Digital Platform Providers Address Consumer Drop-Off [VIDEO]

Shift Finance made adjustments to its credit application after experiencing a “drop off” of customers during the finance process, Head of Business Development Craig Isakow told attendees at Auto Finance Innovation 2017 last month.

“People would fill out the soft credit form, and then if they were qualified, we would say, ‘OK, now fill out this other form,’ and there was a lot of drop off there,” Isakow said. “We discovered there was drop off there, not because people weren’t willing to put their social security number in — which is where I would have guessed — but because once they do all that, they want an answer. They expect to have an offer presented to them.”

That customers did not want to give out their social security number was also AutoGravity’s hypothesis, added Serge Vartanov, chief marketing officer at AutoGravity. However, that wasn’t the case.

“For us, there is something interesting happening in AutoGravity which is that many of the lenders that we work with don’t approve customers, they actually give a counter offer,” he said. “So, the consumer and the lender actually have a conversation in the AutoGravity platform, around like ‘Hey, if I move the down payment or term around, the deal can change.’ That’s a conversation that historically happens in the F&I office.”

Consumers and lenders are learning how to start having those conversations in a smartphone environment, he said, “and we are actually building around, trying to improve that process.”

Hear more about the evolution of the dealership F&I model in the video below — the third in a six-part video series from Auto Finance Innovation 2017.