TD Auto and U.S. Bank are the latest auto lenders to sign on with Shift Technologies, an online car retail and financing platform, Co-Chief Executive Officer Toby Russell told Auto Finance News.
The newest additions enable San Francisco-based Shift to offer consumers financing options across the credit spectrum. “To be totally transparent, a lot of our customers weren’t super-excited about many of the rates they were seeing from the set of lenders that we had that were really geared toward near-prime and subprime and not really oriented toward low rates for prime buyers,” Russell said.
Being in the Bay Area, Shift sees a lot of buyers with strong credit scores, employment histories, and income levels, he added. “They weren’t offering low rates for prime buyers and, as you know, what a prime borrower cares about almost more than anything else is the rate,” he said. “This is really a big push for us into prime and super-prime. Now we truly have full-spectrum lending.”
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Shift leveraged its existing relationship with Lithia Motors Inc. to bring TD and U.S. Bank onto the platform. Similarly, the company used the RouteOne platform to interface its software with the banks’, making it a relatively straightforward process, Russell said.
When a customer applies for financing on Shift’s platform, the interface pops the best offers to the top and flags the best rates, which Russell said empowers consumers with choice and transparency. Other lenders on the platform include Ally Financial, Capital One Auto Finance, Santander Consumer USA, and Westlake Financial Services.
