Westlake Calls on Dealers to Use Automated Payoff Tool Amid Recent Success

Westlake Financial Services is on pace to have about 10% of its payoffs transacted with Dealertrack‘s automated payoff and title release platform — its most successful month since signing up for the tool in November 2018, said company Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Mark Vazquez.

This month is likely to be the lender’s most successful month with the tool, in terms of getting dealerships to use it. While the bank has “done close to about $8 million in payoffs,” which translates to about 850 transactions, Vazquez said the majority of Westlake’s dealerships aren’t on the Accelerated Title platform.

“On a monthly basis, we’re transacting about 3,000 to 4,000 payoffs that we want to push into this process,” he said, adding that this month, Westlake is on pace to transact 300 payoffs using Accelerated Title.

Still, the lender is optimistic about dealers adopting the tool. “It reminds me of e-contracting solutions we’ve had, where it takes a while for the dealership to become accustomed to it and where it starts gaining some wheels on its own,” he said. “It definitely is that kind of process, the more we talk about it, the more dealers will use it.” It’s an active sales pitch for the lender’s 460 nationwide sales reps, Vazquez noted.

The Accelerated Title platform helps Westlake improve internal efficiencies and strengthen dealer relations by offering dealers and lenders an automated connection point between the payoff process and title receipt, Vazquez said.

“Bringing these two processes together removes the need for dealers to hand write and mail checks overnight, and then wait for the delivery of the title, which according to industry standards could take 12 to 18 days or more,” according to a press release. With the automated tool, that process gets reduced to four to six days.

“It eliminates a lot of costs, a lot of errors, and it allows me to better focus that manpower on other things that can benefit our dealerships,” Vazquez said.

Westlake is one of 44 lenders using Dealertrack’s Accelerated Title platform.

For more content like this, check out our upcoming event Auto Finance Accelerate, May 13-16 at the Omni San Diego. Visit www.AutoFinanceAccelerate.com to register.