Somebody asking the other day like would you want to run Carvana as a business? For sure not like I it's so operation intensive. I mean We're gonna believe that part out
What's up everyone? This is car dealership guy You're listening to the car dealership guy podcast Which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market before we start I need your help to grow the car dealership guy community Please take a second to subscribe to the show and leave us a rating below so that more people can benefit from this content
All right, let's get into today's show Chris Coleman is co-founder of clutch a fintech startup founded in 2020 with the purpose of creating Digital lending experiences for credit unions prior to founding clutch Chris co-founder company called Carlipsa, which was ultimately acquired by Carvana in 2017
In this conversation We spoke about selling Carlips out of Carvana how to get the lowest interest rates when buying a car Founding and growing his new startup clutch why Carvana was able to pay top dollar for your car in 2021 and will Carvana actually survive Here's my conversation with Chris Coleman
All views of car dealership guy and any guests on this podcast are so weak their opinions You should not treat any opinion expressed by car dealership guy or any guest as a specific inducement to make a particular investment This podcast is for informational purposes on me
All right Chris great you have here From Stanford to use cars. I mean what the fuck like how does that happen? Please explain us to me Yeah, I mean I think it wasn't quite that directly, but yeah, my parents have the same question Yeah, so I met a co-founder Nick at Stanford Business School. I had actually always been a core enthusiast growing up and so I worked for a number of random car companies too, by the way So I was always trying to figure out whether this is actually a career in cars
So I worked for McKinsey Thinking I would get to work at lead you know as an exact exact car companies didn't have and I worked all sorts of other Random things including casinos which obviously has nothing to do with cars Then I followed a boss to this company called Coda automotive. Do you remember hearing about them? I don't they they were like they were trying to import this car from China and electrify it the whole thing turned out to be somewhat not a scam, but like they could never It's close to a scam is not a scam
It was like this This car that was made in China that didn't really meet US crash regulations It required a ton of reengineering that required scaling up this battery joint venture that never quite worked and so The great experience not a good outcome And so I went to Stanford trying to figure out whether there's still a career to be had in cars or do something else
I met Nick there and in between my first and second year actually got my dream job Which is working in McLaren and so I worked in the UK launching their road cars division It turns out that making Xotic sports cars also really hard business It's not like even though you make a ton of gross mortgage on the car. It's like It's actually more like fashion than it is cars Um, and so it's very tough to know what's fashionable and what's not
Um, it's just sort of fell into that trap again And then met Nick and the one thing that we did know consistently throughout throughout all this is hey There's money in the dealership space and so if there is an angle to be attacked Maybe there's an angle from this sort of peer-to-peer market that that we thought could exist for Individuals who wanted to sell their cars and so that's what sort of spawns We started this business called curlipso and how be it going to Depth of what that was like
Yeah, so your your new company of course is called with clutch and maybe not so new anymore I mean you've been operating you founded several several years ago, but I think it's important to tell the audience I mean you in a way I would say you pioneered a segment of the market Um with again, I'll let you explain what curlipso was but fascinating model and I think there's been several spin-offs of it since but go ahead
Yeah, it's funny in like 2013 everybody started realizing you might be able to sell use cars online It was a year that like all these Quote go big startups popped up so we had us We had room we had shift and we had carvana All of us actually started from pretty different places of like what the key was And I think even curvana's like what the key was is very different than people think it is And so we started from this place of hey the problem we want to solve is the peer-to-peer market
We think that individuals can more easily sell their cars into this market And if we can sort of cut out middleman expenses Through some sort of tack and I can get into what that was Then we can facilitate these peer-to-peer transactions more easily
So you mean again peer-to-peer you just mean like a private sale. I sell my car to you. You sell your car to me Yeah exactly
所以你的意思是点对点交易,你只是指像私人销售一样。我把我的车卖给你。你把你的车卖给我,对吗?
