Dealers are failing to take seriously their responsibilities to record and back up essential FCA compliance motor finance data, says iVendi.
The company says that a significant minority of dealers are simply using a spreadsheet to record basic information – and then don’t even back it up.
James Tew, CEO, said: “A large number of dealers that we visit have an Excel spreadsheet that is open to all users and simply jot type in a few details.
“It is very haphazard. There is no central control over the document, often a sloppy attitude to recording the data and no formal back-up process.
“It is an accident waiting to happen. The data could easily be corrupted or lost and attempting to rebuild the audit trail would be extremely difficult or impossible. If you were then investigated by the FCA, you’d have serious questions to answer.”
At no extra cost, iVendi is adding an automatic FCA compliance data back-up tool to its latest generation of the iVendi Platform, which was launched in January and is designed to manage all aspects of dealer motor finance activity.
James said: “We have added this feature very much in response to the data issues that we have seen at a wide variety of dealers. For users of our platform, it provides a complete FCA compliant data back up to our secure servers without the dealer having to do anything. It is the only solution of this type on the market, we believe.
“It can also be adopted by dealers who do not use the Platform for all of their motor finance activity, although in these circumstances, more of the data has to be added manually. In this case, it still provides a complete data infrastructure and back-up.”
iVendi recently gained full authorisation from the FCA, one of a handful of companies in its sector with this degree of accreditation.