Wells Fargo is the latest auto lender to join Dealertrack’s newly launched Digital Contracting on uniFI, Emil Banga, assistant vice president of F&I dealer operations at Cox Automotive, told Auto Finance News.
Digital Contracting on its uniFI platform launched on Tuesday with a slew functionality to make the contracting experience a “one deal jacket” for Dealertrack’s dealer partners, Banga said, noting that all of the electronic documents dealers need to send to a lender — including aftermarket products — are now located in one place.
“Everything the customer does flows into uniFi,” Banga added. “The dealer can then pick up [the information], run credit bureaus on it, do compliance checks, take it into the credit-decisioning process to get financing prepared, sell aftermarket products, and generate all the electronic contracts required. That was something our old legacy didn’t have. We had all those products, but they weren’t connected together [in one place],” he said.
In addition, the platform plugs directly into lenders’ loan origination systems to provide real-time updates to dealers as they work on funding deals, a key selling point, Banga explained.
“The whole reason why a dealer is going to adopt electronic contracting is because they want to get their deals funded faster,” Banga said. “[Dealers] want to reduce the dollar amount that [they] have in contracts in transit, and in order to do that, [dealers] need to know what documents a lender requires in order to finance the loan.” Lenders can update their underwriting requirements in real time.
Further, Banga found that getting lenders onboarded to the platform was also paramount to market adoption. “Our data shows it takes about 60% of available opportunities for an F&I manager to adopt using electronic contracting,” he explained. “What that means is, say they do 10 deals this week — [dealers] need to be able to use electronic contracting on at least six of [those deals].”
Looking forward, Dealertrack has a “really rich pipeline” of lenders looking to be onboarded to the platform, Banga said. There are currently 18 lenders using the service, including Bank of America, Capital One Auto Finance, Chase Auto and GM Financial Retail. Dealertrack expects to have 26 lenders onboarded by year end — including GM Financial lease, and 36 lenders on its platform by the end of the first quarter of 2020.
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