LOS ANGELES -

Westlake Financial Services announced a major update to the DealerCenter website, which is operated by Nowcom Corp., Westlake's sister company under the Hankey Investment Group umbrella.

DealerCenter is the business portal that houses Westlake's proprietary Buy Program software as part of a full-fledged online DMS solution.

"When you are the No. 1 lender with used-car dealers, you have to listen to dealers' feedback and suggestions," said David Goff, director of marketing. "After extensive roundtables and testing, we are excited to introduce a website that not only looks new and fresh, but also incorporates new features that will make it easier for dealerships to do more deals and make more money."

New key features include:

—New graphical interface: With a single mouse click, dealers can track their funding notices, contracts in transit, turned down deals and pending deals from their home page. They can also manage their inventory, repurchase demands and outstanding titles.

"DealerCenter's new front page features an innovative and active new panel dashboard," Goff said. "The active-tile-based interface mirrors the ease and simplicity of Windows 8. The new DealerCenter is simple, clean and modern and we are confident that dealers will love it."

—Profit Matrix: The new Profit Matrix is housed within Westlake's Buy Program inside DealerCenter. After running a customer's credit, the dealer can receive up to nine approvals across all of Westlake's programs, allowing the dealers to select the deal structure that works best for them and the customer. The results are presented in an easy-to-read matrix.

—Auto Structure All Filtering: What Westlake indicated already was a popular feature has been enhanced. Auto Structure All can highlight the vehicles within a dealer's inventory that will provide the maximum profit per deal.

With the new DealerCenter, dealers now can filter what type of vehicle a customer is looking for and approve that one customer on multiple vehicles on the lot with one click of a button.

—Promotion Redemption: Dealers can now redeem coupons and promotions they have earned on the deals they are working in the system, giving them accurate final deal numbers.

—Enhanced Deal Tracking: Dealers can now track their deals currently submitted to Westlake in real time.

"This was a popular request," Goff said. "Dealers can now communicate directly with the Westlake originations team to provide updated deal docs and resolve funding delays. This will help increase the funding time on each deal."

After highlighting each of the new feature, Goff went on to say, "This list is just the tip of the iceberg. "Current dealers will appreciate the new features. And for those curious about Westlake and DealerCenter but have never made the jump, now is a great time to take DealerCenter out for a free test drive."

To learn more about the new DealerCenter website, a short video is available here or visit www.westlakefinancial.com.