Automotive
One record of the car, the deal and the loan.
Applications wait in a queue while someone re-keys the deal from the dealer's system into the lender's, and a funding delay loses the deal. Our engineers join your team and build the software that takes those steps out, with a Databricks platform that keeps dealer, lender and recovery data in one place.
A car deal passes through more systems than anyone draws on a whiteboard. The dealer's DMS knows the car and the deal, the lender's origination system knows the loan, and a recovery company's platform knows the assignment, and each one re-keys what the last one sent. Our engineers have built at each of those steps.
For DealerIQ we built TotalLoop, which finds a dealership's customers with equity in their vehicle and matches them to cars on the lot. For Auto Approve we built the approval engine that doubled the loans it processes each month without new hires, and for Location Services the repossession platform that now runs on Databricks.
Databricks for dealer and lender data
We moved Location Services' repossession platform off Synapse and SQL Server onto Databricks through TechFabric Airlift, in waves that could each be rolled back, and the rules engine that checks every assignment came through unchanged.
We moved TotalLoop off Cosmos DB and SQL Server onto Lakebase the same way, so the equity matching reads from the same governed store as the analytics.
AutoFabric, our own product, runs the origination and refinance steps that slow a deal down, such as credit pulls, VIN decode, stipulations and payoff quotes, as agents on Unity Catalog and Databricks Apps. Every action is checked against policy, and an AutoFabric customer confirmed a 40% efficiency gain.
What we'd build first on a dealer group's data
Inventory age and customer equity are two numbers a dealer group argues about, and they sit in different systems. We'd land the DMS, the CRM and the inventory feed under Unity Catalog with one definition of each, and give each rooftop a dashboard that reads it.
The same tables then feed equity mining across the whole group, the way TotalLoop does for one dealership, and Genie can answer the questions a general manager asks in plain English without an export.
Customer data and the FTC Safeguards Rule
A dealership or lender that counts as a financial institution under the FTC's Safeguards Rule needs a qualified individual running a written security program, encryption of customer information at rest and in transit, and multi-factor authentication for anyone who can reach it.
Since May 2024 it also has to tell the FTC within 30 days of discovering a breach of unencrypted information about at least 500 consumers. We'd build those into the platform rather than the policy binder.
Customer tables get column masks for the fields that identify a person, grants go to named people and service principals, and the audit tables can show who read what, when the qualified individual writes the annual report to the board.
Sources: FTC Safeguards Rule: what your business needs to know
Clients in this sector
How the data from a car deal comes together
Dealer systems, lender systems and the recovery platform each land once in the lakehouse, under Unity Catalog, with lineage back to the source. From there the equity matching, the portfolio and recovery dashboards and the agents on Databricks Apps all read the same governed record, so a number in one place is the same number in the others.
What we have built here
Automotive finance · Our own productThe auto loan lifecycle, run by governed agents
Origination and refinance steps that slow a deal down, such as credit pulls, VIN decode, deal structuring, stipulations and payoff quotes, run by agents in the lender's own environment. It came out of years of origination and refinance work for lenders and dealer groups. It connects to DealerTrack, RouteOne and CDK, and every action is checked against policy and recorded for the examiner.
B2B ecommerceTotalLoop: Cosmos DB and SQL Server onto Lakebase
TotalLoop finds a dealership's customers with equity in their vehicle and matches them to cars on the lot. DealerIQ brought the idea and the dealership know-how, and our senior engineers worked inside its team to build it on Azure, test it with one dealer account and ship a lean first version. Later we moved it off Cosmos DB and SQL Server onto Databricks Lakebase, in waves that could each be rolled back.
Automotive / FintechLocation Services: Synapse and SQL Server onto Databricks
Location Services' repossession platform automates assignment intake, so fewer people handle each case, and our engineers built it with the company's own technology team. When it was time to leave Synapse and SQL Server, we moved it onto Databricks in waves that could each be rolled back, and the rules engine that checks every assignment came through unchanged.
