Pelican notes investment in DRNsights vehicle location data pays for itself as result of fewer charge-offs, faster repos and impound/stolen alerts
FORT WORTH, TX 07/26/2017 – Since using vehicle location data and analytics from Digital Recognition Network (DRN), Pelican Auto Finance, a subprime auto-finance lender located in California and Pennsylvania, reports they have increased asset recovery rates, reduced charge-offs and avoided losses due to unreported stolen or impounded vehicles. DRNsights combines DRN’s exclusive vehicle location data and analytics to help Pelican locate and recover assets they would have otherwise never found, make right party contact to cure loans and locate legacy charge-offs.
“When customers begin avoiding contact, we need to find those vehicles as quickly as possible. DRNsights pays for itself because we are finding vehicles we otherwise weren’t able to, including legacy charge-offs where we had zero leads,” says Chris Mitcham, Senior Vice President of Servicing and Analytics at Pelican Auto Finance. “We also use the Loss Alerts feature to notify us of impounded and stolen vehicles. With these alerts, we find out earlier that a vehicle is in impound, lost or has been stolen. Just one Loss Alert can result in significant dollars saved in impound fees or vehicle depreciation; and now we are finding four or five a month that we would have to wait on notification, meanwhile racking up fees or not have found at all.”
Pelican uses DRNsights daily in the collections and recovery processes. In collections, DRNsights helps confirm a customer’s given address and alerts Pelican about changes that may warrant action. Using the vehicle location data, Pelican can identify new addresses to make right party contact. “Having new addresses to make contact is especially important in early stage delinquency and can help avoid further delinquency or a repossession,” noted Mitcham.
Once a vehicle is out for repossession, Pelican uses DRNsights to help recover the car faster. The data makes recovery efforts more efficient using vehicle location data to direct recovery agents to the right location, date and time for successful recovery. As a result, Pelican immediately realized reduced charge-offs due to “skipped” accounts and is recovering more vehicles faster.
“DRNsights has revolutionized the repossession industry by helping lenders recover up to 35% more vehicles and avoid charge-off losses. Pelican’s results show the power of our data and analytics to mitigate risk and reduce losses,” said Jeremiah Wheeler, Vice President Financial Services for DRN. The system is powered by DRN’s vehicle location data and analysis, all of which is collected by a network of license plate recognition (LPR) cameras located nationwide. The data is instrumental in helping many lenders in their collections process, providing alerts of possible risk, protection from lien losses, new locations for making contact on 40% or more accounts, and the ability to collect earlier to reduce charge-offs, and a 50% reduction in days to recover vehicles out for repossession.
About Pelican Auto Finance
Pelican Auto Finance, LLC, operating out of San Diego, CA and Chadds Ford, PA, specializes in the underwriting and purchase of deep sub-prime automotive retail installment contracts. Pelican, founded in 2009 by Cavallaro and Kennedy, has a $100 million portfolio and a senior management team with over 100+ combined years in the sub-prime automobile finance space.
