Turning dealer payments into a profit engine

Merchant tools, platforms, and services provide secure, streamlined processes that can increase financial performance. To maximize the benefits a card program offers, dealers have several paths to choose from:

• Commercial credit cards allow you to manage employee spending. Corporate cards help track travel and entertainment expenses and let you set individual spending controls. Executive cards enhance business travel experience with additional benefits for executives and frequent travelers.
• Purchasing cards streamline purchasing with card controls to help you fine-tune business expenses.
• ePayablesare virtual cards that let you make faster and more secure payments, enhancing working capital. ePayables also enables you to provision ad hoc virtual cards for business expenses to a digital wallet.
• Other automated payment processes eliminate paper checks to achieve enhanced payment speed, security, and operational efficiency with:
  • ACH
  • Wire transfers
  • Real Time Payments (RTP®)
  • FedNow®
  • Zelle® is a fit for:
    • Refunding overages on tags, taxes, titles, and fees
    • Receiving customer deposits
    • Paying customers for trade-ins or purchases

Many of the programs listed above can be tailored for your dealership’s specific financial goals. For example, you may decide to seek higher margin-enhancing rebates by paying your credit card bill weekly instead of monthly. Your Truist Dealer Services relationship manager and the Commercial Card services team can help you design a program that fits your dealership’s financial goals.

Merchant programs are another area where the continuous stream of digital advances in terminal technology, fraud detection, and end user enhancements benefit from a periodic review. These reviews can make sure you’ve adopted the latest, best-fit technology across your dealership locations, and that you’re using it consistently, to the greatest effect, and at the lowest cost.

Ensuring you have integrated merchant strategy takes advantage of your dealership’s scale. It gives you the opportunity to standardize your policies and operations, and connect with other dealer systems to:

• Avoid compliance fees and meet compliance and fraud requirements.
• Use specialized fraud software that can help detect auto retail transactions with a higher probability of chargebacks.
• Improve customer experience with the latest merchant terminals and features.
• Minimize and standardize rates and fees.

Start by identifying opportunities for merchant services improvement across your organization. This can mean increased margins and smoother operations. Your Truist relationship manager and our Merchant services team can help find improvement opportunities and quantify their impact.

Step 1 - Review receivables from each segment of business.

Review your merchant approach across business lines. Set surcharge policies that fit each part of the business and type of card presented. Consider cross-brand and cross-location opportunities to standardize merchant terminals and policies. Analyze the margin impact from rationalizing fees and rate structures across locations, brands and departments in your organization.

Step 2 - