DALLAS — With competition heating up and the lending spigot starting to loosen, risk management becomes an even more critical issue for auto finance executives. The question that lenders are grappling with these days is how to strike a balance — how do you successfully grow your portfolio while ensuring that prudent lending decisions are being made?
That was one of the main topics lenders discussed yesterday at the Auto Finance Risk Summit.
One strategy that lenders mentioned for mitigating risk is to grow, but in a controlled way. That is, targeting specific areas and regions for growth, then concentrating efforts there. Another tactic is to provide elevated service, which helps to un-commoditize a lender’s products and bolster dealer relationships. A third idea is to slowly peel back some risk-management protocols, tightly monitoring the results and tweaking the effort as needed.
Today’s lineup of sessions will address the latest risk threats, fraud management, legislative and compliance issues, liquidity, and scorecard development, among other topics.