Driving efficiency in automotive financing

In Latin America, an automotive financing company is working smarter, faster, and streamlining customer experiences. Recently, the company turned to Iron Mountain to solve longstanding challenges inherent in the document-heavy automotive financing industry.

Faced with costly, manual-intensive processes for handling a large volume of diverse documents, the automotive financing company was concerned about eroding its customer experience and profitability. The company sought a scalable solution leveraging AI and automation to optimize document handling and shorten financing approval time while reducing workloads on existing staff.

Iron Mountain’s Intelligent Business Process Management (iBPM), InSight® Digital Experience Platform (DXP), and InSight® Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), including services and support, were deployed to tackle these challenges. With Iron Mountain solutions in place, the automotive financing company reduced labor, decreased cost per transaction, and minimized errors, thereby improving customer responsiveness and accuracy while decreasing operational costs.

Streamlining the approval process

Every day, the automotive financing company handles documents spanning from contracts to licenses, insurance policies, and non-standard bank slips and invoices. Traditionally, information has been extracted, validated, and integrated manually, creating a larger margin for errors. Manual processing is also inherently slow and costly. As a result, the loan approval process, involving 10,000 approvals per month, was taking too long and decreasing the company’s competitiveness.

The company’s stated goals for the Iron Mountain solutions were clear:

• Reduce staff to manage the approval process by at least 50%
• Shorten the average loan approval time
• Reduce operational costs
• Minimize document validation error rates

Iron Mountain solutions are currently in Phase 1 of the overall deployment. Newfound competencies include a powerful intelligent document processing capability, the creation of valuable workflows, and the availability of operational data to measure progress. In addition, the solutions establish strong access and permission control.

Automating for accuracy, speed, and lower costs

These new competencies translate into competitive capabilities that bolster business outcomes. A wide range of tasks are leveraging automation and AI to gain accuracy and efficiencies at scale. For example, activities like metadata and document reception, automation of the data extraction process, document data validation against proposal data, and integration with fraud detection systems are faster, smarter, and require much less manual support and intervention.

Additionally, the manual issue resolution process is now optimized through a user-friendly, process- management-focused interface. This allows data generation for KPI dashboards related to the approval process time and effectiveness so that the automotive finance company can track business outcomes and progress toward its stated goals.

Generating business outcomes

To date, the Iron Mountain solution is delivering the desired business outcomes. The automotive financial company has reduced manual labor required for loan approvals by half, freeing up dollars and resources for other business priorities.

The company also decreased the loan approval time, reduced the cost per transaction, and significantly minimized error rates. Securing loan approval while the customer is still at the dealership is crucial to earning their business. Another benefit is the elimination of inappropriate loan approvals, further boosting efficiencies. Together, these outcomes are improving customer experiences, increasing profitability, and fortifying a stronger, more competitive future for the automotive financial company.

Learn more about Iron Mountain’s Intelligent Business Process Management.