Facebook Auto Finance

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.