Weekly Wrap: Industry execs receive Auto Finance Excellence Awards

The 2021 Auto Finance Excellence Awards were presented Oct. 28 at the Auto Finance Summit in Las Vegas as industry executives and automotive lenders were recognized for their notable efforts in community service, leadership and operations. The in-person awards ceremony allowed recipients to receive recognition in front of their peers and give a brief speech regarding the honor. Santander Consumer USA Senior Executive Vice President Sandra Broderick accepted her leadership award in recognition for her career accomplishments as she prepares to retire early next year. GM Financial Chief Executive Dan Berce also was awarded a leadership honor, which colleague Kyle Birch accepted on his behalf while sharing a personal anecdote about his working relationship with Berce. Executives from Bank of America , NextGear Capital and Toyota Financial Services also received awards at the event. In this episode of the Weekly Wrap, Editor Joey Pizzolato and Associate Editor Whitney McDonald discuss the winners of this year’s Auto Finance Excellence Awards and what’s to come in auto finance this week. Subscribe to The Roadmap Podcast on iTunes , Spotify , or download the episode. Video Transcript: Editor’s note: This transcript has been generated by software and is being presented as is. Some transcription errors may remain . Joey Pizzolato 00:02 Hello everyone and welcome to the roadmap from auto finance news since 1996, the nation's leading newsletter on automotive lending and leasing. It's Monday, November 8. I'm Joey Pizzolato and joining me today is Whitney McDonald. This is our weekly wrap for what happened in auto finance, the week ending November 5 2021. As always, we want to thank Auto Finance News advertisers, Dealertrack, CEDAR CX, Defi Solutions, Verisk and Westlake Financial. Last week, we continue our earnings reports with Nicolas financial posting increases in both direct and indirect originations for the second quarter of fiscal year 2022. Directly originations grew at 3.7% year over year to 7 million and indirect originations grew 9.1% To 18 point 9 million. In general Automotive News, Ford Motor Co is selling bonds aimed at benefit benefiting the environment, a first for the automaker and part of its transition to electric vehicles. Ford said last week, it plans to sell at least 1 billion of green bonds. As part of a broader plan to cut its borrowing costs by more than half through repurchasing a 5 billion of junk rated debt and trying to return investment grade, trying to return to investment grade credit ratings. Meanwhile, Manheim use vehicle value index also came out last week and hit a new record. US vehicle values were up 38.1% year over year for the month of October. sales continue to remain low with seasonally adjusted annualized rate, estimated at 19 Point 6 million units down from 21 point 1 million units last year. We're of course following vehicle values and sales trends as we watch for return to more normal values, with predictions looking to the second half of the year for that normalization. We're also continuing our coverage of the auto finance summit that took place last two weeks ago. In our latest magazine, which came up Thursday, we highlighted the auto finance Excellence Award winners in leadership, community service and operations. The winners were able to accept their awards in person in Las Vegas at the summit. Whitney, you covered the the auto finance excellence awards. So why don't you wrote give us a rundown of what what went down?Whitney McDonald 02:27 Yes, I was able to cover the auto finance excellence awards for 2021. A lot of great things going on in the industry, of course. So it's hard to hone in on the top, top key players but we did it and we're really proud of our award winners. Joey was able to be there to see them accept their awards in person I was able to streamline the event but it was great to be able to see our winners accept their trophies in person be able to give a little bit of a speech of gratitude and explain what they've been up to. So without further ado, our winners, which hopefully you've seen, we posted our feature with all the winners last Thursday as part of our magazine coverage. But we had two Leadership Awards, one being Dan Berce, the chief executive of GM Financial, he was recognized for GM financials exceptional performance this year. His leadership style is lead by example. He has a very full int. He does a lot of philanthropy, and then of course has efforts in diversity, equity inclusion, he actually wasn't able to be at the summit to accept but it was a really special thing to see his colleague Kyle Birch accept the award on behalf of him and share kind of a personal anecdote of what it's like to be his colleague. He shared just kind of what we celebrated him for which was He's a great leader great to work with, and of course has so much experience in the industry. Moving on to our second Leadership Award was Sandra Broderick. She is the Senior Executive Vice President and head of operations at Santander Consumer USA. She has been an example to women in the industry. And it just made sense to give her this award as she is leaving the industry. She plans to retire at the beginning of the year. But one thing that really stood out to me with doing research on her and watching her accept this award and kind of digging a little deeper into her career. She always said that there is a seat for women at the table. And people were women have really followed her lead as she has sat in many executive leadership positions throughout her career. Next up was Toyota Financial Services. They got the Community Service Award this year, we have been following their program Toyota for good, which is an app that has their volunteer opportunities on it for their employees to sign up. See what's available to volunteer for. Their latest volunteer effort was tutoring is a tutoring and mentorship program that started at the beginning of the school year and is carrying on. It's a hybrid program. So in person now that that's more acceptable with COVID regulations, but yet they are tutoring mentoring, you could do that online or in person, a lot of their volunteer efforts are maintaining online just because it's very convenient for their employees to stay involved and fit it into their schedule and still be able to volunteer. Next up was next year capital, they had a operations award this year. So they launched two new dealer products. One was first year, which helps brand new dealers who have been in business six months or less, kind of get off the ground support them, give them the necessary capital to kind of hit the ground running. Basically, a partner without becoming a partner. Flex pricing floor plan was their other product launch. It's a tool that frees up dealer cash flow, which who didn't need that I'm at the pandemic. And the last thing that really stood out to us from next year was they offered a relief package related to the to the pandemic for their dealer partners, which really stood out to us because everybody needed extra support. And it just showed that they really cared about their partners during that time and gave them extensions, and things like that. Lastly was another operations award for Bank of America, they are continuing their efforts to streamline electric and hybrid vehicle financing. The Eevee segment is just continuing to grow. So watching them be creative. Take this online, allowing for the financing process to start online for EVs is really exciting, and it's growing a lot. So we are going to be continuing to follow all of these winners, and we congratulate them and it was awesome to see them back in person to accept these.Joey Pizzolato 06:54 Great when he thinks Um, also, as our secondary feature, we did highlight four key takeaways from the auto finance Summit. Unsurprisingly, the things that the industry is watching is inventory, digitization, increased diversity, equity inclusion initiatives, and obviously, electrification. So please check out that that story on auto finance news.net. This week, we will continue to cover third quarter earnings, and we will finish up our coverage from the auto finance summit and power sports finance Summit. So watch for those items online. We have a lot of really great best practices, articles that are coming out of that that should help everybody increase their efficiencies in their operations, and really just, you know, be the best that they can be. Thanks. Thanks for joining us on this week's roadmap. Of course, we always want to hear from you. So please rate the roadmap on whichever platform you lose us to listen to the program and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you online at auto finance news.net and here next time

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