The goal of the company was to try and get people who otherwise would have traded in a car To be like you know, it's just as easy to sell it peer-to-peer And so why don't I do that and therefore I'll get more money That was a whole theory behind it
And the way we did this is we like installed these you know lock boxes and GPS trackers on these cars We would monitor all the test drives and do all the marketing for that individuals car
我们的做法是在这些车辆上安装锁盒和GPS跟踪器,然后对所有试驾进行监控,并为每辆车做营销。
Um, we actually ended up going to a Y Combinator for that experience and We ended up reaching a peak of like 50 or 60 cars. It was an absolute nightmare Like it was it was the worst 50 or 60 cars a month 60 cars sold a bit a month sold a month sold a month and it was let it's literally the worst business you could start like if you told me to do anything else I would literally do anything else at this point if you're like Silt toilet paper. I would glad. I would be like that's a much better business. Let's do it
So what was so difficult right was it you know, plenty of people Buying cell cars every day plenty of dealers and so what specifically made it so difficult about this peer-to-peer model It's the wrong market to select into it's like all the worst things that you can get compounded And so anyone buying like part of the problem is there's no room for you to make money and let me explain why
And so like if you if you are Captivated by the marketing message of get more for your car That means that you want more money for your car than you could have got it a dealership right? So you already have that expectation of higher transaction value If you're buying in the private market chances are you're trying to get a lower transaction value And so the individuals here are both willing to spend quite a lot of time to make sure that's true And they value their time less than you value your time And so inherently what happened is people buying would would just consume a ton a ton of hours Trying to get this car to be as cheap as possible and the people selling obviously wanted the most money And so in all of these cases you ended up adversarial to both counter parties And no matter what you offered of of value You quote unquote like there were other ways to make money like you know
You could make money on financing contracts or on selling warranties and things like that But it's pretty hard to insert yourself in there without physically taking possession of a car And that's something we didn't want to do because if we started doing that we're like okay now if we if we go down that road We may as well just be a dealership because then we don't have all these this two-sided Satisfaction problem we haven't self-selected into the wrong market
And so you kind of end up in nowhere land of Neither side values of service you may provide to the level that makes sense economically And so like we just made very little per car So you go to Carvana right Carvana acquires car lipso yes, and I what I'm really curious about is the transition from going to work
At Carvana and ultimately right like years down the road founding a company That focuses on credit unions right to think that first thing that comes to my mind is okay Chris had some insight While at Carvana something told him hey, this is an alternate opportunity in the market right But let's kind of break it down step by step how you went from Carvana and what that you know transition was like for you
Yeah, there's actually like it's actually a steer step so let's go through the full steer step too So with car lipso we started with this peer-to-peer model that didn't work and we knew it didn't work at the end of why commenter like we Why comment it was like you know do things that don't scale we took it way too literally and didn't do anything that scaled And so
At the end of it like some of our employees one of our employees still has like PTSD from answering phone calls like you won't answer a phone call I mean So like he's so distraught by what happened to him during this this phase and so At that point we said hey, why don't we actually just try and direct Sale cars from auctions and so we'll cut out this two-sided model will only serve buyers And since these auctions are like price set marketplaces Now we have almost unlimited selections
So if somebody says hey, I want x car Then we can simply find x car in the marketplace will we'll figure out effectively how to SEO these aggregators And so we would basically take every car that was in manheimer or desa Cross-reference how it would rank on sites like car gurus and see what existing inventory was there And then choose to advertise a select number of bins to generate a ton of leads That's like the first thing in a half.
如果有人说他想要 x 车,那么我们可以在市场上找到 x 车,然后有效地决定如何在聚合器上进行搜索引擎优化。我们会基本上列出在 Manheimer 或 Desa 上所有的车,并将其与像汽车顾问这样的网站进行排名的交叉引用,看看已有的库存。然后选择广告推广一些挑选出来的车型来产生大量的潜在客户。这是步骤中的第一步半。
Okay, so this this is important right because I get asked all the time people like hey Can can consumers buy from auctions and and I mean this was like 10 years ago, right? And so this is not anything new but I Keep going I mean, I'm just really intrigued like tell us you know bad debts experience You know what worked what didn't go ahead?
Yeah, yeah So at the time what happened was all these Nissan Leafs came off lease And Nissan had completely screwed up the residual and so we could we would see that these leaks were transacting In wholesale for like 10 to 13 grand and people's buyouts were like 17 20 grand And so we started listing these leafs being like hey there, you know 13 grand you can get a leaf and we'll make good money at 13 grand And so we put these leafs on or other cars that sort of met these metrics and they would immediately show up top of car gurus rankings And we would generate a ton of phone calls and someone call in super confused being like him coming down to your lot We have to explain we definitely don't have a lot. Please don't come here.
