Wrapping up the first quarter provided the Canadian Product team with an opportunity to reflect on its various achievements and celebrate some significant wins!

Lead by Stephanie Turner, Head of Product for Canada and Brazil, the team all came together virtually to complete a mural of all the Q1 achievements they could think of that were product related. According to Stephanie, it was “a fun chance for everyone to take a step back, get away from the day-to-day pressures and to-do lists and just appreciate the good things they helped accomplish in Q1.”

We’re extremely proud of the Product team and their accomplishments but we also know that all of our teams are contributing in similar ways – imagine how big the board would need to be if we did this exercise across all of our teams!

For now, please enjoy learning about a few of the big wins identified through this exercise and consider this idea for future opportunities to sit down as a team and appreciate the work that we all do to help Cox Automotive transform the way the world buys, sells, owns and uses cars.

In order to deliver a better buying and selling experience to our customers as our auctions shift to a more digital model, the outdated legacy Simulcast system was replaced with a new solution (in partnership with UK partner Kingfisher) Simulcast 2.0 and launched in our Halifax auction on March 26. With plans to roll out across Canada throughout the year, this system will deliver a better overall user experience, improved UI and provide more data to help better represent the vehicles that sell digitally via Simulcast for Manheim auctions!

To help our dealers in the awareness and prevention of fraud, the team worked with a partner to build a solution focused on digital identity verification that leverages the Dealertrack data to create warning flags around suspicious deal behavior, and also data validation across other applications and dealerships.

By partnering with EnStream, the solution can assist with customer identification by validating the information in the deal such as the customer name, address and date-of-birth.

This data, when combined with a credit bureau, does meet FINTRAC’S dual-process method of verifying a customer’s identity and red flags, which will leverage our own internal data, will provide lenders with greater insight into buyer behavior and provide them with any warnings related to that deal.

After launching in May of last year, the KBB.CA team has been working hard to grow the site and brand in Canada. As the next step in the site’s growth, the team needed some new tools to increase the engagement level of consumers as well as provide dealers with the ability to start the deal online from the KBB marketplace.

By integrating a new Digital Retailing Payment Driver, consumers can now view vehicles for sale, calculate their payments and submit a request (lead) to contact a dealer - with the ability to submit a credit application and add digital documents also planned for future implementation.

In addition, a new Build & Price application embedded within our DDC dealer websites was launched earlier this year. This allows consumers to build a new vehicle from scratch and continue their journey all the way to digital retailing payment calculations. The Build & Price solution is the result of strong collaboration and powerful integrations between the KBB catalogue and Digital Retailing enables our dealer clients to get leads for consumers that want a new vehicle that’s not currently in their inventory so they don’t lose the client!