CPS Announces New FinTech-Driven Enhancements to Car Financing Platform

By Edlyn Cardoza

Consumer Portfolio Services, Inc. (‘CPS’), an independent specialty FinTech that provides indirect auto financing to people with pre-credit issues, low income or limited credit history, continues its robust deployment of artificial intelligence, machine learning solutions to offer greater payment flexibility and more efficient processing of car loans. The company ended the year with three significant partnerships to improve efficiency, dramatically reduce funding times and offer more payment options for borrowers.

The company has selected Informed.IQ to automatically calculate income, collect and delete credit determinations and dealer documents, and create a better dealer and consumer experience throughout the auto loan process. CPS expects Informed.IQ’s AI tools to significantly reduce funding time.

For decades, CPS has focused on bringing enhanced intelligence to auto lending, becoming a leader in FinTech initiatives that improve the front-end review and financial decision-making process. Now, CPS also helps automate the backend service experiences and has partnered with Prodigal to better manage the collections and service the workforce and process. Prodigal is a Consumer Finance Intelligence solution that uses AI to analyze agent and borrower conversations and improve profitability, experience and compliance.

From a customer standpoint, CPS named PayNearMe as its primary payment partner. This partnership will accelerate the car lender’s digital transformation and deliver a frictionless customer experience across all digital payment types. PayNearMe will eliminate on-site cash payments, dramatically reduce the number of customers paying by check, and transition most customers to electronic payments through multiple payment options.

“Our entire business has been driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, from credit to service,” said Mike Lavin, Chief Operating Officer with CPS. “Adding these three partners to our back-end and front-end system at the start of the new year enables us to simplify the loan financing process, offer more accessible payment options for our customers and use AI to effectively improve collections by reduce the workload.”

Since the company began operations in 1991, as of September 30, 2022, it has purchased over $19.7 billion in contracts and served a total managed portfolio of approx. 2.7 billion dollars with approx. 185,000 active customers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have taken the company’s loan decision-making process to new heights.

At the end of the first quarter of 2023, the company will introduce a new AI credit decision model to improve fraud detection, reduce credit losses and increase approval rates. Later this year, CPS will introduce an AI-focused recovery and recovery system scorecard that will combine crime data with machine learning, allowing the company to better analyze when the time is right to recover a vehicle.