Car-leasing platform Honcker has rebranded to Rodo, the company announced via LinkedIn on Thursday.
The rebrand comes in tandem with the rollout of new proprietary rebates, incentives and desking technology, Chief Executive Nathan Hecht told Auto Finance News. Prior to the rebrand, the company was licensing part of its software stack through third parties, Hecht said, although he declined to name specifics.
The creation of its own core proprietary technology stack — called a Rebates, Incentives, Coupons Engine, or RICE price engine — took nine months for a team of 35 people to implement, Hecht added. Now, through machine learning and what’s called “natural language processing,” Rodo (www.rodo.com) is automatically processing all automotive data to produce highly customizable lease payments for consumers.
Rodo’s new mobile app was also overhauled with the rebrand, Hecht said, allowing customers to do “a lot of interesting things” related to monthly payments. For example, customers can now roll tax returns into their monthly lease payment as opposed to having a due-at-signing payment.
“We’re [also] handling basically every possible scenario of getting [a customer] out of their existing lease and rolling in payments — rolling in dealer fees, rolling in DMV fees, rolling in taxes — everything is transparently shown in the app because we control the pricing technology,” Hecht said, adding that the new technology allows Rodo to desk lease transactions via the app in real-time.
In addition, Rodo plans to roll out new features in the next six months that relate to pricing and rebates, Hecht said, declining to elaborate.
Looking forward, Rodo intends to license its new technology to third parties, Hecht said. “We believe this has the ability to power pretty much any lease or finance transaction on the internet,” he said, noting that Rodo is currently in discussion with “somewhere around five companies” to license its API.
