Many deal­ers with their eye mainly on com­pli­ance, set up a Red Flags Pro­gram that cre­ates a “look, I tried” paper trail. But the real cost when some­one dri­ves away with a vehi­cle, is to the dealer. And what might pos­si­bly prove ade­quate processes to the FTC, isn’t ade­quate to actu­ally pro­tect against today’s ID scam­mers at dealerships.

“The ID thieves hit­ting deal­er­ships today are super-sophisticated and so is their tech­nol­ogy. But dealer ID ver­i­fi­ca­tion processes aren’t. With all that end­less pho­to­copy­ing, barcode-scanning and ver­i­fi­ca­tion call­ing, they have remained in the Dark Ages, pow­er­less against this fast-growing and incred­i­bly costly prob­lem,” said Pete MacIn­nis, CEO of Deal­er­Centric. “ID Drive may be small and sit on a desk, but it’s the most potent anti-fraud and test-drive secu­rity solu­tion ever invented for dealerships.”

Deal­ers need to adopt tech­nol­ogy – and extreme tech­nol­ogy — to fight the fake ID wave. If deal­er­ships made every test-driver – and every per­son that walks into their store – sim­ply swipe their license/ID at such a state-of-the-art scan­ner, ID fraud would be rad­i­cally reduced.

The tech­nol­ogy is here. How does it work?

Ser­gio Mar­chionne, chief exec­u­tive of Fiat and Chrysler, is count­ing on a merger of the two com­pa­nies as Fiat’s finan­cial per­for­mance gets hit.

Fiat’s third quar­ter prof­its were hurt, but Chrysler had strong results.

Mar­chionne would like to see the two com­pa­nies merge to bet­ter com­pete with global majors GM and Volk­swa­gen.

His efforts have been under­cut by union health­care trust Veba, which owns 40.5% of Chrysler not held by Fiat; Veba wants to see an ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing that Mar­chionne would rather avoid.

Mar­chionne has been cred­ited for cre­at­ing a part­ner­ship and inte­gra­tion between Fiat and Chrysler, avoid­ing the mess that hap­pened not long ago with Daim­ler not treat­ing Chrysler as an equal part­ner. Read all about what’s next for the Fiat and Chrysler merger.

Just as pay­day lend­ing evolved to bet­ter meet the needs of the under­banked, so will auto lend­ing change to meet the needs of non-prime customers.

That indus­try is large, it’s grow­ing, it’s incred­i­bly frag­mented, it’s inef­fi­cient, it’s lop­sided (the house mostly wins), and it’s one of the largest yet worst con­sumer finan­cial experiences.

New tech­nol­ogy, new busi­ness mod­els and new reg­u­la­tion rep­re­sent an enor­mous oppor­tu­nity for incum­bents and entre­pre­neur­ial thinkers to cre­ate a more effi­cient and more trans­par­ent marketplace.

Here’s what we could see in five years…

At Issue:

At Michael Jor­dan Nis­san in Durham, NC, folks were con­stantly replac­ing bulbs and bal­lasts and tol­er­at­ing the color shift­ing lights that made the deal­er­ship inven­tory look incon­sis­tent – all while pay­ing a pre­mium price to run and main­tain them.

“There’s noth­ing worse than cus­tomers walk­ing out into a dark lot to look at a new car and they can’t see.” – Man­ag­ing Part­ner Ray Vrscak

When Michael Jor­dan Nis­san decided to update their deal­er­ship with new light­ing, they had no idea how sig­nif­i­cant the improve­ment would be. Drill down fur­ther to find out what improve­ments took place and how the same ben­e­fits can be applied to your dealership!