Experian Automotive has launched Finance Alerts, a monitoring feature for use by car dealers and finance companies and the latest update to its AutoCheck vehicle provenance tool.
The service will provide dealers with "purely automated" alerts when retail finance arrangements are cleared, amended or re-added, explained Alistair Scullion, managing director of the global information provider’s automotive business in the UK and Ireland.
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The feature will be the first of several innovations from the company planned for 2013, part of Experian Automotive’s commitment to organising data services around clients’ needs and the continued and increased investment in data by the company.
Tick of the clock
Speaking to Motor Finance, Scullion, explained Finance Alerts would reduce motor retailers’ and finance providers’ time spent on the telephone to one another when checking for outstanding finance on a vehicle.
"It’s a lot of work for the dealers, a lot of work for the motor finance companies," said Scullion. The motor retailer "no longer has to worry" to check when finance is signed-off and finance companies no longer need to field "hundreds of thousands of calls", which "frees up capacity".
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By GlobalDataScullion said Finance Alerts was also the result of extensive work with the Finance & Leasing Association (FLA) to ensure "finance data is as accurate, up-to-date and timely as it possibly can be" and cited the latest figures from the FLA which showed dealer finance reached a 70.8% penetration into UK new private sales.
Paul Harrison, head of motor finance at the FLA, has endorsed the feature, saying it "will provide valuable insight to dealers and other businesses on the finance status of a vehicle as it passes through the sales process".
‘A better picture’
Scullion added Finance Alerts was a "step forward and one of the biggest innovations in this finance intersect" and would inform other products and services being prepared by Experian for the car finance market.
Under the place-holder name ‘Right Deal’, Scullion said the company has been working on a system to alert consumers, retailers and lenders when a finance deal was heading into trouble. The system will use the predictive modelling capability of Experian’s indebtedness and affordability indexes and would work along the same lines as software which notifies finance companies and dealers of the optimum time to renew a deal.
Data innovations planned by Experian include taking into account a consumer’s history of home-rental payments when credit scoring – expected in Spring 2013 – and a National Property Database, bringing together property valuation and land registry data.
Such information, explained Scullion, would provide a "better picture of consumer wealth" and a "better picture of affordability" for finance companies and would, again, be built into score cards. Given finance companies’ requests for evermore accurate credit profiles, Scullion said Experian would hold further meetings in April with a manufacturer captive provider which had expressed interest in the data.
A full interview with Alistair Scullion of Experian Automotive will be published in the February issue of Motor Finance magazine.
richard.brown@timetric.com