Here's the deal And a lot of people were freaked out, but if for every you know for every three freaked out people There was one person who was willing to go ahead with it And so sure enough like the first car we sold was this Nissan Leaf to a guy who already had a leaf that was turning in his lease Like I was like in his mid 70s and he's like ask for it. It's worth trying it out shows up super happy that was super easy and so he's just start doing more and more of this And so That model ended up being a lot easier because you don't have this like two-sided audience You need to serve totally impartial about the inventory What we kept getting deeper and deeper into is you're like you still lean all the things that a car dealership has
Right, like you still need to do the reconditioning and so like EVs inherently need less reconditioning so starting there was much easier than as we got into more and more complicated cars The thing that sort of where we tapped out is you know like old businesses you think whenever you start It's gonna just completely keep going And what happened was there was a limited audience at the time was like willing to completely buy online Who met the credit profile that we had And so we could reach a point of sort of a hundred to a hundred fifty cars in San Francisco But we could never break through that wall It was like we had a decent You know, it was a it was a decent small dealership that advertised online that could have been profitable within a few markets And that was like yeah, but we were a venture back company
But the key here is like you didn't actually own the inventory or it didn't sit on your balance sheet correct Yeah, we got flooring for the inventory and so like our turn time on a car was like seven days and so The flooring Companies all got super confused. They're like hey, you're paying this off way too quickly We're like well the car's gone and they're like And they you know they do these all I don't know if you've been through like a flooring company audit But then they come and they look for all the inventory like where is it? We're like we sold it when we keep telling you guys like this like we already bought it and we already sold it It's it's out of like it's done at this point and they ended up confused in each time we'd have to explain to the new auditor who came around What was happening because also he expected like a dealership lot and we had a tiny warehouse
How did the auctions feel about you advertising the cars to say you know the consumers and you know manheim did they give you any Flack for that progressively yes and so i mean the reality is it works out great for the auction So it actually isn't beneficial for them and i think in some ways they'd love to do it They just can't up can't end up in this environment
We're actually everybody's doing it and somebody is simultaneously selling because a lot of dealers actually Would sell the same car that they also had at auction and so they would continue to list that car in hopes that someone might You know at the last minute come through and pull through on that car that's not getting sent to wholesale Um, and so we got a few you know angry dealer calls of wise your car listed here and so the things we did
The auction company got mad at us saying hey look you can't advertise these explicit vans and so just don't do that And so we ended up doing is Actually creating these synthetic vans that would go on the aggregators and then putting this huge disclaimer In the ads themselves saying hey, this is not the exact car there are there's a car that is exactly of the specification that That you can buy And that that worked. I didn't know you can create synthetic vans you learn something you every day
So tell us about the transition to Carvana Yeah, good point And so we got to a point where we said this business is not going to scale and so the reality is for Carlips So we sort of came to a point where we knew we wanted to sell the business And so we're saying look doesn't scale um We have this asset which was effectively we had built all these tools that scraped the auction sites And that could pull in exact details about each of the vans And so one of the things about consumers buying online is like a lot of our consumers We're buying 30,000 dollar plus luxury cars
And so they're like hey, I want to you know, I want a seven series and it's got to have rear-heated seats and the massagers in front and the m-sport pack And so you had to be able to get a you know a sales guy off the street to be able to do all this Without actually knowing each and every car in full intimacy And so we developed these like Almost he's like a window sticker like tools that would break apart the window sticker or the options and features for each car on a venn level
And we could do that for like 80% of vans not every not every venn not a venn man or either like Honda's didn't matter um And so Carvana was interested in that ability to do that They're like hey if we could do this then it improves how we merchandise our cars We also sell cars online some of these same issues because often they would end up with you know Describing a car that had a heated seats that didn't actually have it because The guy walking around the car just made a mistake Um and obviously you ended up with a very upset customer when that happens and that was like anchoring feature for them um, and so we ended up talking to Carvana in like really 2017 before their IPO And so we had these conversations of sort of what's the technology we have what would fit into Carvana what makes sense and why and then The transaction eventually went through and sort of may of that year um
And then me and like it was me and Nick were co-found as a business Nick At first we're like okay, let's just get the business sold and then let's figure out what we're gonna do in the building So we actually had no idea what our role would be in Carvana It was like whatever the role is like if they want us to you know clean the windows Let's just get this thing to the door for three years that's fine um And so we got to deal through the door part of that was Nick was gonna go work in buying cars from consumers um, which he was very half-hearted about at first because we had tried something similar at Carvana and it didn't work that well
And that environment Worked phenomenally well at Carvana for different reasons Why is that why did it work so well Carvana? Carvana was spending on like it was a windfall of marketing dollars that they were already spending to sell cars And we were trying to kickstart one marketing message at Carvana So like when we ran a bunch of early experience to buy cars for consumer We would run a bunch of advertising around hey we want to buy your car or we'd contact random people on Craigslist who are really selling and be like Hey, we want to buy your car None of that worked in isolation But Carvana was doing like very broad-based marketing on TV And the message people got was kind of car car
Uh, and as a result of that there was a natural windfall and people who wanted to sell their car and we're going there anyway And so the problem was different It wasn't finding marketing leads the problem was actually monetizing the funnel And so like the issues Nick had to deal with it Carvana were not generating net new interest or volume and that was the problem we dealt with at Carlypso that we couldn't solve Um, and so it was a natural like byproduct of Being associated with a large scale dealership that you got this inherent volume anyway
Yeah, and I mean Carvana has been tremendously successful in buying from public You know, I think it's debated on the valuations they put on cars throughout different periods Did you guys work on their valuation model? Was that part of your your team? And you know, we're going to put you on the spot over here Yeah, there's actually there's multiple there were two valuation models in the building when I was there And so the one that would the the valuation model for buying cars we could see where it was actually different Then the valuation model for buying through wholesale auction And so I worked very closely with the team that did valuation for buy from auction and I worked Semmy semi closely with a team that was buying direct from consumer But like the triggers were different and the way the inventory mix Was looked at was different and arguably you actually got different cars too Like the cars you got from buy from consumer were arguably older you had a higher condition variance Uh, they tended to be less pricing benchmarks internally.
