SAN DIEGO — CarFinance is building a “customer acquisition” platform for dealer and lender partners slated to debut in July, Chief Executive Craig Hewitt said at the Auto Finance Sales & Marketing Summit last month.
“[The platform] is facilitated by a customer-acquisition tool that allows dealers to do direct mail campaigns and drive consumers to their branded website,” Hewitt said. Currently dubbed the CarFinance Platform, the system’s name is subject to change prior to its official launch next month.
The latest offering from CarFinance will also provide what Hewitt calls a “dealer website connection” tool, meaning that dealers can integrate virtual storefronts into their websites, he said.
Additionally, the platform will allow “lender connection” capabilities, Hewitt said. “Our financial services partners can connect their websites to our dealer network and fulfill the whole end-to-end digital purchase for consumers,” he said.
CarFinance’s focus on rolling out a single online platform that facilitates all aspects of the car-buying process is a strategy to provide services for not only consumer customers but also for CarFinance dealers and lender customers, Hewitt said. “The line between direct and indirect is not very blurry anymore in our perspective — it’s very clear.”
To that end, CarFinance is focusing its near-term goals on providing services that facilitate a holistic digital experience for lenders, dealers, and consumers. “The industry thinks a lot about consumers spending less time at dealerships,” he said. “It’s not just consumers, but lenders and dealers are open to digital experiences.”
As a result, CarFinance is finding ways to take a lender or dealer’s “disparate systems on their websites and aggregate them to a single user environment to deliver a better customer experience,” Hewitt said.