Automotive / FintechAuto-refinance company doubles loans processed without adding agents
Auto Approve's loan agents were copying every refinance request by hand between the CRM, lender sites and Excel, a process that took two to three days. Our senior engineers worked hand in glove with Auto Approve's own IT staff to build the approval engine that automates it, and the company doubled the loans it processes each month without hiring more agents.
2×
Monthly loans processed
4+
Manual workflows replaced
0
Additional agents hired
Automotive / FintechMitigating risk in vehicle repossession with durable execution
A wrongful repossession, and the penalty that follows, can start with one API call nobody saw fail. Location Services' software sometimes didn't tell a vendor an assignment was closed, and nothing retried the call. Our senior engineers rebuilt that process as a durable workflow on Temporal and put it into production, so every close retries on its own, alerts the operations team when retries run out, and keeps a full history.
Automotive / FintechModernizing an auto refi platform: iLending's Phoenix app
iLending's new loan application had stalled with another developer, running late, over budget and short of features, while call center agents kept turning refinance leads into loans by hand. TechFabric's engineers picked the project up, reviewed what had been built, and rebuilt the app day to day alongside iLending's own developers, automating lead and loan officer assignment, rate sheets and stipulation documents. Manual errors dropped and new agents got productive faster.
Automotive / FintechSWBC doubles orders processed on a rebuilt LOSExpress
Credit union loan officers quote and book vehicle protection in SWBC's LOSExpress alongside a member's auto loan, but quoting was slow and new staff took too long to learn it. After gathering feedback from SWBC's staff and customers, our engineers and designers rebuilt one of its modules as a single-page application on a new design system. Orders processed doubled, and each loan officer now spends half as long on an order.
100%
Increase in orders processed
29%
Account growth
50%
Less order time per loan officer
The intersection of strategy and solutioning: an automotive logistics OMS
Order management for automotive logistics, designed alongside the operators who run it daily.
The lines that do this work
Migrations to Databricks
Off Snowflake, Synapse, Teradata and SQL Server, onto Lakehouse and Lakebase, with a cutover you can reverse.
Data science & AI
Context stores, memory, retrieval and governed agents that survive production.
APIs & durable systems
Long-running operations that survive restarts and partial failure. Temporal under the lakehouse jobs, agent runs and approvals that must not half-complete.
Product development
Full product delivery: multi-tenant architecture, operator consoles and the data layer under them. On Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or Cloudflare, and as a Databricks App where the product belongs next to the lakehouse.
FAQ
Automotive: questions we get asked
Do you work with dealer systems like CDK, DealerTrack and RouteOne?
Yes. AutoFabric, our product for auto lenders, reaches into DealerTrack, RouteOne and CDK because that's where the deals already are, and TotalLoop reads a dealership's customers and its inventory to match one to the other. A data platform for a dealer group starts by landing those same feeds.
Can one Databricks platform serve dealers, lenders and recovery firms?
Yes, if the permissions are designed first. Unity Catalog grants decide which rooftop, lender or vendor sees which rows, so a dealer group's managers see their own stores and a recovery vendor sees only its assignments. We'd design those grants before the first table lands.
What does the FTC Safeguards Rule mean for a dealership's data platform?
If the dealership counts as a financial institution under the rule, customer information needs encryption, multi-factor authentication and a written security program run by a qualified individual, and a breach affecting 500 or more consumers goes to the FTC within 30 days.
We'd build the masks, grants and audit queries into the platform so the annual report to the board can be written from it.
Do you also work with auto lenders?
Most of our automotive work is on the lending side: the Auto Approve approval engine, iLending's loan application, SWBC's LOSExpress for credit unions, and AutoFabric. Financial services in full is at /industries/financial-services.
Talk to someone who has built this.
A technical conversation with a senior engineer who has shipped in this sector, about what you are trying to build.