Large International Consumer Bank Boosts Car Dealer and End Customer Satisfaction with New Mobile App

The Large International Consumer Bank wanted to strengthen its leading position in the automotive financing market. The bank has replaced slow, paper-based processes with a flexible mobile workflow, built with Kofax Mobile Capture™ Platform. Today, the bank can approve customer credit requests and pay car dealers faster than ever before, boosting satisfaction and keeping the business poised for growth.

The Large International Consumer Bank is a leading independent service provider in the automotive financing market. To maintain its market-leading position, the bank is always looking for new ways to deliver greater value to its affiliated car dealers and their customers.

The Head of Technology at the Large International Consumer Bank, states: “Our field staff are in constant contact with car dealers, and are always open to suggestions about how they can provide a better quality of service. Recently, a number of car dealers suggested that they would like to shorten the time between a customer walking into the shop and being able to seal the deal, complete with a financing contract. We were keen to help them find a solution.”

Previously, when a customer applied for a car loan, the dealership had to post the paper-based application and supporting documentation to the bank head office. All the documents had to be manually sorted before they could be reviewed by back-office teams—a tedious, time-consuming process. If any key elements were missing from an application, the bank’s staff would have to get in touch with the car dealer, and the procedure would start all over again. The result was that customers often had to wait several days for the documents to be checked and approved before they could sign the final financing contract and drive away in their new car.

The Head of Technology continues: “This was quite an inconvenience for customers and some would even change their mind while the documents were being processed. What’s more, the long waiting times directly affected dealers’ cash flow, which was becoming a growing concern.”

The bank decided to develop a mobile strategy to drive more direct, rapid interactions between car dealers and its own back-office teams. The bank’s car business division and IT team worked together to evaluate several offerings before selecting Kofax Mobile Capture Platform™ as the core component of the new mobile offering.

“Kofax offered an excellent mobile document capture platform,” notes the Head of Technology. “And as the bank had previous positive experience of working with Kofax, we knew we could rely on them to deliver a solution that met the requirements of both our internal users and our affiliated dealerships.”

The bank engaged with a third party software development company to create a mobile application. Mobile Capture Platform embeds image processing and capture capabilities into the new mobile application, turning smartphones and tablets into powerful information capture devices. Users simply have to take a photo of customer documentation, and the solution automatically extracts and validates relevant information, eliminating the need for manual data entry.

The Head of Technology comments: “With Mobile Capture Platform, car dealers can now capture and submit documents to the bank with any smartphone or tablet. This fully integrated enables us to move forward with our digitization strategy and reach new levels of automation and staff productivity.

The bank is currently working with field teams to roll out the new mobile application to additional car dealers, focusing on more than 1,000 of its most important partners. Once the digitization project proves popular with dealerships in Germany, the bank will consider extending similar solutions to operations in other countries.

By introducing the new streamlined, mobile workflow the bank has accelerated the document submission and review process from several days to several minutes, resulting in improved satisfaction for both car dealers and end customers.

Encouraging its dealers to leverage existing mobile devices to provide a better service to their customers significantly simplifies interactions between customers, dealers and the bank. And as it now takes less time to collect and check customer documentation, the bank can now pay out money to car dealers much faster than before.

“Fast cash flow is critical to many of the dealerships we work with,” says the Head of Technology. “By reducing the time from receiving a car financing request to getting a signed contract, we help dealers to complete transactions more rapidly and, crucially, get their money quicker as well.”

With the experience gained from streamlining credit processes for car financing, the bank also plans to start redesigning and optimizing its general credit management procedures.

The Head of Technology concludes: “Leveraging a tried-and-tested Kofax solution with our mobile application helped us to deliver value quickly, without overly long development times or high project costs. By integrating Kofax Mobile Capture Platform into our mobile app we can help dealers deliver a better customer experience. This solution boosts satisfaction among buyers, providing a significant competitive advantage for the car dealers, and also strengthens our position as financial service provider.”