CARY, N.C. -

Scaling new technologies in the auto industry, including relatively new entrants like vehicle subscription services, can be complex.

With apologies to “Field of Dreams,” you can’t just build it and hope scalability will come.

Vince Zappa would know. He’s the president of Clutch Technologies, a software platform that facilitates vehicles subscriptions. Clutch has gone from about three industry customers a year ago to nearly 40 now, with more on the way.

Scaling such technology comes with “a lot of tie-ins back to the ecosystem,” including things like financiers, insurance and billing payment providers, Zappa said.

The latter is where Clutch’s latest launch comes into play. The company announced an end-to-end billing and payments solution for the car subscription market on Wednesday called Clutch Payments, which is powered by Stripe Connect.

The goal is to give Clutch customers, which include automakers and dealers alike, a “seamless” avenue for managing billing and payments in their respective subscription programs.

And again, billing and payments are among the crucial “tie-ins” to scaling something like subscriptions.

“Being able to tie this ecosystem together with one platform presents some interesting technical challenges, both with the ecosystem and inside, being able to balance and optimize the notion of a fleet and the consumer experience,” Zappa said in a phone interview. “So, there’s a lot more going on than kind of just re-engineering a price point and calling it subscription, in order for it to scale.”

As Clutch continues to add industry customers, “because our platform is being used to facilitate (deals with) their customers, we have to be able to put together a payment system back to the OEM or back to the dealer group that lets all the money flow collected from the end consumer appropriately,” Zappa said.

“And that’s what the Clutch Payments product is about,” he said. “It’s about being able to segment out all of the dollars associated with the service to the right people, once those dollars are received. (It’s) fundamental. Collecting it and distributing it.”

Auto industry takes ‘Internet-forward’ approach

Stripe, which processes online payments for web-based businesses across a variety of verticals, is likely a familiar name to most, both in and outside the car business.

Specific to automotive, its Connect platform also powers online marketplace Shift and household names like Lyft and Uber, said Richard Alfonsi, who is the company’s head of global revenue and growth.

While other verticals perhaps are more entrenched in online commerce, there certainly has been a ramp-up in the online automotive movement in recent years through online retail, subscription, ride-hailing, car-sharing and so forth.

“We’re pretty excited about it. I think it’s still in the early days, but there are a lot of examples of auto industry players, transportation players, really taking an Internet-forward, Internet-first approach to the market. Clutch is a great new example,” Alfonsi said in a phone interview.

And perhaps an indication of where retail, in general, is leaning to some degree.  

“Shoppers are increasingly inclined to buy everyday items — from meal-kits to beauty supplies and, now, their cars — via subscription services,” Alfonsi said in a news release.

“In fact, our research shows that 32 percent of consumers would prefer to sign up for a subscription than make a one-off purchase. We’re thrilled to work with Clutch to make it easier for dealers and OEMs to reach customers,” he said.

White-label product

Adam Carley, who is vice president of product and marketing at Clutch, said in a phone interview said the company has been working with Stripe from the outset, but the company approached Clutch to suggest they use the Stripe Connect product as more of a white-label, wholesale solution.

“We started working with them out of the gate. We started using Stripe just as any other customer could, when we first started doing subscriptions,” Carley said.

“When we started working with other partners, we had them create Stripe accounts and we linked to those Stripe accounts and starting working with them in the same way. And they were great for that.”

Carley added that, “we were basically almost using a retail solution at that point, and there was always going to come a point where we were going to need something more of a wholesale solution.”

He added: “They’re basically wholesaling their platform to us and letting us white-label it.”

It allows Clutch to have some more technical control over payments. Additionally, they can save on transaction processing costs, and then pass those savings to customers, Carley said.