Car dealerships that help buyers finance their purchases (so-termed “Buy Here, Pay Here” models) are sometimes faced with customers who do not meet their full payments for the car on time. As a solution for this problem, ERM Advanced Telematics has designed a technology that monitors the parking habits of the drivers in the purchased car. The technology is called ‘Parking Habits’.
The parking habits profile presented by the software can help car sellers predict problems in car payments. In addition, the solution has helped a U.S. car dealership recover 400 vehicles that have not been fully paid for.
To discover more, Digital Journal spoke with Eitan Kirshenboim, who is CMO of ERM Advanced Telematics, to learn more. ERM Advanced Telematics is an Israeli electronic company focused on the design, development and manufacture of vehicle security & GPS tracking devices for the telematics and fleet management industry.
Digital Journal: How common is it for car purchasers not to meet their finance payments?
Eitan Kirshenboim: We never did any statistics for this, but the fact is that the end customers working with this solution till date where able to retrieve so many stolen vehicles, save millions of dollars and bring down their business risks to a very low percentage.
DJ: You’ve developed a technological solution for this, how did this come about?
Kirshenboim: ERM’s philosophy is to be there for our partners at all times, thus learn from them about requirements in the field.
So in many cases, ERM develops technologies and solutions based on request that comes from our partners. The close and supportive relationship we have with our partners allows them to come to us with any kind of business case they need to resolve and we do the best we can to help them. This was the situation in the Parking Habits solution.
One of our partners in the U.S. came to us with this case, so we researched it and found solutions on the market that address this issue, but with lower success rate and many limitations. So we came with a patented solution, that makes the retrieving percentage much higher than they had before.
DJ: How does the technology work?
Kirshenboim:Parking habits solution uses very small data logging. It is flexible enough to allow each customer to customize it to support his specific needs and to predict for predefined situations he wants to be alerted for.
DJ: How did you test the technology?
Kirshenboim:The solution was developed for a real case, and actual customer. Our partner’s customer tried some other solutions with limited success rate and was very anxious to find a better solution. Once we explained how the technology works, along with our partner, the customer was very happy to allow us to implement it in his vehicles and test it
DJ: What has been the response from car dealers?
Kirshenboim:As far as we know, it is only implemented with car financing companies which are very satisfied with it. But it can be relevant to other applications also
We work with service providers partners in more than 65 countries, globally. We have a very good relations with them and long term relationship. Because we usually don’t know all of their end customers, we can never know who might need it so once a new solution like this is approved by the field, we try to spread the word as fast as possible and talk about it with all of them.
DJ: What are you working on next?
Kirshenboim:ERM is constantly working on new innovations and in parallel solution requirements for business cases that comes from our partners in the field.
What I can share is that we are planning to launch some very interesting stuff based on our Wireless Connect strategy, to disconnect hardware solutions as much as possible in order to enable easy and quick installation while lowering its cost and provide simple after sale support.