So they were more unique skews Like auctions auctions is somewhere were a little easier because you had like Generally anything you bit on you had some Pricing benchmarks from other things that were similar in inventory They tended to be less unique skews and so you couldn't get it that far off and three you always had this Like it was a simultaneous auction So you you could never pay that much more than someone else is paying Because you didn't pay your highest willingness you paid n minus one Like that's the inherent nature of the auction versus you could end up paying your highest willingness and buy from consumer
Explain to me like a third grader. How how did Carvana managed to you know out just out compete the market with their you know relatively high offers throughout the last three four or five years right like just break that down for us very simply Yeah, I mean like Carvana's actually Like the way to think about the business and this was the eye opening part from moving there from Carlips O is At Carlips O we tried to sell to almost all Uh prime credit buyers And they're a terrible audience for online carbine Like they're terrible because they have great alternatives everywhere else And so like if you if you try and sell in recidic class to a prime buyer You're being compared to a recidic p.o. program And then you're like why would you buy from You know randomee versus Mercedes CPO Mercedes has great dealerships and not like bad and not bad operations You know nobody's getting beaten in the backroom as people like to portray the car comes with a warranty from the manufacturer Um, and so like it's it's actually a good option and people know Two things one is they know what other cars they can get They know that they can afford them so there's no question for ability and then be they generally know the financing rate that they should get And so they're not being you there's no there's no opportunity to make a lot of margin On these consumers and then the online model is arguably not better for them You're like okay, here's the trade-offs You can wait for your car You're not going to know the condition with any certainty until it arrives And um, it's not going to have this OEM warranty that you might get from a dealership and so like is that really better Like if if I can walk into a Mercedes D like get my car the same day. I know the rate. I'm gonna get um Like I can walk out with a car and know the condition at the moment. I see it It's really it's really like it's not like you avoid any major step in the process by buying online You still have to do all the same steps. You can't avoid any step of buying Um, and so I think that I'm assuming you're gonna I'm assuming you're gonna contrast this to sub or near prime.
Yes. Yes, which is a different audience like if you take sub prime Subprime is actually the best audience to serve online Um, and the reason being like think about the experience from the consumer from the standpoint like if you're a sub prime Get simmer you actually have real Uh, what'll call like budget risk So you walk into a dealer you actually don't know what you can afford with the high degree of certainty And so you know roughly the down payment and roughly the payment you can afford but a lot of a lot of times That's contingent on what the finance company will extend to you in credit And so you actually await your answer from the dealer But you still want to buy a car that you went in for And so you may enter a dealership being that I want to walk out of here with this you know, 2015 Chevy Tahoe But when financing terms come across the guy behind the sales desk is gonna convince you that you actually need a 2013 Volkswagen Beetle And you're like, well, because he's only got 50 cars on the lot financing came back awkward You have to go through this embarrassing exercise at which he tries to convey that the Beatles a good Stepping stone car for you and and that like Carvana just kind of made that experience much Much more palatable because you get financing rates on everything and there was enough inventory Where if the Tahoe didn't work out Stepping back from a Tahoe was easier to figure out what you could get
I'm gonna cut you off for saying but how does that translate to paying you know, $20,000 for a 2013 Civic with 110,000 miles? Good question. So, hey, you can make you can you make more money on on higher finance rates, right? So there's only so much you can mark up the spread on a prime buyer So if you have you know, DCU or the biggest credit, you know, one point was offering something like 1.49% interest rates There's only so much money you could mark that up and still remain competitive to finance any car Right, and so So your ability to make more to spread on the loan is very limited on the prime segment Then be the prime segment has a lower attached of products And so like you don't if you could you don't need to buy a warranty Which just means that all it means is that they're Not gonna buy as many warranties and you know aftermarket products as a subprime consumer may correct correct and and so those two things like you may make limited morgid on the front of the car But between financing margin and product margin You can sort of forward calculate what you expect to make on those two elements And you can price the car in such a way that you might discourage prime buyers and incur its subprime buyers to buy that car Um, and so like a prime a prime buyer is looking at price of vehicle and they roughly know the financing rate and if they finance They'll pay what the payment is right a subprime buyer is looking at a payment-based purchase And so they're not even like the price is almost irrelevant because there's so much else that goes in the monthly payment of what matters for that consumer In addition to can they get over the down payment threshold Of do they have enough money to actually Enable the transaction at all and so they could buying dynamics. They're just very different between these two audiences And so there is the ability a to do some price discrimination So you could select into this audience and not that one and then be your ability to mark up these loans Is better on this non prime audience and so where you might make you know two percent on a prime buyer That can be you know six to ten percent on a subprime buyer And you I mean you see that in Carvana's financial statement right like the biggest driver of Of margin for them is being able to build this entire stack of Of If they had to survive on front and margin alone. It's not a business.