By: Wendy Greenawalt
The auto industry has been hit hard by this Great Recession. Recently, some good news has emerged from the captive lenders, and the industry is beginning to rebound from the business challenges they have faced in the last few years. As such, many lenders are looking for ways to improve risk management and strategically grow their portfolio as the US economy begins to recover.
Due to the economic decline, the pool of qualified consumers has shrunk, and competition for the best consumers has significantly increased. As a result, approval terms at the consumer level need to be more robust to increase loan origination and booking rates of new consumers. Leveraging optimized decisions is a way lenders can address regional pricing pressure to improve conversion rates within specific geographies. Specifically, lenders can perform a deep analysis of specific competitors such as captives, credit unions and banks to determine if approved loans are being lost to specific competitor segments.
Once the analysis is complete, auto lenders can leverage optimization software to create robust pricing, loan amount and term account strategies to effectively compete within specific geographic regions and grow profitable portfolio segments. Optimization software utilizes a mathematical decisioning approach to identify the ideal consumer level decision to maximize organizational goals while considering defined constraints. The consumer level decisions can then be converted into a decision tree that can be deployed into current decisioning strategies to improve profitability and meet key business objectives over time.
