Sopra Banking Software (SBS) has announced plans to expand its work with automotive companies in the US. The company currently works in more than 50 countries with auto manufacturers including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, BMW, Nissan and Volvo, as well as banks and independent lenders like Santander, TD Auto Finance, Lloyds Bank and Standard Bank, who finance their dealership fleets.
SBS is now making the technology used by these companies available to auto manufacturers and lenders in the US so they can digitize the outdated process of providing financing to dealerships. As a result, dealerships will be able to bring more inventory to market faster and eliminate inefficiencies that limit them from competing with digital-first buying formats.
Auto companies have innovated from the outside-in, adding high-tech features to vehicles and digitizing processes at the retail level. But with so much focus on upgrades to these consumer-facing parts of the business, backend operations like wholesale financing, inventory auditing, and risk management have fallen behind.
These critical business operations remain very manual and slow down lenders’ ability to onboard and renew dealers, and process vehicle financing. This can leave cars to sit unpurchased for up to months, affecting dealers’ cashflow and depreciating the value of inventory in the process. For risk management specifically, these manual processes are costly and inhibit lenders’ ability to track risk and manage breaches in real-time.
Using the Sopra Financing Platform (SFP), auto manufacturers and finance lenders in the US can now completely digitize their wholesale asset lending offerings or take a components-based approach to transforming the way they audit inventory, determine risk, assign credit, and offset depreciating value of un-purchased vehicles and assets.
Made up of SFP Wholesale, SFP Digital Audit and SFP Credit & Risk, the Sopra Financing Platform transforms historically manual processes into digital-first, cloud-based functionalities, so that automotive manufacturers and lenders can introduce new revenue streams, future-proof lending operations, and virtually audit vehicle inventory.
“It’s no secret that the traditional wholesale lending model needs to evolve, but it’s more than simply digitizing processes—lenders need to create a more efficient and effective process behind every single wholesale loan,” said James Powell, Head of Specialized Finance, Sopra Banking Software. “SBS is powering both established and new lenders to digitally transform their processes and drive efficiencies within the business. We’re looking forward to extending our reach to do this in the US.”
