Hyundai Capital America CEO and President Ross Williams spoke at the 18th annual Auto Finance Summit about the company’s strong growth and the challenges he’s dealing with today.
“I remember celebrating reaching $10 billion in assets seven years ago. A couple of years later it was $20 billion. A couple of years later it was $30 billion,” said Ross. “For those of us who grow like that it’s great, but you also have other challenges, mostly on the operations side.”
An example is on the servicing side of the business, he said, “especially when you don’t have returning lease customers. The build-out of our lease-end processes and our remarketing channels back in 2016, 2017, were a great example of something you didn’t have to think about … but we really had to think about it when a 100,000, 200,000 vehicles were coming back,” Ross said.
Operational efficiencies needed to be improved, which raised the challenge of integrated technology into the company’s processes.
“You can always run on manual processes — and we had a lot of them,” he said. “When you’re growing, you can mask that,” said Ross. “This year we’ve spent a lot of time looking at all of our manual processes — understanding what makes sense to just eliminate, what makes sense to improve, and [where it] makes sense to add technology.”
As for how he set the organization’s goals and priorities, Ross said, “the first step was to … assess the servicing side, the collection side. It took us about six months,” Ross said. “Now we have a very good plan. We have goals set for next year based on our discovery of this year.”
The practical aspects of the plan includes looking at the back-end of the company’s operations, including a review of what software the company is using and not using.
Check out the exclusive interview below, which is part of a special video series sponsored by White Clarke Group.
