serve their dealership clients by fully integrating their eContracting capabilities.

“At EFG Companies, we understand that no two dealers are the same,” said John Pappanastos, president and chief executive officer of EFG Companies.

“Each dealer operates with different goals, success metrics, and systems, and we pride ourselves in acting as a strategic partner in their success,” Pappanastos continued. “In our effort to further that initiative, we partnered with F&I Express to augment our growing list of e-contracting solutions with one of the most utilized eContracting platforms in the market.”

F&I Express president and CEO Brian Reed added, “For almost 40 years, EFG Companies has been leading innovation within the automotive industry. We have been eagerly anticipating their addition to our F&I eContracting network and look forward to bringing their products to our dealer customers.”

RouteOne launches new desking product

RouteOne recently launched what the company dubbed RouteOne Desking; a new product that can enable dealers to quickly calculate and present monthly payment options to their customers.

The company highlighted that RouteOne Desking covers multiple sales types, including lease, retail and cash deals.

RouteOne Desking features rates, incentives, and residual values from captives and a wide array of finance sources. It also can check for rebate and program compatibility to help reduce errors and the need for manual verifications. It includes dealer configurable options, such as taxes and fees, and default aftermarket values to allow for room on the back-end when the deal moves into F&I.

Once a deal has been desked, all the data from it can generate a credit application, in RouteOne, with the simple click of a button.

“RouteOne’s Desking tool is excellent. The integration is great, however what sets it apart for me is the look and functionality of the customer proposals,” said Jesse Akins, sales manager at Pace Chevrolet in Reidsville, N.C.

RouteOne chief executive officer Mike Jurecki acknowledged, “There are many outstanding desking solutions in the marketplace today, which we will continue to integrate with to fully support dealer choice. So we didn’t get into the business just to get into it.

“We got into desking because our customers asked us to,” Jurecki continued. “They wanted an easy way to consistently calculate payment across all channels that integrates directly into the RouteOne workflow that they are so comfortable with and count on for its reliability. With the launch of this new product, they are able to do just that.”

For more information, dealers can visit www.routeone.com/desking or call (866) 768-8301.

National Credit Center unveils Avendas CRM

National Credit Center (NCC), a provider of comprehensive credit reporting solutions, data and marketing solutions recently rolled out its new customer relationship management  technology product — Avendas CRM.

Designed to work with NCC's dealer clients to enhance their customer's experience, Avendas CRM is designed so dealers spend less time using software to locate requisite data, and more time communicating effectively with their customers.

Built on what NCC contends is a responsive, cloud-based platform, Avendas CRM can allows for full functionality and the best experience on any device.

“For two decades, National Credit Center has been on the forefront of innovation in the automotive sector, and that tradition continues with the introduction of Avendas CRM," said Jevin Sackett, chief executive officer of NCC parent company Sackett National Holdings (SNH).

“In developing Avendas CRM, we’ve invested more than 20,000 hours in coding alone, with countless additional hours dedicated to ideation, workflow, and UI/UX. Our automotive professionals spent thousands of hours conducting A/B testing with dealers and industry experts, then used their suggestions and feedback to enhance the product,” Sackett continued.

“The resulting system reflects the wealth of resources we've used to develop this innovative CRM,” Sackett went on to say. “Avendas CRM was designed to minimize the time required to deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right time."

Understanding the critical importance that time management plays in the automotive industry, Avendas CRM is designed so that dealership staff can be fully trained in a few days, through either in-store training or via online, instructor-led classes. One of the goals of Avendas CRM was to free up dealer staff to interact more with customers, instead of spending time using software to find the necessary data and information required to communicate effectively with customers.

“Avendas CRM was developed to keep pace with the modern methods dealers use to manage their customers' experience,” said Shawn Morse, NCC’s senior vice-president of software solutions. “Currently, the most widely used CRM platforms in the automotive sector were built before the iPhone and Facebook were even released.

