Toyota Financial Services Made Enhancements to Vendor Platform

DALLAS — Toyota Financial Services has made changes to its vendor oversight platform following the appointment of Veronica Roman as chief compliance officer of last year, Roman said during a Wednesday fireside chat at the Auto Finance Performance and Compliance Summit in Dallas.

The behind-the-scenes compliance structure at Toyota has been largely the same since Roman accepted the position, but she noticed that there were areas that could use improvement.

“I looked there and I saw that there were some enhancements I could make around our vendor oversight within compliance,” Roman said. “We have a sound vendor oversight program in the business. So, we added staffing around vendor oversight and made some enhancements to the testing program.”

Vendor oversight has been a hot topic of conversation following the Wells Fargo scandal that involved consumers being force charged for insurance that they already owned. The bank sighted laxed vendor oversight for the misteps and has since made changes to its program to address compliance of third-party partners.

Wells Fargo is still in the midst of remediating consumers for the full harm done, but it sounded the alarm at many financial institutions to review vendor oversight more generally.

“Things can happen and it’s harder to detect unless you’re actively trying to detect,” Roman said. “Not that anyone’s suppliers are behaving in a way that would cause concern — I don’t think most suppliers are — but why take the risk?”

Toyota can use the framework that is designed to either prevent or detect and then “you stake the right talent against the framework and you have routines where things are going to be escalated,” Roman added.