ORLANDO — Zoot Enterprises, an automated credit decisioning platform, is “in talks” with powersports groups, but requires more data before it commits to the market, Eric Hathaway, vice president of marketing, told Powersports Finance at CBA Live yesterday.
Zoot typically works with the top 100 banks, but it does have partnerships with six auto lenders because they have a high enough volume to justify Zoot’s services. In this regard, the powersports market is “a bit of a different beast.”
“We’re dealing with [auto] groups that have multiple locations and multiple transactions, whereas powersports, it’s typically smaller groups,” Hathaway said. “Obviously, you have the ‘big boys’ [the larger powersports OEMs], but they typically aren’t dealing in the kind of volumes that we are seeing in the auto finance group.”
Though Zoot has yet to jump into the powersports space, they have been in discussions with “a couple of higher-end, larger volume groups,” Hathaway said, but declined to disclose the company names.
Machine learning utilized in credit approvals is already being utilized by some powersports companies. MotoLease, for example, improved the accuracy of its internal credit forecasting model, M-Score 2, by implementing machine learning techniques and alternative data. Accuracy increased by over 2% to 66.2% in the new model.
Additionally, ZestFinance, an artificial intelligence-based underwriting company, is also prepping to enter the market with the potential signing of two powersports lenders.
Source : AutoFinanceNews
