Mobility and disruptive technology continue to develop in the automotive industry, and there’s a “big role” for auto finance companies in a disruptive economy, according to Dan Berce, president and chief executive of General Motors Financial Co.
As General Motors Co. — GM Financial’s parent — takes more strides into emerging mobility and autonomous technologies, GMF is “right behind them,” Berce told attendees during a fireside chat at the 2017 Auto Finance Summit last October.
“The transformation for us is that we’re going to be doing more fleet finance, so if GM deploys a fleet of autonomous vehicles in Manhattan, we’ll be the owners of the fleet, we’ll be the financiers of the fleet,” he said. “We will have consumer interface in a different way, so instead of collecting a monthly payment we’ll be charging an hourly payment or a daily payment.”
GMF has continued to nurture its core business of financing and leasing vehicles while providing “remarkable customer experience,” Berce said. However, finance companies will need to devote resources to investing in disruptive technologies at the same time, which General Motors has done “very, very well.”
However, consumers aren’t going to stop purchasing vehicles all at once, and the move to options like ridesharing will gradually become more prominent over time.
“Disruption and transformation going on in the auto industry is inevitable,” Berce said. “It doesn’t mean that consumer purchases of vehicle are going to go away ever and that everything is just going to shift to ridesharing, but we’re going to see — especially in urban areas — more and more of a sharing economy.”
Hear more from Dan Berce talking about mobility and disruption in the video below — the first in a special video series from the Auto Finance Summit held in Las Vegas last October:
For more content like this, attend the third annual Auto Finance Innovation event, slated for March 7-8, at the Parc 55 in San Francisco. For information, or to register, visit autofinanceinnovation.com.
