GM Financial’s Commercial Lending to Ramp Up Credit Lines
GM Financial’s commercial vehicle lending (CVL) department is aiming to establish more long-term relationships with its dealer partners and increase its credit lines in the face of aggressive competitors, according to Kevin Peters, GMF’s senior vice president of commercial vehicle lending.
The captive’s CVL program currently has 125 lines of credit with approvals for around $125 million, and “that’s an area where we plan on expanding on,” he added.
CVL launched in September 2014 and is still actively growing and building its dealer network, Peters told Auto Finance News in an exclusive interview at GMF’s Irving-based facility yesterday.
“Our competitors out there have been doing [commercial lending] for 20 years and have those long-term relationships, so we need to build those relationships and earn that business” in order to compete, he added.
CVL needs to “take it to the next step” by picking up additional lines of credit that can turn a 2- or 3-unit deal into a 10-unit deal, Peters said. This can, in turn, give the dealer the confidence to say, “’I will turn this customer over to you and you can talk to them and get that line of credit,’ but that’s something that comes with time.”
“The dealers that haven’t come over yet have long-term relationships and probably are still a little hesitant as well, but we are seeing a big shift in that,” he said. GMF’s commercial lending group has a “decent-sized” sales force. “We know the dealers who are the big players, and we are spending a lot of time with them. We are bringing products like fleet-management and these other things to them, which is a great way to really introduce ourselves into the market.”
