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Just like a finance company might do with its portfolio, fintechs diversify, too. Look at what’s happening at AutoFi.

Building on the strength of its digital retail platform, AutoFi has launched a new business division focused on the automotive industry’s largest enterprises. Germinating from this division is the company’s new Lending as a Service (LaaS) offering.

A part of the first group of Emerging 8 honorees, AutoFi highlighted that the service can allow industry participants to bring their own branded vehicle purchase experience to life, while offering their customers a transparent, fully automated financing solution.

Now OEMs, online dealerships, inventory aggregators, lenders and marketplace integration partners can offer online financing to their customers by leveraging AutoFi’s new API Suite, according to a company news release.

The enterprise division is an expansion of AutoFi’s business and its existing digital retail solutions division. To date, the company has focused its offerings on dealerships’ websites and showroom floors.

The new AutoFi API Suite is designed to give any participant in retail automotive the opportunity to create a branded purchase experience. Customers are able to receive and select instant finance and lease offers, removing friction and manual steps typically associated with vehicles purchases.

Furthermore, the company said LaaS can offer a seamless and easy integration providing vehicle price estimation, intelligent credit application routing, and displays customer offers from more than 40 of the industry’s largest finance companies such as Chase Auto, Bank of America, and Santander Consumer USA.

“As more and more consumers turn to buying and selling cars online, AutoFi’s solutions have helped us accelerate the growth of our end-to-end ecommerce platform and build our unique brand,” Vroom chief revenue officer Mark Roszkowski said in the news release.

Experienced industry veteran Matthew Orlando, who joined AutoFi in the middle of last year, will head the new division as vice president of enterprise partnerships.

Orlando previously spent more than 13 years with RouteOne, a joint venture created by Ally Financial, Ford Motor Credit, TD Auto Finance and Toyota Financial Services to streamline the credit application process, where he was most recently director of OEM and partner strategy.

“In the pursuit of a better car buying experience, our industry has been on a trajectory of incremental improvements to streamline and complete vehicle sales online,” AutoFi chief executive officer and co-founder Kevin Singerman said. “Lending as a Service allows the industry to take a major leap forward by natively integrating financial services into automotive e-commerce.”

AutoFi chief revenue officer Jonathan Schenk added, “Today, our enterprise customers include online dealers, OEMs, banks, and rental car companies. In each case, these partners leverage our APIs to bring their online shopping journeys to life. We believe forming this new business division is a logical next step for our company and allows us to focus on bringing LaaS to this accelerating enterprise segment.”

More details about Lending as a Service

AutoFi explained that its LaaS solution is geared to offer online automotive participants both basic and enhanced integrations for the flexibility to support as little or as much of the auto-finance journey as appropriate.

Additionally, AutoFi said that online finance puts the potential buyer in more direct control of the purchase.

The API suite includes capabilities and tools designed to streamline the process and make it easier and more enjoyable for all participants — buyers, sellers and finance companies. The suite includes:

— Payment calculation and estimation for finance and lease on new, used and certified pre-owned vehicles

— Credit application submission through RouteOne or Dealertrack

— Real-time customer decisioning for lease and finance

— Smart lender routing based on loan-to-value ratio, payment-to-income ratio and credit score

— Bi-directional finance offer presentation with rate markup and counter-offer technology

— Soft pull credit solution and custom business rules for application routing

— Standalone soft pull credit estimator for consumer affordability

Dealerships and finance companies can learn more about how AutoFi’s Lending as a Service can help improve your online automotive experience. They can register now for the 2021 NADA Show and participate in a virtual workshop titled, “Cracking the Code to Remote Selling” led by Joe St. John, AutoFi head of digital retail, on Feb. 9 beginning at 12:30 p.m. (ET).