Chase Auto Finance has had a busy couple years integrating its prime and nonprime platforms, reducing its dealer base, and increasing its automation — among other changes — according to Bruce Jackson, head of retail lending auto finance at JPMorgan In the past two years, Chase Auto Finance has also migrated to seven “very large” locations that are open seven days a week with extended hours, from 50 smaller locations across the country. The larger facilities have allowed the company to align dedicated underwriters to each dealer, Jackson told Auto Finance News in an interview last month.
“Those have really been our priorities,” he said. “It sounds very simple, but as you can imagine, getting out of 50 sites and taking it to seven, taking automation from a lower percentage to a high percentage, getting on one automation system, segmenting our dealers and aligning them to the proper underwriters just took a little while, but we’re there. That’s now completed. It’s been a two-year journey.”
Beyond Chase Auto’s recent upgrades, Jackson shared his thoughts on the company’s prime focus, rising interest rates, and other industry trends. A portion of his comments follow.
Auto Finance News: From a technology standpoint, you just finished integrating two systems into one. What did that entail?
BRUCE JACKSON: We had the legacy Bank One system, and that was what you would consider the subprime group. Then you had the other system, which was on the prime side. For years we operated, quite frankly, as two different ‘go-to-market’ strategies, and the dealer would have two different underwriters. Today, an underwriter can now deal with any transaction that a dealer may send us. Instead of saying, “You’ve got to go over to the prime side to talk about this transaction,” or conversely the nonprime side, it’s all on one system. And that also helps us assign the underwriters to the dealers.
