Business and Finance, Free Access Articles ,

INCHCAPE Australasia has launched its own finance company that will manage financial services for Subaru dealers and for Peugeot and Citroen retailers.

In a statement to GoAutoNews Premium the company said: “Inchcape will launch its own dedicated financial services company leveraging the experience of Allied Credit via a true captive joint venture.”

Financial services for Subaru have previously operated under a white label arrangement with Macquarie Bank. GoAutoNews Premium understands that agreement was due to expire.

Under the current arrangement Subaru Financial Services loans were funded and managed by Macquarie.

Allied Credit is well known as the business funding retail financier for many of Australia’s biggest names in motorcycling, marine and powersports for the past decade but more recently revealed a unique dealer-centric business model as it set off on a plan to become a significant player in the far wider car finance market.

Apart from offering traditional funding to car retailers, Allied Credit’s drive into the car financing market uses a unique business model where a finance partner like an OEM or a large dealer group is offered a joint venture in their own loan book.

It is this joint venture in the loan book that has clearly attracted Inchcape which distributes Subaru and more recently Peugeot and Citroen in Australia.

Jon Moodie

The company said the arrangement with Allied Credit was “the result of many years of research and evaluation to deliver the right financial services solution to our Subaru and PCA networks, our retail business and our customers”.

Inchcape will launch its dedicated Subaru Financial Services on October 1, 2021, and will launch Peugeot and Citroen Financial Services on January 21, 2022.

Inchape said that through its “dedicated finance company” its “absolute focus will be on providing its dealer networks and customers with flexibility, confidence and convenience”.

The CEO of Allied Credit and former chief of Macquarie Lending, Jon Moodie, told GoAutoNews Premium in an interview in January 2020: “The joint venture business model completely changes the relationship between dealers and their retail finance house because both sides of the relationship have a common interest.

“The beauty of the JV model is that both parties want the same thing. They want the book to perform.

“So the dealer partner is not going to put bad quality business in,” he said.

“The discussions we have with our joint venture partners are very different from the discussions we used to have with dealers in our past lives where the dealer does not have a stake in the performance of the loan book.

“There is much more trust. We are all aligned towards the same goals.

“It is fair to say the joint venture model is really built for the larger dealer groups that write reasonable amounts of business each month. It does not work for everybody. But we have the normal brand that does the normal retail business as if we were any finance company,” Mr Moodie said.

By John Mellor

Manheim
Manheim
Manheim
Gumtree
AdTorque Edge
PitcherPartners
Gumtree
DealerCell
MotorOne
Schmick