CarFinance.com, the online direct lending unit of Flagship Credit Acceptance, is building its lender network, auto loan products, and white-label services as it looks to spin out from the parent company to become fully independent “in the near future,” newly appointed Chief Executive of CarFinance.com Craig Hewitt told Auto Finance News.

“[Flagship] understood that the businesses need to compete on their own — within their own merits within their own space,” Hewitt said. “They recognized that the businesses are sufficiently different, that they both require individual and unique staff.”

Hewitt was appointed to the role in mid-July to lead the company through this transition.

Today, the financials are run separately but the platform does still share compliance, legal, and human resources teams with Flagship. Previously, all direct loans going through the platform were originated by Flagship, but moving forward CarFinance.com already has a full-spectrum of lenders originating on the platform with more to come.

“We have several lenders and several in the pipe who are contracted and are in some form of integration,” he said. “At some point, Flagship will be one of many of our partners on the platform.” Hewitt declined to name the other lenders.

The direct lending platform has ambitions to add a white-label product for dealers and other lenders to use and wants to add refinancing, commercial financing, lease buyout, cash-out refinance, and eventually dealer purchase to the platform. “When you get to CarFinance.com, we want to be all things car finance for a consumer,” he said, noting that the company is currently still on “generation one” of this process. “Generation two is where we’re on the dealer’s website — direct lending powered by CarFinance.com — that’s more of an automated fully transacted purchase at the dealership or potentially delivered to the consumer.”