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's The definitely the rates that we're seeing and especially now and it's always been you know The subprime customers always been a payment shopper. You know, they're they're shopping for financing They're not shopping for cars. It's certainly cars important, but it's much less important Correct, and so I think that that that's something that helps people understand right they see like oh Carvana You know quote-a-quote overpaid for my car, but did they really right like let's look at the business It's a vertically in great business. They have it's like five businesses and one. It's like that's right You know, it's like in that sense where you know Amazon is vertically integrated. I guess you could say it's similar But that enables them to you know pay more for that car under certain circumstances and you know, they do have a disproportionately their audience is disproportionately skewed towards subprime and bad credit
And so like everything you're saying makes sense now, but here's what I want to understand right so you you have this inside now I'm going back if you know a couple years here you're at Carvana You see that subprime is a lot more lucrative. It just that's the reality of the business And and then you go to credit unions, which is like the peak epitome of like cream of the crop like I have amazing credit Like don't fuck with me. So how does that happen? Yeah
Here's how it happens so like it's it's not all like a the spectrum So it's not like all subprime prime So there's not only two audiences a full spectrum in the audience I think the the insight was hey the financial products end up being the key profit drivers Here and then be one of the other insights was a lot of buyers. They don't think about this too hard And so like whatever the whatever the rate was one reason Carvana could exert control is because people didn't shop around for financing Like Carvana only offered its own financing through their own pages
And so you you either kind of went with it or not People were not shopping figuring out what is the true market rate of what my credit should get me across all these other lenders um And so what we said is if we look at the best lenders Right like the cheapest cost of capital is actually credit unions And the reason that's true is why is it yeah, they're not for profits And so the credit the credit union effectively has to return slightly more than a treasury yield on their book of loans And so there there were bank they're like a banking system setup in the early 1900s where they're effectively a cooperative They exist for the benefit of their members, which is anyone who has a loan or deposit with the institution
And so what that means is they effectively run Uh a net zero bank So as if like if you their cost of capital is cheaper is cheaper exactly exactly they're getting they're getting deposits at near for free from consumers They have to return some interest yield, but they don't pay profit on the interest yield And so therefore you're you're roughly net benefited by that Uh not for profit spread Um and credit unions do like 25th a third of used auto loans by the way they're huge
I'm gonna say yeah, it's like a third of used auto loans And so Like if I'm a consumer in the market today, right and and I'm a dealer and you know We get credit customers that come with credit union checks all the time We also work with credit unions, but If I'm a consumer today or if you know if if a consumer right you're your your mother wants to buy a car She doesn't hate Chris. I want to buy car and I'm going to finance it one way or another like what would you tell her to do?
Yeah, I mean To yeah the good question There's there's many ways to go about that process like the the old way would be hey go get a pre approval from a credit union Walk into the dealership Pick the car you want show them this you know Use the financing that you have from the credit union and some credit unions will issue checks a lot don't do that because it's a fraud vector
Still there is another way which is simply if if you demand that the dealer uses a credit union that you already know They can go that route they they have indirect channels already and so you can walk into the dealership and say hey, I want to finance through you know Varidian credit union and Most credit unions who are connected on cuddle or who have dealer track or others can still send loans that way There are of any sort of larger medium size You're smaller you're smaller dealerships may not be connected credit unions. That's arguably not where you're getting your car anyway
Um, but like my recommendation will be go into a good dealership That's connected with credit unions already through cuddle or through dealer track Pick one of these credit unions you can see the advertised rates for prime credit And walk out with a great car loan.
