2008 Special Finance Hall of Fame Inductees

Corporate Award Winner: DealerTrack

The second corporate inductee is DealerTrack. While the company today has come to provide a literal cornucopia of technological offerings, the company’s name will forever be synonymous with the portal that the majority of dealers and finance personnel use to submit credit applications to the many finance companies and banks serving the industry.

The DealerTrack company was originally created by three leading finance companies, J.P. Morgan Chase, AmeriCredit and Wells Fargo, to revolutionize the credit application process by automating the laborious task finance managers and underwriters alike faced. In 2001, the company and the product launched. The product enabled dealers to automate and accelerate the indirect automotive financing process by increasing the speed of communications between these dealers and their financing sources.

Up to that point, dealers had traditionally relied upon legacy paper systems, which required the consumer to fill out a paper credit application for the financing sources to which he or she applied. The dealer then faxed the credit application to each financing source and awaited a series of return faxes. When a financing source approved the consumer’s credit application, the consumer manually signed a paper finance or lease contract with the dealer, who then delivered it with ancillary documents to the financing source via mail or overnight courier. The financing source then manually checked the contract for errors or omissions, and if the contract or ancillary documents were accurate and complete, the financing source paid the dealer for the assignment of the contract.

Today, DealerTrack has established a network of active relationships in the United States that consists of over 700 financing sources. This system allows dealers to electronically submit credit applications to the industry’s largest and most diverse network of banks, independent finance companies, captive finance companies, credit unions and regional banks.

The on-demand credit application processing solution eliminates the expensive and time-consuming inefficiencies of legacy paper systems, and thereby decreases financing sources’ costs of originating a loan or a lease.

Over the years, DealerTrack has expanded to offer several additional services, but for any manager in the finance office, you still can’t beat the simplification of the credit application process.

Vol. 2, Issue 4