Westlake Financial Uses Dealer Intelligence Tool to Help Grow Portfolios

Equifax recently announced that Westlake Financial, a privately held financial company that specializes in the acquisition and servicing of prime to sub-prime automotive retail installment contracts, has agreed to use its dealer intelligence platform, TradeSight®, to manage and monitor its dealer relationships.

TradeSight helps lenders analyze originations, current and future dealer partners and performance of the loans booked through dealer partners. It works by combining Equifax consumer credit information with dealer and vehicle data from third-party data sources to enable Westlake and other auto finance companies to assess their dealer network and establish peer benchmarks to help evaluate dealers credit risk.

“We’re happy to use this new product to help us drive well-informed business decisions and develop and adjust strategies so we can more accurately understand the performance and behavior of our dealership network,” said Ian Anderson, Group President, Westlake Financial. “Since TradeSight comes with detailed loan-level data and four years of history, Westlake was able to benchmark ourselves against our various competitors and adjust our go-to-market strategy as a result.”

Equifax delivers a powerful combination of data via TradeSight, including dealership names, firmagraphic information, purchased vehicle details and vehicle values, loan structure characteristics, including annual percentage rate, term, loan-to-value and loan performance metrics. Additionally, the product provides pre-configured lender categories such as bank, captive, credit union, independent auto finance lenders, Buy Here Pay Here information and more.

“By providing comprehensive analytics from a single platform, TradeSight will help Westlake Financial continue to compete at a high level and establish even stronger relationships with dealers in order to profitably grow their portfolio,” said Lou Loquasto, vice president, auto finance and dealer vertical. TradeSight differs from other products in the marketplace in that it merges all of the data into a single platform, which can be used by auto finance lenders to monitor market share, loan/lease structure, vehicles purchased, the selling dealership and how the paper performs.