Real-Time Analytics Put Vehicle Financing in the Fast Lane

Providing software for vehicle financing has been Banqsoft’s core business since the company was founded in 1994. From this experience we’ve seen how the industry has long been plagued with challenges around data gathering and reporting.
Extract, transform and load processes often take a long time for vehicle-financing companies to perform, with the result that stale data ends up being used for analysis. This is simply not good enough in today’s market.
To win contracts you need to have efficient credit-granting and onboarding processes. If you make a potential customer wait too long for a financing decision, they may accept an offer from another company. Having access to timely and accurate data – from the sales floor to the back office – is the key to speedy decision making.
Real-time data is also critical for managing your incoming leasing revenue against the depreciating value of your vehicle assets. We all know how a significant mismatch between the value of a contract and the value of an asset represents a huge risk for any leasing company.
If your business is heading in this direction, you need to know long before it gets there. You may find out too late if your reports are only weekly or monthly.
This is the background against which Banqsoft has developed IntelliView – our real-time analytics solution for the vehicle-financing industry. In this article I will explain how the solution works and demonstrate its benefits for our customers’ business.

 

Reliable data in beautiful dashboards

I joined Banqsoft as a software developer in 2004, so I’ve seen our own capabilities develop profoundly since those early days. I am immensely proud of the data models we created for our legacy reporting solution, and we’ve been building on this knowledge ever since.
We have long believed that the future of reporting lies in using business intelligence and analytics to empower our vehicle-financing customers to take advantage of the vast amount of information that has been collected over the years. Developing a solution in this direction has been a top priority for us.
In short, we saw how there is a need to deliver real-time data directly to different stakeholders at different points in the vehicle-financing chain. For example, a dealer needs to call up a specific set of data while sitting with a potential customer, so that a timely offer can be made. The onboarding team, back-office staff, managers and other members of the vehiclefinancing operation all need reports and dashboards for their own sets of purposes.

Some years ago we started to look into more modern ways of delivering this report content to these different groups of stakeholders. This led us to create a new businessintelligence platform that we called IntelliView. Our vision with IntelliView is that you should be able to follow a single customer from when they enter the dealership, through the credit and onboarding process, and into the portfolio as a live contract.
From there you can track all invoicing and payments, skipped payments, and whatever else you need to see until the contract is finalised. You get this 360-degree overview in real time and from the perspective of your choosing. A new leasing application from a potential customer will typically be available in the onboarding model of IntelliView within 30 minutes after the application is received. Once that application is a financial contract it becomes available in the portfolio – also within 30 minutes.
This means companies using IntelliView can monitor their business in real time and act on changes or challenges in minutes rather than days.
Unlike other solutions, IntelliView enables the analysis of large amounts of data without requiring any technical expertise. Usually you need some knowledge of SQL to get data into a report. You need to know about database tables, how to join them together, how to create measurements, how to aggregate data, and so on.
This is not so with IntelliView. We’ve enabled more than 1,500 database entities in our core systems, so with just a few clicks you can generate comprehensive visualisations to show the quality and performance of your entire vehicle portfolio.
We made IntelliView so easy to work with by basing its data warehouse and analytics on the Microsoft Data Platform, and by using Power BI to visualise the data. Microsoft has taken this field by storm in recent years. Their analytics capability is unparalleled and the visualizations are beautiful. There is also a marketplace for additional visualisation components.
Our main products for asset financing – CoreView and PreView – are prerequisites for using IntelliView. Here we have already created comprehensive models for onboarding, portfolio management, the general ledger, and reconciliation.
IntelliView works by fetching data from CoreView and transferring it to an Azure SQL staging area. Here the data is transformed into an Azure SQL data warehouse where we build the analytics models that our customers then use to create their reports and dashboards. This process can be done whether our software-suite customer is using a SaaS model, is hosted by us, or has a Banqsoft license and hosts their own environment.

The power of a 360-degree overview

One of our customers using IntelliView is a leading automotive financial-services entity in the Nordic region. The company has been using IntelliView from the start of its operations in 2021 and has based most of its reporting on the solution.
Within the first two years of doing business, our customer became one of the top four asset-financing companies in that country. During 2023, the company has been experiencing portfolio growth of 5% – 8% per month.
The customer has conducted 74,000 credit scorings in its first two years of operations. Some 51% of those were handled automatically. Of the remaining 36,000 that required manual handling, 93% were approved. If we presume that each manually handled case takes about 30 minutes, then it has taken approximately 10 full time employees to process these applications.
The onboarding models in IntelliView bring our users valuable insights for tuning and automating these credit process to fully support business growth.
It's also worth considering that applications automatically approved by the customer have a conversion rate of 74%, while the conversion rate is 67% for those that are manually approved. This demonstrates that your conversion rate can be improved by tuning the credit process to increase automation and allow faster manual decision making.

Different audiences, different data needs

As discussed earlier, different IntelliView users have different needs from the solution.
Banqsoft provides a lot of the IntelliView dashboards as part of the package to get customers started and show what can be accomplished. But most customers want to tailor their dashboards to their specific business, as everyone has slightly different products and wants to emphasise things differently.
If we start on the sales floor, we see that case officers may want an IntelliView dashboard with all the data they need about a customer they have on the phone. This includes information on what products the customer uses, their credit score, suggestions for upselling, and much more.
These case officers have supervisors who may want a more aggregated view of the operation. For example, they may want to know how many cases are being handled at a given moment, if there is a queue, and whether more people are needed on the floor. These parameters are especially important during onboarding.
You can also use the IntelliView models to see how many applications are coming in at different times of the day. If a company’s conversion rate is lower in the evening, for example, this may be caused by longer decision-making processes due to a shortage of employees on the floor. Such information allows you to work out how many case handlers you should have serving customers at any given time.
A sales manager typically wants to see an overview of sales against budget. This is easily shown in a live dashboard by linking IntelliView’s onboarding model to the customer’s own daily sales budgets.
A CEO or CFO is probably most interested in seeing the size of the current portfolio against the budget and compared to the previous year. Year-on-year sales growth is also of interest to the C-suite. All these metrics and more are within your grasp through IntelliView.

Leasing companies always want to keep track of the residual value of contracts getting close to maturity. If you’ve agreed to take back a leasing asset at a certain price, it’s vitally important that you know how many such assets you will get back at any given time, as well as the expected value of said assets. Changes in the market can cause residual value to fall lower than originally expected.
One can guard against this by getting information in real time on different vehicles, including their average sales prices and how long they stay in stock. When you spot a negative trend in sales prices, you may choose to offer the customer the option of buying the vehicle at a reduced price. This way you can to some extent minimise your residual value risk.
Keeping track of your competitiveness is another important area. As a leasing company in a fierce contest with other vendors, you need to be on top of the credit process and know exactly where you’re losing any business. Is it because your decision making is too slow? Or are there some other variables in the score card that need fine tuning? Using the analytical models provided by IntelliView allows you to make better-informed decisions.
We’ve really just started to scratch the surface with this immensely powerful analytics solution for vehicle financing. Our next step is to roll out general ledger and reconciliation models. We’re also looking into embedding the Power BI reports and dashboards directly into our different front-end solutions.
When it comes to data sources, we are constantly evaluating our different markets to make sure the solution has everything our customers need for that crucial competitive advantage.

 

Bogi Palsson is Business Unit Manager, Business Analytics
Tel: +47 22 31 44 00.

Email: marketing@banqsoft.com