Joydrive Seeks to Integrate Finance Marketplace Into Online Store

Online retailer Joydrive works with a dealers existing lender network to arrange financing for customers on the site, but in the medium to long-term, the company is seeking a strategic partner to “integrate a financing marketplace,” Chief Executive Hunter Gorham told Auto Finance News.

“Early on we decided not to exclusively align with just one lender,” he said. “We have created an online marketplace to buy a car from your couch and integrating that with a financing marketplace — almost bringing in a Rocket Mortgage element to it — where it’s just faster, smoother, and can be more digitized and may be attractive to our customers.”

Gorham understands the importance of financing, having spent 14 years of his career with General Motors Acceptance Corp. and then Ally Financial Inc., most recently helping to lead the lender’s digital platform initiatives.

“Ally is the financing source for digital companies out there such as Carvana, Vroom, and before that [the now defunct] Beepi,” he said noting that those companies are buying fleets and competing directly with traditional dealers. “I just believed there was a better answer for the customer if we included the dealer instead of circumventing them.” Financing penetration on the platform is “north of 60%” since the company launched in January, Gorham said.

Joydrive is partnered with 50 dealerships in North Carolina, Texas, and Washington with a cumulative inventory that fluctuates around 12,000 vehicles. By yearend, Gorham expects to have dealerships active in “all major markets” with a total stock of more than 50,000.