Whether it’s during an industry-wide conference or in one-on-one client sessions, finance companies often pepper Anil Goyal with questions. The senior vice president of automotive valuation and analytics for Black Book mentioned some common ones such as, “Can you tell me why this segment is performing well? Why not? Where is the supply or demand? Can you tell me how the segment has performed in the past five years?”

To provide finance companies more opportunities to ask those questions — and perhaps more importantly receive what Black Book considers to be reliable answers — the company introduced Visual Analytics, a subscription-based interactive data solution that can enable users to easily unearth and gain insights on outcomes leveraging historical, current and projected vehicle and segment valuation data.

SubPrime Auto Finance News joined the stream of posing questions to Goyal, who shared a demonstration of Visual Analytics during this week’s Vehicle Finance Conference in New Orleans hosted by the American Financial Services Association. Goyal showed how the browser-based application produces information through a dashboard presentation.

The tool can offer metrics going back nearly two decades as well as Black Book projections that look ahead for the next couple of years.

“My excitement is more about leveraging this tool to help deliver insights and inform lenders on where the trends are going to help them make better decisions,” Goyal said. “What’s happened in the last five years, we’ve had such a strong market both in terms of lower delinquencies along with growth and demand coming up and retail values being so strong. It’s all been very positive.

“Now some of those positive trends are turning,” he continued. “Delinquencies are rising and vehicle values are going down. Pent-up demand has been spent. There are more plateauing of those positive trends as some of the negative trends are starting to creep in. That means you need to make smarter decisions. Just being in the business is not enough. You’ve got to get ahead of that competition. You have to understand what your data is saying. You have to know where you can fine-tune your portfolio. That’s where the value comes in.

“Five years ago, it might not have been that relevant because everyone was winning. But data analysis and visually delivering it have been more and more critical for some to say, ‘I get it,’” Goyal went on to say.

Here are six of Visual Analytics’ capabilities and features designed for auto finance company managers and other industry professionals to “get it,” including:

• Realize in-depth market trend analysis to see a holistic picture of the used-vehicle market and see where collateral values are trending historically and current day.

• Detailed residual value projections that offer visibility and forecasting from a predictive modeling approach on individual vehicle models and ranking within segments on where collateral trends are projected to go.

• Gain insight to help fine-tune loss forecasting so that lenders can minimize and mitigate potential loss resulting from falling values and delinquency rates.

• Identify new and emerging opportunities based on collateral trends that show growth potential across each of the vehicle segments, opening up avenues for segment growth in portfolios.

• Understand depreciation trends that are critical to healthy and profitable portfolio growth.

• Explore robust data based on the Black Book’s accurate valuations data.

“If you’re looking for something in this space, we have all of the information right here for you,” Goyal said. “These are the kinds of insights where you would have to get a lot of data and an analyst. There’s a lot of talk about data analytics, but it requires a lot of effort, too. We want to simplify analytics like this and make it available to our lending customers.”

Finance company clients also can upload data to Black Book — sets that do not include personal customer information — and Visual Analytics can run various reports about that credit provider’s portfolio. Goyal highlighted the tool can determine how much exposure a portfolio has to certain segments and even specific models that have gone through various changes involving demand, depreciation and more.

“These insights will really help them understand what’s going on in the market, the history and where it might be going,” Goyal said.

To schedule a demo of Visual Analytics, or to learn more about the solution, visit blackbook.com/solutions/visual-analytics.