iVendi research reveals emerging trends

Online motor finance is one of the major emerging trends of 2015. However, it is an area that is new enough that there are very few hard facts available about consumer behaviour.

Until now, that is. In recent months we have started to compile statistics from our Car Finance Checker online finance pre-qualifier that provide a useful degree of insight. Here are some of the key findings.

How does online motor finance affect your geographical reach? Offering motor finance online helps dealers attract customers from well beyond their local area – with over 60% living more than 25 miles away and 10% more than 150 miles.

Most dealers attract only a minority of customers from outside of a 25 mile radius but once a business effectively becomes an online entity, its location matters much less to buyers.

Offering an online motor finance facility means that the customer can essentially complete the whole deal to buy the car without ever having to visit your showroom. As long as the vehicle description and images are accurate, they’ll be happy.

What is perhaps surprising is the long distances some customers will travel. Our figures show that around one in 10 customers will travel 150 miles or more and some who have applied to Car Finance Checker are more than 250 miles from the dealership.

Is online motor finance dominated by subprime? Analysis from users of the company’s Car Finance Checker shows that more than four out of five are financeable by each dealer’s panel of lenders. Additionally, only a small proportion of Equifax Risk Navigator scores on the system fall below 200, pointing to a high quality of potential borrowers using the tool.

As a company, we have been working in the area of online motor finance for several years and one of the repeated objections that we have heard is that it attracts a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers. However, our figures, covering the thousands of people, show the opposite is true. This is a quality field of potential borrowers. They are financeable people who are serious about buying a car.

How do customers access online motor finance? Mobile devices are now used to access 50% of motor finance online. These statistics have changed rapidly from just two years ago, when less than 25% of access came through smartphones and tablets.

This unequivocally shows the way in which consumer attitudes towards mobile online access of all services have changed in a very short period of time. The message for dealers and finance providers is simple – your online motor finance products must work very effectively on smartphones and tablets or you will be effectively excluding yourself from a large part of the market.

And finally Other figures obtained through the new Car Finance Checker analysis show that individual users prequalify themselves for finance an average of 1.6 times – in effect, they are very interested in an average of slightly fewer than two cars. Also, online motor finance customer are currently split 2:1 male to female.