Think about these statistics: Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Couple that exposure with information about people in the market for a car, and you have the ultimate auto finance lead generator. In fact, maybe Facebook could get a lending license and offer the loans itself.
In a recent report, consultancy Gartner predicted that social media sites may try to create revenue streams by offering insurance and financial services.
“Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers’ financial services strategies and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users,” Gartner analyst Juergen Weiss writes in the “Gartner Predicts 2012” report.
Here’s a perfect example: Earlier this week, there was major flooding in Houston. My friend Alex got stuck in the deluge, and his car flooded. His Facebook post:
Now it’s final and absolute: our car is gone in that flood. If somebody has a (safely) drivable car they don’t really use, so I could rent it for a couple months, please let me know.
A used-car lender with access to that information could reach out to Alex with a list of dealers in the area and a preapproval.
Once the deal is done, Facebook Auto Finance could expect customers to be pretty active with mobile payments. For instance, 350 million Facebook users access the site through their mobile devices. While they’re on the site, they could make payments, check loan balances, or find out about refinancing.
Need to revisit tax credits- the junker credit should help on both the enviroment and sales front
Marcie, I forgot to mention that we would store the electronic data for upto seven years, with easy access and up loading for the dealer or lender within our secure data base. The whole transaction would also allow the dealer and lender to be in full compliance to all new rules and regulations, by the federal or state governments.
It would take over 90% of the problem to comply with these new regulations.
Bill Fowler
Bill
Sounds interesting, Bill. What are your thoughts, though, on Facebook as a direct-to-consumer auto loan provider?
It has great possibilities that we will be looking into with our present system. Give me a few days to get back to you on this.
Bill
Marcie, I talked to the head of our IT department and his advice was”
“Facebook is a major security risk. I have to say, unequivacally, that I am not in favor of this right now. Facebook and Twitter are not secure sites and they cause me some major concern.”
Now having said that, he also informed me that his department is in deep research to figure out how to solve this problem.
So my reply is to be very careful and in six months or so I could better answer your question. For now a company may wish to let people just link to your secure web site over the Internet to gain access to your services.
Bill Fowler