Graham Wheeler, former head of VWFS and now consultant to the UK motor finance market, has picked up a non-executive role at a consumer-focused tech startup for the used car market, called Credicar. Brian Cantwell spoke to him to find out more.
Graham Wheeler understands the challenges associated with the used-car funding market after 21 years at Volkswagen Financial Services, 11 of which he served as chief executive officer.
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A startup called Credicar has impressed him enough that he has decided to back it with his contacts and experience as a non-executive director.
Credicar has created the most fully formed used-car funding platform concept that he has seen, says Wheeler.
Its design is the first to take a consumer-led, omnichannel approach that includes dealers, funders, manufacturers and credit-scoring in a “conversational” style with the consumer, as they seek finance for a used car. It also gives the inquirer an answer to their funding request by the end of their interaction with the platform.
Funding Journey
It is clever for a couple of reasons, says Wheeler, mainly for the way it connects all the parts of the funding journey. “The thing that I thought was smart about it was that they had taken an intelligent approach to customer on-boarding,” he explains.
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By GlobalData“Credicar has digitised the finance sign-on process and the digital signature. The platform then creates finance documents where people can sign up online, identically to how people would go to a dealership and sign on a paper format.
“It’s completely integrated, and it is the first omnichannel system that I have ever seen: the first that links both dealer and funder together. So, effectively, it tracks the customer along their journey, and the customer has the ability to either step into a physical environment along the way or gain funding in the digital environment.
“Credicar has designed the platform so it uses Open Banking and can perform an affordability check automatically.”
Additionally, the consumer platform is compatible with, and can read information from, any dealer online stock platform, which Wheeler says is helpful for dealers that are currently developing their own used car digital propositions.
Then, as he explains, the Credicar platform system links the dealer stock indirectly to the different financers, effectively allowing the financers to have their own portal within the Credicar system, where the funder can attach its own credit scoring mechanism.
Conversation Piece
“They have turned the credit application process into a conversation piece, using mobile technology,” says Wheeler. “So the Credicar platform gathers customer information through the credit check, the identity check, the fraud-management check and the credit-scoring check. The full end-to-end journey has been done in conversation with the customer in the way that a customer can really engage with it.”
Because there is a record with each different finance credit company’s credit-scoring system, the system chooses the credit provider that best suits the profile of the customer. It then goes back with a credit line that tells the customer if they have been approved and for how much.
Challenge
The challenge for the startup now is populating the platform with providers of credit and dealer partners, which is where Wheeler comes in.
“My help comes with the contacts that I have in both the financial services industry and the motor dealers, introducing the team from Credicar into both sides of it. I’m helping to give them finance industry technical knowledge, including compliance and governance issues, and helping to take them to market.”
Despite the fact that the consumer portal is in development, there has been some pre-launch interest, including a motor-dealer group in the Czech Republic and a UK car manufacturer that needs help selling 30,000-40,000 used vehicles, such as ex-demonstrators.
“The business took it to the manufacturer and they displayed instant interest and wanted to get it into the dealer channel – and wanted it straight away as it solves a problem for them,” says Wheeler.
“It’s difficult to explain how engaging the process is until you see it in action. It feels like an app when you’re using it, but obviously it has that whole infrastructure behind it that links into all these systems, including all the credit-scoring businesses.”