“As a result, in our consultations with dealers during Avendas’ development, we heard that many CRM systems weren't optimized for today’s technology, and that resulted in deficiencies in a host of areas — including reporting, email deliverability, security and the ease of use of their existing CRMs,” Morse continued.

“Avendas CRM was developed specifically to address the concerns that dealers identified with their existing CRM systems. As a result, Avendas is designed to provide a cost-effective, modern, intuitive CRM system that gives complete control of actionable data, process management, marketing, security, and reporting back to our dealer clients,” Morse added.

With more than 5,000 dealership partners nationwide, NCC said it was critical that Avendas CRM complement the company’s existing products. As a result, Avendas CRM also was designed to work seamlessly with the NCC credit portal (NCCI), giving dealers powerful customer data in the most efficient way possible.

“With its ease of use, flexibility, customizability and value, Avendas CRM is breaking new ground in the field of automotive CRM,” the company said. “Designed, tested, and then enhanced by industry experts who use CRM daily, Avendas CRM will transform the way dealers manage new and existing customer relationships.”

For more information, visit www.NCCdirect.com.

eLEND Solutions’ ID Drive to generate soft-pull credit report

Executives from eLEND Solutions recently announced that their ID authentication program now instantly and automatically can convert a driver’s license scan into a consumer consented soft pull credit pre-qualification application, without even requiring a Social Security Number.

Initial results from California-based Huntington Beach Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram show a 36-percent conversion ratio using ID Drive pre-qualification and a dramatically shortened sales cycle.

“In the first month, we scanned nearly 900 driver’s licenses — capturing the relevant data in our in-store systems, giving us an accurate record of who has driven our vehicles — of those scanned, nearly 50 percent opted for pre-qualification and we converted 36 percent of those into a sale — making it one of our highest performing and most profitable channels,” said Pete Shaver, managing partner of Huntington Beach Jeep.

“And because the process is so fast and easy, we can verify their address and pull credit in less than 10 seconds. We are saving a huge amount of manpower and time,” Shaver added.

Having this information up front enabled Huntington Beach Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram to shave an estimated one to two hours off the sales process — what eLEND Soluations called a huge upside for both the dealership and the customer.

Shaver also confirmed that the simplified pre-qualification process directly impacts customer satisfaction.

“Customers appreciate not having to share their SSN and knowing there won’t be any negative impact on their credit score — and they love the fact that it shortens the sales cycle,” Shaver said.

Pete MacInnis, chief executive officer of eLEND Solutions explained that ID Drive’s pre-qualification differs from pre-screening or hard pull inquiries because it does not require a SSN or impact the consumer’s credit profile while providing the dealer with a full credit report and real-time credit score.

“This new enhancement is designed to help dealers sell more cars in less time, improve CSI by reducing bottle necks in the F&I department and improve overall profitability,” MacInnis said. “We are giving dealers the information they need to put customers in the right vehicles with the right deal structures, matched to specific lender programs at the front of the sales process.” 

In addition, MacInnis pointed out that ID Drive is the only driver license scanner that can authenticate every version of driver license for all 50 states, appending validated address and phone information, and automatically can convert a driver license scan into a consumer consented pre-qualification application.

Once scanned, the consumer’s lead information is electronically integrated with any pre-existing lead or credit application data — prior to the test drive — then securely exported into the dealer’s CRM and finance systems, integrating the historically fragmented sales and finance processes.

The company added that ID Drive’s Pre-qualification also includes much lower costs per credit pull and simplified compliance requirements and cost savings for dealers.

ID Drive’s pre-qualification function can work hand-in-hand with eLEND’s CreditPlus program which instantly pre-qualifies customers based on dealer-defined credit criteria, giving car buyers direct, upfront access to dealership financing sources and real near-final terms from multiple finance companies, all of which are controlled by the dealer.

For more information, visit www.elendsolutions.com.