Flagship Credit Acceptance has renewed its partnership with Speedpay Inc. for a new five-year term, a Flagship spokesman told Auto Finance News, which comes on the heels of a decline in originations.
The renewed partnership positions Speedpay — a Western Union company — as Flagship’s electronic billing and exclusive payments provider. Flagship will be Speedpay’s first auto finance client to offer the moBills solution through Walletron, which provides customers with the option to view their statements or pay their bills within their smartphones’ mobile wallets.
The Walletron solution was made available to borrowers at the end of September.
“We will be combining the [Speedpay] capabilities with a comprehensive customer contact platform that goes fully live in 2018 — that will extend the capability to all forms of communication and account management, not just payment management,” the Flagship spokesman said. “While app-based notifications could potentially have an impact [on delinquencies], this was a step we primarily looked at for its potential to further increase the quality of our service.”
At midyear, Chadds Ford, Pa.-based Flagship and subsidiary CarFinance.com had slashed originations to $398 million, down from $868 million over the same period in 2016, amid a strategic pullback to reduce losses, which had dramatically increased.