NextGear Capital has financed more than $1 billion of non-auction dealer purchases through floorplan tool Rapid Pay since the start of the year.
“We are giving our dealers funding before we have that title in hand,” Sarah Lutey, director of corporate strategy at NextGear Capital, told Auto Finance News. Lutey was referring to a Rapid Pay feature, unveiled in March, that initiates funding requests upon notice of title.
“Anytime a dealer wanted to floorplan inventory that was dealer-owned, a dealer-to-dealer purchase, or a trade, it had been a very manual process,” she said.
That process that historically took days has been reduced to about 90 seconds. Already, 39% of NextGear’s 22,000 dealers use Rapid Pay to floorplan all their non-auction purchases, typically one to five units at a time.
For now, though, the tool is ill-suited for larger dealers. “We have several larger dealers who might floorplan 30 to 40 units at a time, and one solution we don’t have for those larger dealers yet is a way to quickly and easily floorplan that many units at once,” Lutey said.
In addition to working on a solution to scale the Rapid Pay platform, NextGear, a unit of Cox Automotive, has started to roll out an audit self-reconciliation tool.
The feature will allow dealers to view audit results and reconcile the status and location of vehicles. “A dealer can log in their account portal, view results of their latest audit, and input if a vehicle is at a service shop or take a picture of a car that came back from a test drive and is back on the lot,” she said.
The reconciliation tool rollout should be completed by yearend.
