By Larissa Padden; Diana Asatryan
Leveraging digital channels, completing transactions quicker, and boosting efficiency — among other things — is on the radar for a number of executives that Auto Finance News interviewed for our December magazine issue. Here are the top 3 questions we asked.
Tech Investments
Auto Finance News: What tech investments are you making in 2016?
Chris Ballinger, chief financial officer, management innovation at Toyota Financial Services: There are a lot of opportunities with fintech companies and startups. We have what they want — scale and customers — and they have what we want. We struggle with legacy systems that are enormously expensive. Sometimes the code is written in languages where it’s hard to find anyone who can work on it anymore. You can give fintech companies the opportunity to untangle some of that, with up-to-date code, it can be relatively cheap, it could be plug-in.
Joel Kennedy, chief performance officer at Pelican Auto Finance: We are going to be building up our data architecture. Right now, on a maturity scale of 1 to 5, we are probably about a one, so we are looking at options and mapping out our progressions to develop a data warehouse strategy, if you will.
Kurt Wood, CFO at DriveTime: We were the first [buy-here, pay-here] company to go nationwide with 100% electronic contracting offered at our dealerships. You will see us expand that into our loan modification system.
