Toyota Finance Australia follows customers online

Toyota Finance Australia is on a “progressive” digital transformation that aims to help dealers manage more of the new car sales and loan process online, and stay ahead of fintech-enabled financiers.

Toyota Finance Australia's CIO Colin Mapp (Credit: PegaWorld Inspire 2022)

Retail customer experience general manager Craig Neville told PegaWorld Inspire 2022 that car buyers are now much more comfortable transacting online, with over one-third “willing to buy a car end-to-end online”.

He said that Toyota Finance Australia (TFA) saw this trend, as well as the encroachment of fintechs, as drivers that “hastened our need for digital and customer transformation.”

CIO Colin Mapp said that TFA had previously invested in a “modern, digital and configurable” core end-to-end loan origination platform back in 2018 that it brands as ‘Quantum’.

Quantum is underpinned by technology from Pega.

Mapp said TFA saw more potential in Pega’s suite and has progressively deployed different Pega tools to improve customer and dealer experience of different aspects of car purchasing.

Neville said that TFA is working on a “Quantum 2.0” platform in collaboration with the vendor.

“We’re working with Pega to evolve Quantum in a way that will allow us to focus on the customer experience and address changing customer behaviours,” he said.

“Quantum 2.0 will support customers who prefer online channels rather than in-dealership, with one of the most significant enhancements being a revamped consumer quote layer, enabling dealerships to manage the whole sales process entirely online. 

“By working hand in hand with the Pega team we’re also delivering a raft of other enhancements for our dealer network, including opportunity management tools, improved navigation and smarter graphs and reports.”

TFA will also use Pega’s customer decision hub product “to initiate timely and personalised conversations with customers, ensuring they’re presented with the right offer, at the right time,” Mapp said.

Dealers would be able to use the hub to “segment customers and create personalised and local retention programs,” he said.

Neville added that TFA would have a single view of customers. It also intends to reduce hand-offs between different parts of TFA - and different systems - to resolve a customer inquiry.

The company is also looking to Pega’s collections product to replace a legacy collections system. The technology promises to make case management easier, and to help personalise payments plans.

Mapp said that customers would also have the option to “self-cure before we step in to initiate collections activities”.