BEDFORD, Texas -

The auto industry relationship involving Jim Calvert and David Gryglewicz dates back several years, and now the pair has collaborated to form a new company designed to improve repossessions, recoveries and remarketing.

This new operation — ENDTRUST — looks to provide all the administration and management performance oversight offered through the forwarding model, while returning the recovery agent and relationship control back to the auto finance company client that’s inherent in the direct model.

Calvert and Gryglewicz believe they have strategically bridged this industry gap by aligning with leading-edge compliance and technology systems service providers enabling ENDTRUST to develop a platform that ultimately can deliver the “best of both world,” with forwarding and direct through what they’ve dubbed the Supernova Hybrid Model.

Through its relationship with these contemporary and innovative companies, ENDTRUST operates and facilitates its services built on three foundational pillars: compliance, technology utilization and workflow automation.

“No longer is it an either/or compromise where auto lenders have to choose between the forwarding and/or the direct model. They now have the unique first-of-its-kind opportunity to select a nationwide repossession service provider that provides the best both have to offer, all from the same platform,” Gryglewicz said.

At one time, Calvert was a top executive with the captive for Mercedes-Benz.

“In the late 1990s, I left the comfort of a growing prominent auto finance luxury brand to satisfy an aspiration of starting my own company. Unbeknown to me — like any fledgling new company, we had our challenges in what back then was a soon-to-be declining vehicle lease finance marketplace,” Calvert said.

“It wasn’t until the mid to late 2000s when we pivoted into a close related business venture in the leasing sector where we finally got some well-needed traction in a newly discovered untapped market. Since then, we’ve either started or acquired several other companies all with a clear immutable slant toward technology and innovation,” he continued.

Along with ENDTRUST, Calvert also owns and manages Fusion Auto Finance, Novak Motors, GrooveCar, CUXPRESS LEASE and GrooveCar Direct. Calvert recapped why his relationship with Gryglewicz intensified.

“When we started receiving inquiries from our lender clients regarding repo and remarketing servicing, there was only one name that immediately came to mind,” Calvert said. “I met David when still at Mercedes and then subsequently asked him to join me in my first company venture, EndTrust Lease End Services. There’s no one in the auto finance back-end outsource servicing space that has more experience and expertise than David.”

ENDTRUST now is a third-party national provider of repossession, remarketing and lease-end service management all functioning out of its operations center consisting of 44,000 square feet located in Bedford, Texas.

“When Jim Calvert first contacted me to discuss what he felt would be another great vertical in his family of companies, he asked, and I provided my personal insight as to the current state of the repossession/remarketing industry space,” said Gryglewicz, who now serves as president of ENDTRUST.

During the 1990s, Gryglewicz was one of the executives who led the charge in developing what is commonly known today as forwarding. He estimated that about half of all repossessions today are now secured through one or more of the 15 of the larger forwarding companies.

“There’s a far greater need for compliance, technology utilization and workflow automation today than any other time in the history of repo servicing,” Gryglewicz said. “When Jim and I sat down, we both saw this to be a crowded space. However, all the current large players have been around anywhere from 10 to as many as 25 years.

“Further, the universal inventory management systems providers who first came on the scene in the early to mid-2000s are still occupying the same space with the same systems since that same time,” Gryglewicz continued. “Where some may view this crowded space as a significant barrier to market entrance, we saw the same as an aging business model plagued by and encumbered with antiquated legacy systems and inefficient workflow infrastructure in what is now tapping out as a stagnant industry life cycle, ripe for disruption.

The result now is ENDTRUST and its Supernova Hybrid Model.

“Throughout my lengthy career in this space, despite the numerous benefits the forwarding model offers, there has always been and still remains today an equal contingent of lenders who continue to prefer the direct model,” Gryglewicz said.

“Right, wrong or indifferent, many lenders prefer to keep management of repossession operations in-house because of the ‘control’ they maintain working directly with recovery agents,” he continued. “Forwarding has a long list of administrative benefits any lender would enjoy, however, there’s always been a contention with the communication channel which flows from recovery agency to forwarder and then forwarder to lender. Many lenders aren’t willing to give up and live with what they view as too large a trade-off.

“On the flip side of the same coin, there are lenders who currently utilize the forwarding model that would prefer to maintain direct management control working and communicating directly with agents themselves,” Gryglewicz went on to say. “The model relationship that coexists today offers a ‘one or the other’ ultimatum proposition evidenced by a current industry partisan statistic showing half the industry’s use of the forwarding model while the other half utilize direct.”

ENDTRUST goes into more detail about its offerings in a video available here as well as at the top of this page.