Automotive Business Magazine – Q2 2026 – Digital edition - Magazine - Page 18
INT E RV I E W
SBS AND VERO TECHNOLOGIES
dealer who wears multiple hats and
needs to spend time out in the front of
the store selling cars, rather than in the
back office dealing with administrative
responsibilities.”
Artificial intelligence
No discussion of technology would be
complete without speaking about AI.
Although far from a new concept,
AI – or at least AI branding – has been
slapped on just about every technology
over the past few years.
While it is debatable whether some
systems are actually built on the cuttingedge AI technology they promise, it is
true that value is already being added at
various points within the sector.
Mizzi says: “The more forwardleaning dealers are adopting some
AI applications, particularly around
customer outreach, customer support,
providing a better buyer's experience for
their customers.
“The vehicle buying experience is one
of the most complicated – and just not
fun – experiences that any retail business
puts their customers through. As this next
generation of dealer leadership takes the
reins and the current folks age out, there
will be broad adoption.”
So far, the industry has focused
on these customer-facing AI
implementations, but Mizzi thinks
that the back-end processes offer an
opportunity too.
He explains: “Where we see
opportunities in the wholesale financing
space is streamlining a lot of the manual
processes that ultimately keep an
organisation’s hands full, and prevent
them from differentiating the dealer
experience on a relationship basis.
“We're building out some agentic
capabilities for those middle and back
office folks. Rather than spending
their days collating reports or sifting
through Excel spreadsheets, we should
be able to automate much of that and
ultimately allow those folks to spend time
thinking about how they provide their
dealer customers a better borrower's
experience.
“The other piece of this is around
maximising the impact of employees and
attracting the best.
“We spend a lot of time talking with
banks globally, and it's wild when you
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hear about someone who's been there
for 25 years, has a ‘fat cat’ salary, and
their job is building reports and chasing
people down for status updates.
“Those that adopt will very easily
differentiate themselves by enabling
those all-star performers to have
massive increases in capacity and drive
more significant business impacts.”
Managing risk
From the perspective of lenders, the role
of AI goes even further, as the technology
is built to work with large datasets.
Powell says: “Where we're seeing
it really gain traction is in risk
management.
“AI is able to go and scrape data from
bank accounts, and look for certain types
of transactions and fraudulent, suspect
activity in those accounts.
“With generative AI and agentic AI, we
can just talk to the system and get risk
reports, or general business performance
reports. That's where I see quite a lot of
value in the wholesale space.”
This type of risk management has been
made possible by Open Banking. Powell
thinks that this, while initially driven by
regulations, has evolved to offer genuine
benefits to companies.
He explains: “It's become a business
use case-driven scenario with risk
management – the ability to credit risk
assess a business daily, rather than it
being based upon monthly reporting and
annual statements.
“I'm really interested to see how
that adoption starts to grow in the US,
where there's been a lot of scepticism
up to this point. Open Banking has
been a huge, huge factor in improving
risk management and generally doing
business across the globe.”
While there has been scepticism
among some dealers so far, this does
seem to be changing.
Mizzi says: “When we got started, it
was all about data privacy, and ‘why am
I giving you access to that information?’
There's this broad conversion of thought
where, on a permission basis, society
has become more trusting. Or, it's
just become more of the norm that if
someone's going to lend you $5m, and
they ask you to share access to your
bank account, you don't really have a
good reason not to.
