The volume of loans contracted electronically in February neared 50% for Ford Motor Credit Co. and grew to the high-50% range for Toyota Financial Services, said Brad Rogers, chief operating officer of e-contracting vendor RouteOne LLC, during a session at the Consumer Bankers Association’s annual conference this week. In February 2013, those numbers were 25% and 1%, respectively, he said.
Meanwhile, Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp.’s e-contract volume is about 60%, said Michael Collins, vice president of lender finance solutions and Canadian operations for Dealertrack Technologies. “We are starting to see a very large critical mass” among some captives, Rogers said.
For non-captives and other financial institutions, though, “those numbers are far less,” Collins said.
The main hurdle to industrywide adoption of e-contracting, according to the panelists, is the age-old chicken-and-egg problem: Dealers say there aren’t enough lenders on the platform, and lenders say there aren’t enough dealers.
To date, Dealertrack has 5,000 dealers on its system; RouteOne has 4,500, with plans to add 1,000 more this year.