So if I do that I can't buy through Carvana you can still buy through Carvana, but it become alluded and so here's here's here's Here's part of the process and so the problem the problem with car financing is that you have this asset that has all these paper Documents associated which is like this we mortgage is the same more is even more antiquated you've been through mortgage But like effectively the vehicle title is this piece of paper that needs a bunch of random signatures on it to establish chain of custody
The the strange part is the title actually becomes electronic often when it goes to DMV And so there's the electronic leans which will say hey chase actually has ownership in this car Once the paperwork is filed and so if you were to want to buy through Carvana and finance your credit You can still do that, but the process would be different you'd buy through Carvana You'd go with Carvana financing 30 days later you'd refi that loan So you'd go to your local credit and say hey, I want to I have this deal with Carvana I want to switch that loan for this loan And that's something that's very easy to do It's actually easier like the refi process is much easier than the corbine process because of the CLT
What's the what's the bare thesis for credit unions right? I think we know that clearly the both thesis is that I mean it's just cheaper cost of capital and I've been very vocal about it You know we clearly work with credit unions dealers Any normal reputable dealer will work with credit unions I'm seeing that you know the spreads between a credit union and a traditional lender nowadays are like You know, huge repoints. It's very very very significant. Yeah. Yes But like what's the bare thesis here right like why does this not work out or why why does this peak or not scale beyond like you know mega proportions Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple cases so and I think not not all credit unions are impact the same way
If you look at like there's if you look at banking there's kind of three segments of banks too. There's mega banks There's regional banks and community banks and then there's credit unions I think the sector I'd actually worry most about is that middle sector because they have none of the scale and none of the advantage of the other end um
The the credit unions the credit unions are we most about are the small credit unions were like you It's very hard to get out of this those are the one that you were you worry about them the most you said I worry about small credit unions a lot Yes, and the reason the reason being is because They're not of a scale where they can then get out and like make these investments that a substantial order to like do this modernization to remain on par with the chase or a well as far go
And you need to continue to attract deposits And so you need to attract deposits in order to be able to do lending Lending I think is actually your strongest advantage. I think deposits tend to be a more commodity product Right like if you do checking do you really care where your checking account is it just has to function as a checking account and be easy
But at the same time it has to be easy and so to do that you need to make these investments And technology to allow people to use their checking account in easy way And it's just harder to make these investments if you're small scale Right like some of the largest FinTech companies will bend over backwards to work with chase But if you only have you know 4000 members or 4000 potential customers No one's even chasing you as a potential higher of this technology and so it's very hard to serve That segment in a way that makes sense for the technology provider and for the credian
And the credians left a little bit handicap with antiquated tools trying to give people to sign up for their services They've already got limited branch or other reach And so these smaller credians the trend you're seeing is Maybe 20 years ago there were about 10,000 credians Currently there's about 5,000 and so they tend to merge and consolidate Into larger and larger assets The biggest credians tend to think more like banks And so the larger the credian the more it becomes focused is this like this larger efficient high investment institution
And so like it's it is in everyone's benefit to get some scale as a credian The the bear case is just like can you do that quickly enough and can you remain competitive with mega banks who seem to be drawing in all these assets
Do you think the traditional lenders like now that rates are you know significantly higher than they were To one two three years ago. Do you think that traditional lenders? You know the capital ones and you know the allies or whoever right publicly traded Have you know lots of leverage when it comes to cost of capital like how do they survive At least in the prime segment versus the credit unions over the next couple of years
Yeah, I mean, I don't think everyone needs to survive everywhere And so I don't think that needs to be true for them to still have great businesses I think the other thing about lending is lending tends to be highly cyclical Right, and so some of these very well-run business like allies a great example of ally understands us That they're not like in some ways Harvana got a little caught off guard by the cyclicality of just how quickly Lending swung from one side to the other and I mean, it's not like they're the only ones who got caught off guard The fence never raised rates at the rate that it had raised rates, but they Both a made big investments at that time and then be got hit by this which tends to impact profit But allies been through these cycles before and so they understand like Hey, when rates are low things are going to be great when this is environment where things are changing very rapidly It's going to be more confusing
We may need to get in and out of some of these segments that we've served in certain times well and Like we maintain that flexibility and they've been good at that. That's why they've been around a long time as a business Um, and so like when when rates are near zero People tend to be less sensitive as rates go up. They tend to be more sensitive because each mortal point impacts them more Um, and so like I think creditians will thrive in this environment as people become more rate sensitive Um, and that's like a great time for them and then Allie will as rates go down ally will come back and sort of reserve that prime segment very well
So I think if they think it's a good natural progression into your current company with clutch um, you know What are you guys doing specifically for credit unions and you know How is that going to help consumers? Can you give us some background on the thesis for the company?
