Mercedes-Benz Financial Services will continue to focus and invest heavily on digital innovation in 2017 — including making enhancements to its mobile app and piloting e-contracting to dealers — with the help of the company’s new Vice President and Chief Information Officer Johan Swart.
This year, MBFS has made great strides to put more emphasis on technology innovation. The company partnered with the financing app AutoGravity for both loans and leases, and MBFS was awarded an Auto Finance Excellence Award for its launch of the Digital Transformation Office.
MBFS has a “two-step approach” to digital innovation, Swart told AFN. “We look at innovation to our dealer and customer network, but we also have the digitalization and renovation of our internal — our core business — within the organization, as well.”
The technology industry is moving fast, and the exciting part is getting involved, he said. “For me, the focus is getting our workforce exposed, get them experience using these technologies so that we can use it; and we can bring that to dealers and customers and also employees internally.”
Swart’s appointment is a signal of an increased focus on digital innovation, the company announced on Oct. 10. Swart succeeds Udo Neumann, who was recently named global chief information officer for the global financial and mobility services division of Daimler AG. Swart will oversee 400 employees and direct the company in resource planning, overall IT strategy, budgeting, and operational initiatives for the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, according to a company press release.
Swart began his career with Mercedes-Benz South Africa in 1998 as a business analyst in the IT division before serving as CIO in the country, where he led the integration of information technology management functions for the company’s various IT units. He most recently served as senior manager of IT applications management.
Swart spoke with AFN about the captive’s digital initiatives for 2017 and technology projects on the roadmap.
Following are edited excerpts from the interview:
Auto Finance News: What are your top priorities for 2017 in this new role?
Johan Swart: I look at it from two perspectives. One is from our company perspective, which is providing services to our end customers and our dealer network. The focus around that is really that we want to provide total dealer and customer satisfaction. We want to provide innovative services to our dealers and customers that differentiate us from the rest of our competitors. The second dynamic that drives a lot of my priority, is where the IT industry is going, and what we see coming out of the IT industry — especially around a lot of these startup companies. They provide a lot of innovative products in a very short period of time, and they are disrupting a lot of industries and businesses with these new startup organizations. My priority is basically looking at these two macro drivers, then defining what is it that we focus on in IT within Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, and provide that excellent service to our customer and dealer network.
AFN: What are some of the innovative services you offer that differentiate MFBS from competitors?
JS: Our consumer mobile app. We actually launched, on Nov. 14, further enhancements on that platform, including extended toolsets for customers to do calculations — comparisons of different vehicles and different financing options. We also provide functionality now, like, for instance, biometrics, where the customer can unlock or log onto the application with their thumbprint. We also have added some features that make it very easy for customers to complete their credit application. For example, they can actually take a picture of their driver’s license and their information will be taken to their credit application. The customer doesn’t need to type it out.
AFN: What other technology projects does MBFS have in store for 2017?
JS: We are focusing on providing really a paperless experience to customers and dealers, to bring it into a full digital concept. Our goal is that we want to provide a comprehensive e-contracting solution to our dealer network and look at the overall process. We don’t just want to provide one document, and we also don’t want to provide just digital signatures. We want to offer a holistic experience to our customers throughout the whole buying process, of which one component is e-contracting. There’s still a lot of regulations and still a lot of compliance aspects to be taken care of here. This is a project we are working on now, and we are spending a significant amount of time and energy behind this to make it a real good experience for our dealer network. We are targeting to start a pilot process in 2017.
Another area where we will spend a lot more time and energy is in analytics, to get a better understanding of customer behavior — how customers are using our website, how customers are using our self-service tools — and get some insight through analytics. That will feed into how we look at our design process, about how customers are behaving around our applications and websites, and how dealers are using our websites and toolsets. We will definitely spend much more time within the analytic space. We will start getting into a more “big data” component, analyzing trends and patterns, how products are used or not used, and ways we should change the investment or focus for us internally.
This story was originally published in the December issue of Auto Finance News.