Data helps empower organizations to make decisions, track activity in their business, and confirm theses. When it comes to floor plan lending, maintaining a real-time view of performance across your portfolio is particularly critical given the relatively short duration of the credit, physical collateral that can be towed at any moment, and the fact that dealers are generally highly leveraged businesses. And floor plan lending software unlocks the full potential of this game-changer for your business.

Floor plan lenders who are potentially exposed to thousands of cars or machinery on any given day need to be aware exactly how their dealership partners are managing their inventory. However, modern day bank systems are often complicated by data silos across different systems, manual operations, and information that is often processed days after something occurs. These gaps can be crucial in discovering mismatched funds, potential defaults, and even fraud.

We believe integrating real-time analytics with floor plan lending software can help alleviate a multitude of risk factors.

Banks may have an entire team of analysts dedicated to their reporting function and still have several day lags on management-level reporting. Their Portfolio Managers are then making decisions on a dealership's business status with stale data instead of current insights and are consistently stuck in a reactive mode. Banks also often have difficulty consolidating reporting from their loan management system with their bank core data, limiting their ability to see a 360-degree view of the client relationship.

There are two primary types of data that should be considered: behavioral/performance data and alternative data.

Performance data is related to the dealer relationships with the financial institution, including:

1. Turnover rates
2. Inventory aging
3. Payment consistency
4. Liquidity
5. Bank transactions
6. Other banking products being used by dealer
7. Transactions with other known lenders

Alternative data provides insights from independent 3rd parties around key operational functions of the dealer:

1. Title registration data from DMVs
2. Insurance registration data
3. 3rd party sale volume reporting
4. Market insights

Once this data is available, there remains the risk of “analysis paralysis” - i.e., becoming overloaded with information that you are unable to effectively process. In order to garner meaningful insights from the abundance of data that is available, banks should think about building the right processes and schemas from the start to clean, ingest, model, and visualize the data as the dataset evolves over time. The real power comes from automating this flow and the alerts generated based on historical observations that can call attention to specific issues across the portfolio, especially when managing the high volume, short duration nature of a floor plan portfolio.

Real Time Makes a Real Difference With the Right Floor Plan Lending Software

Real-time data is especially important for managing all types of payments and financial transactions. Banks can easily monitor dealers’ available balances at a quick glance through open banking integrations. This helps them understand liquidity risk for a dealer at any given moment. They can also immediately be aware of any upcoming scheduled payments, missed payments, or NSF notices. By being alerted immediately of any events that deviate from the norm, a bank can quickly make contact with the dealership to triage the situation. This helps improve recovery outcomes and makes your bank a real partner to a dealer.

Pipeline Tracking in Real Time

Lenders can easily track the status of car approvals, see their transactions, and understand their flow of funds. Especially when dealing with mass volume, it is hard to see through the noise without real-time analytics. Otherwise, your analysts may be spending days cleaning and reconciling systems without floor plan lending software.

This is especially true when dealing with titles and tracking documents. Knowing exactly where every document is helps you manage potential losses and fraud.

Real-time systems can also assist with audits, where you can digitally complete and monitor them with NFC tags or livestreams. Combined with GPS, images, and videos, banks can be comforted that they know where their cars are. Banks can have live results of audits so they can be quick to notice concerning behavior.

Finally, all this data also means more in-depth reporting that can be analyzed for trends. Immediately understanding metrics helps banks make decisions as they continue to grow with their dealers.

If you have a portfolio and are looking to upgrade how you operate, consider contacting our team of experts today to learn more about the best technology solutions for your inventory financing needs. We are proud to work with Sopra Banking Software to offer a comprehensive, trustworthy, and user-friendly loan management system.