Yeah I mean the thesis for the companies at credians are the best lenders and they should be capturing more share a wall out of debt Like that's a thesis in a nutshell and The reason they're not capturing more share of debt is just they've been harder administratively to deal with And so we're trying to facilitate how creditians can execute loans Both for a consumer standpoint and from an internal operations standpoint Like there's both how easy is it to apply and then there's how easy as it to actually book From the people doing the work in the back office Um, and so we're trying to serve both of those like both of those are our customers in some ways
Tell me in you know in five years, right? You guys have scaled and you've empowered more credit unions Right how did how is that change to carbying experience to car business? Right like what's the impact that you guys have made in five years? Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think there's a couple things a um, I think credit unions should have a much larger market share of auto loans than they currently do And so like it should be people find other areas to compete on the fringes of credit unions and A lot of other lenders shouldn't be nearly as competitive Right like credit unions should be financing a much larger portion of loans in their currently financing a and then be a huge portion that should also be direct like the ability to both uh refinance debt that's not quote-unquote optimal and so as consumers get better credit credit unions should be able to yield and and get that opportunity more easily
So if you were if you were an ally customer, but now you've made you know, 15 payments on time We should be able to refy that loan and discover that loan very easily if you're a credit you remember and that should be a compelling reason to be a credit You remember is that there's this there's this sort of active watching out for you for all your debt portfolio
I think it's not just cars though, too. I think the other manifestation is even if you look at a platform like credit karma Like you won't see a you won't see a credit union on credit karma Which is like super puzzling because yeah, why why can't I connect to it like they cannot connect to credit karma They don't have APIs. There's no way to connect to the balance sheet of a credit unit And so like that technology infrastructure still needs to be built out um, and yet often like if you look at some of these lenders All they do is resell portfolios to credit unions And so there's many lenders who will literally aggregate traffic from karma Repackage that and resell that debt to credit unions And that's like the the strangest sort of middleman intermediary that you could have where if you said hey If the credit unit can simply direct connect to these consumers and connect to the largest sort of Places that consumers get financing then we should be able to grow the balance sheet of Of credit union lending across the board is if you're looking for a person loan and you're near prime or prime That should be a credit union loan if you're looking for an auto loan and any direct origination channel That should be a credit union loan
But does that dry up? I mean do they have enough funds in capital to fund the I mean these trillion dollars of loans That we're putting out there. I mean what what is that much point of maturity I'm sure some investors have asked you this at some point because that's the first thing that comes to mind Okay, so there's this large addressable market, but you know how much capital do these credit unions really have Yeah, I mean the good news is it varies hugely by credit union Right so like some credit unions hit lending caps and have done so others still have plenty of drive powder Um, you're always playing as a lender you're always playing this two-sided game, which is like I need to get deposits Uh in order to do lending and the way you get deposits is Two ways either a you like provide great banking services that people can trust And I think credit unions have a lot of growth strategy there as well Or be that you can also pay high rates which are things like you know CD accounts and things like that and they often pay above market and those accounts as well because They can effectively anything you're making from your lending book You can effectively distribute a portion of that to those high yield CDs too
And so they do have way they have to play a balancing game of hey, I want to grow my lending book But I also need to figure out how to grow deposits as well And I think the more success they can have And marketing as a whole the more confident. They'll be growing both ends of this book So if you look at a lot of credit unions today, they're a little bit gun shy on marketing And the reason being is because they don't have great digital distribution paths So if you attract a consumer like some of our credit unions you can't even open accounts digitally So if you were to market for digital loans You may say hey, I want to go out and I want to find somebody who needs a personal loan. Let's say I can get their loan application approved But they may still need to come physically into a branch In order to finalize the loan and deposit account opening And so like they're just a little bit and because of that they're paying a lot more marketing than what you imagine Somebody like upstart might pay because you can finalize everything through upstart You can't do that with a credit unions so they have to find five times as many consumers
Um, and so the more comfortable they get with marketing the more The returns from all of these activities are compounding But it all goes back to like do you have an experience? It's competitive With the the best other finance companies out there and if you can be a parody With any with uh, you know with it's the same experience as a chaser wells forgo or some of these other fintechs Then all of a sudden now you can be equivalent in marketing But now you've got the rates right so you're you're a better financial product at the same cost of marketing You should win nine out of ten times in any battle
Who's the ultimate beneficiary here right like do you think it's consumers or do you think it's dealers because they can put more cars in the road Or I mean do you think it's everyone really because look the way I see it is in an environment where money's cheap And you know, it's like sloshing around everywhere right like just companies are not efficient And it feels to me like now where you know things have gotten a lot more expensive lending's expensive If people are starting to turn over every stone and they're looking for ways To operate more efficiently and to increase their conversion right like I mean I can tell you that our conversion uh in the sub in ear prime segments from call it like lead to sale Has just consistently dropped since January and it's not driven by Um anything necessarily in store, but it's it's the lending the lending has gotten tough and it's tightened up And we just cannot convert that segment of the market right and it puts us in a very tricky situation because you're missing volume targets You have the customers coming in they want to buy the cars Um, and of course I'm referring to you know, this is not prime segment which credit unions typically work with but I wonder like do you think this is a ultimately just a net benefit for the entire industry and you know You'll see we'll start to see uh bigger companies say like carmax and carvana maybe Show some more innovation on that realm Or do you think that this is more of it doesn't really gain getting get into the mainstream as much And it stays more behind the scenes and you know you work to digitize them But we don't see this more in the mainstream dealership side
