Sanjiv Yajnik, president of Capital One Auto Finance, will deliver the Keynote Address at the 2009 Auto Finance Summit.
The Summit takes place Oct. 12-13 in Las Vegas.
Yajnik has been president of Capital One Auto Finance since 2007. He first joined Cap One in 1998, and was schooled at the University of Western Ontario. He completed the Stanford University Executive Program in 2003.
Capital One is the 11th-largest auto finance company in the nation, with about $21.5 billion of outstandings at yearend 2008.
Yajnik joins the most impressive Speaker Faculty in the Auto Finance Summit’s nine-year history. Among those speakers confirmed for the 2009 Summit are Marc Sheinbaum, CEO of Chase Auto; Ellie Clark, president of Bank of America Dealer Finance; Dan Berce, president & CEO of AmeriCredit Corp.; and Jeffrey Young, president and CEO of Mitsuibishi Motors Credit.
For information on the Summit and to register, click here.
A person with a 720 credit score loses his or her job, defaults on their debt, has a vehicle repoed and now their credit score is 550. Is this credit score artificially low? I don’t think so. Credit scores are used to assign a probability of default and in my mind their probability of defaulting in the future is indeed higher and the lower credit score warranted. The savings rate in the US is around 3% or less which means that most consumers spend everything they make and have nothing saved for events such as losing a job, health issues, etc. Who’s fault is that? Maybe the brand new BMW wasn’t the way to go? Maybe trading in the car every three years or so and buying new wasn’t such a great idea? Maybe maxing out the credit cards so as to take great vacations wasn’t such a good financial plan? We all have to budget our lives such that we can withstand events such as unemployment. The failure to do so results in defaults and may be indicative of behaviour that warrants a lower credit score (a higher probability of default given that behaviour).
The major lenders business model is predicated on electronic decisions. The niche for the smaller lenders seems to be in finding the “good” borrowers from the low credit score population. This involves judgement that cannot, and probably should not, be modeled.