With the experience of working through past down cycles in the auto finance industry, ACA has learned that being at its operational best is critical to not only surviving but thriving during lean times. The key to operational excellence is all departments pushing forward in the same direction. ACA has seen both its corporate functions and operations departments step up and come together to focus on creating efficiencies and innovative strategies to improve our business. A few examples are outlined below.
Though still in early testing phases, the new Digital Collection tool is making a real impact for ACA’s customers. The customer-facing web application can be sent over text or email as an additional method for customers to make payments.
For those groups testing out the tool, Digital Collections are now the No. 1 payment channel. Overall, teams are seeing an increase in the number of dollars collected per day, as well as the number of payments being made. ACA is leveraging the tool to create more effective and efficient communications with their customers.
In the past two years, the Risk and IT departments at ACA have made tremendous improvements with their speed to market in delivering pricing changes, cutting the lead time from 2-3 weeks to 1 day.
More recently, the team optimized their pricing strategy by using AWS (Amazon Web Services) machines, which have been able to reduce their analysis time by 90%. Each of these technological improvements allows the teams to focus more of their efforts on strategy and analysis. As a result, ACA has been able to do the following:
- Onboard new partnerships
- Test and learn from different pricing optimization strategies
- Release new Origination models and make updates as needed
- Quickly adjust their pricing as it makes sense in the economic environment
The Servicing team has also made an impact on innovation by improving their outbound and repossession title processes, shifting locations of auctions to increase sales, adding more repossession vendors to give ACA a competitive advantage in the market, and investing in agent coaching programs to improve efficiencies and performance overall.
Additionally, our Originations team has used this time to focus on growing the funnel by enrolling new dealer partners along with increasing the percentage of dealer partners who are submitting deals for funding. Their team continues to emphasize operational excellence through an enhanced priority on coaching and calibration, team performance, and new resources so teams are set up to succeed.
“ACA has found in the past that working through the lean times is as rewarding as reaping the harvest when times are great,” says Curt Sidden, CEO. “In fact, the work done during difficult periods plants the seeds for the future harvest. We are confident this cycle is no different, and I’m excited to see what we achieve with everyone working toward the same goal and creating innovations in every department across the company.”