Yeah, I think that's a good question I think it's the very least like the one benefit you'll have is consumers right like consumers paying lower rates For ostensibly this like I don't think they actually care that much about their financial product right like it's not like if I get an ally or a Uh, you know chase loan. I'm not like I love I love the chase brand. This is such a I'm proud to talk about the brand of my loan I don't think it's like a brand entity. I think it's it's a more commoditized product And so I think from a loan perspective the consumer is going to benefit I think where the brand may come in is in the other suite of services institution can provide and that's where that's where creditians When and that's arguably work dealerships can win as well And so what I mean by that is like if creditians get more comfortable doing more lending Like you often see that they don't serve this near prime segment even though they could And so creditians can lend up to 18% like that's typical user recaps for credit you you almost never see an 18% loan Right like you'll almost never see that and it's because a lot of them just don't feel comfortable lending that segment. Yeah But there there is a way as they get more technologically advanced as they get more comfortable with um Actually orchestrating a booking the loan These loans tend to be harder to book because you tend to need more steps and more verifications And so it is you can sort of enable that you can serve a broader segment I think that's where that's where actually dealerships will benefit Which is if creditians can get more comfortable moving Down the credit spectrum that means that dealerships are more easily able to sell more cars Through this credit you and channel And that works out well for both parties
All right, so there you have it folks go buy from a credit union That's that's all you need to know from today. No other takeaways. Bye. Bye. I'm just kidding Um, I mean Chris. This has been awesome like just your wealth of knowledge and you've had a lot of experience And I've really enjoyed it where can people learn more about with clutch your work, you know anything Yeah, I mean you can go to with clutch.com to learn about our company What I would say though if if you're a consumer the best way is to actually go Like you can experience our same platform through any one of our sort of 60 partner creditians And if you go to with clutch you can see who this partner creditians are we work with some amazing partners Who are actually doing like we do the technology but they do the real hard work and they're the ones who The other ones who are offering the great consumer service We're the ones who are enabling that service And so look at any one of those 60 partner creditians. They're absolutely wonderful institutions And if you want to find a way to interact with the creditian, that's a great starting point
Before we go to the last question. I want to do a quick 180 And ask you a juicy question This Carvano survive where's Carvano in five to ten years? Good question. Yeah I mean, I think they survive and I'll know that they survive in the same way they exist today like The if you look at Carvano's origin like the one origin was hey We'll have the centralized pool of inventory and if you just just take that to extreme Right, if you take the two extreme you're like okay We have one big distribution center in Kansas where we house 100,000 cars and just distribute those across the country
I think over time what you've seen is that like this model converges to a less logistics heavy dealership And so like the things that Carvano has proven or can you sell cars online? Is there a segment of the population that this is good for? The things that they're behind on the proof points for Are is this economically viable and sort of like all weather conditions And I think the old the old weather part is not yet flushed out I think the debt they've taken on is arguably like the biggest new surround their neck right now Which is they just have massive interest payments Could they if they didn't have these massive interest payments and they'd finance it through equity would it be easier to get this pathway out? Yeah, and like if they converge eventually to a more carmax like model but more online Does that seem like that's a viable path? I think both those are true. There's like restructuring that needs to happen between now and then Uh in order to make that happen, but I think they've they've proven too much to go away entirely And so there's certainly someone that will Like I think they can navigate a way out of it. I just think this like some ugly roads they need to cross between now and then
But somebody asked me the other day like would you want to run Carvano as a business? For sure not like I it's so operation intensive. I mean We're gonna believe that part out Fair All right, well Chris last question.
I'm curious what have you changed your mind on in the last five years What have I changed my mind on the last five years? I mean I think Carvano like I got to give you some insight into my mindset at the beginning versus the end too because when I went to Carvano A lot of it was just to see the end of the Carlips of story Like we went thinking this business will never ever ever work Um, and actually they proved a lot more than we then we felt possible like they opened my eyes up This like subprime and non prime segment and how they buy cars which is very different than the segment we dealt with And so completely changed my mind on how to think about that area.
I think the other thing too is like Learning through 2021 and 2020 like uh Used to somewhat believe in this like rational market theory and obviously it's not true at all um because people like The story of Carvano has been the same for the past Like you could see everything I have my friend. I see it every day If you could see you could see everything that's happening and yet the swing between What they were and what they are like neither neither of these endpoints are true. It's somewhere in between but like um People just get carried away with exuberance all the time
Do it I love it. I'm rooting for you guys. You're working on some awesome stuff I really you know, I really appreciate it and this has been great. So thanks for coming on Chris and I'm sure I'm sure we'll talk again soon and you know, I'm just excited to see your progress with clutch of course Thanks for thanks for having me on awesome.