Western Funding to Roll Out E-Contracting This Year

Western Funding Inc. intends to implement e-contracting in the first half of 2016, according to Guerin Senter, the company’s president.

Like many of Western Funding’s initiatives for the year, e-contracting is aimed at streamlining the business, he said. Dealers have not specifically asked for e-contracting, but “when we show them that their deals will fund faster if they have it [e-contracting], then they agree,” Senter told Auto Finance News.

“Frankly, nobody wins if the contract is executed incorrectly, and it can be something simple, like the co-borrower didn’t sign page three of the contract. He wasn’t trying to evade his contractual responsibility, he just forgot to do it.” With the use of e-contracting, however, the process cannot move onto the next section until everything has been executed as it’s supposed to be, Senter said.

“Currently, our funding is pretty good, dealers are sending clean packages to fund within 36 hours,” he said. “But, nevertheless, the packages that aren’t clean, are dragged out.” The lender will also remain focused on engaging its dealer base in 2016. “’Engaged’ for us means that the dealers send a number of deals every single month, and we think that a ‘good number’ is three deals a month, on average, per dealer,” he said.

Western Funding doubled its dealer base to 2,000 dealers in 2015, after it signed about 1,100 new dealer partners as of November 2015, Senter told AFN at the time.