Navigating Compliance Challenges in Auto Finance Lending Space

Auto finance lenders face a unique set of compliance challenges, from managing regulatory compliance requirements to ensuring vendor compliance. In addition to this, they often get audited by regulatory bodies, their investor, or funding banks and need to manage all aspects of compliance internally. This means they need to be able to monitor and manage their compliance requirements in-house. This can be a daunting task, especially for smaller lenders who may not have the resources to dedicate to compliance management.

This is where plug-and-play compliance management technology comes in handy. By investing in the right compliance management system, auto finance players can protect their businesses from expensive regulatory fines and ensure long-term success. Here’s how:

Vendor Management

Vendor management is a critical aspect of compliance management for any auto finance player. It is essential to work with vendors (collection vendors, dealerships, loan origination and servicing vendors, insurance companies, third-party payment processors. etc.) who have strong compliance standards and to ensure that they are adhering to those standards. This is where the vendor management (VM) module of a robust compliance management system (CMS) like IPACS can help. VM allows businesses to track vendor contracts, monitor vendor performance, and ensure that vendors comply with relevant regulations and standards backed by vendor due diligence, risk assessment, performance monitoring.

Auto finance lenders also have a lot of dealer outlets, but they often struggle to manage their compliance requirements. They often track dealer documentation, but they need to be able to manage vendor compliance effectively, which includes due diligence, audits, monitoring, and reporting. This requires a system that can track dealer compliance and monitor dealer activities. A cutting-edge CMS can help them achieve the same. In addition to this, partnering with an expert who can help ensure your vendor audit processes are comprehensive and sufficient can also be extremely helpful. An expert vendor audit partner like Provana can even empower you to remediate audit findings and help ensure that corrective actions are performed in time.

Regulations Management

Managing compliance can be a challenging task, and it is not uncommon for lenders to struggle in this area. In fact, out of every 10 lenders, 8 are struggling with regulation. Therefore, it is essential to have a robust CMS in place that has a feature of regular monitoring of regulatory changes and a plan for implementing necessary updates to your operations. The Regulations library in IPACS enables lenders to create a repository and keep up with the latest regulatory changes that impact auto finance lending.

Complaints and Disputes

Complaints tracking and resolution are crucial for auto finance lenders as they directly pose a threat to their reputation. Having said that, capturing all the complaints from different channels can be a daunting task. A centralized complaints management system can streamline the process of logging and tracking complaints from various channels, including email, phone, and self-service portals. Subsequently, these complaints can then be assigned to relevant personnel, and their progress can be tracked. Once integrated with a business analytics platform, it can also provide analytics and reporting tools to help you identify trends and improve your operations.

Another compliance challenge that auto finance lenders face is managing credit reports. While the volume of credit reports for auto finance is much smaller than in other industries, the need to manage disputes is still present. Lenders need to be able to track disputes and resolutions to avoid reputational risk. The dispute management feature of a CMS can simplify the process of managing disputes related to credit reporting. It allows auto finance players to track credit disputes from consumers, manage communications with credit bureaus, and ensure compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

Policies and Procedures

Centralizing policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs) are another challenge that many auto finance players face. Without a centralized system, it can be difficult to ensure that all employees are following the same guidelines. CMS like IPACS can help to streamline this process, by providing a centralized platform for policy and SOP management. It can enable you to create version logs for these policies and SOPs and schedule audits based on these policies.

The platform can even facilitate automated workflows and alerts to ensure that all employees are following the correct procedures.

State Exam and External Audits

An advanced CMS can help allow lenders to create questionnaires related to state exams and upload responses to these questionnaires directly into the system. It streamlines the examination process, saves time, and reduces the potential for errors or miscommunications that can arise when information is spread across multiple platforms or documents in different formats. Not to mention, by using a centralized platform, auto lenders can ensure that their responses are consistent with state exam requirements and that they are documenting all required information.

Teaming up with a proficient compliance service provider such as Provana can be beneficial, as they can conduct an impartial review, perform risk scoring, create write-ups, and draft summaries for compliance department personnel. This will ensure that they stay up to date with state exams and external audits, which can be particularly useful in the long run.

Your One-Stop Shop Compliance Solution: Compliance management is an essential aspect of running a successful auto finance function. Regulations are constantly changing, and it can be challenging to keep up with the latest developments. An advanced compliance management system like IPACS can provide tools to help you manage auto finance lenders’ compliance obligations and stay ahead of the curve. IPACS also offers a comprehensive suite of compliance management functionalities (such as policy and procedure management, vendor management, complaints tracking, dispute management, regulations library, and external audit/state exam) that can help you improve compliance processes, mitigate compliance risks, and maintain a positive reputation in the auto finance lending space.

You can top the platform up with Provana’s comprehensive compliance services that can assist you in managing the complexities of audit requirements and certifications. By utilizing our end-to-end, fully managed services, which include regular risk assessments and extensive audit programs, you can improve your compliance standing. Our tech-enabled approach, which involves rigorous gap analysis, timely resolution, and secure document delivery, can help you reduce your compliance costs at the same time.

Click here to learn more about how IPACS and Provana’s compliance services can benefit your business.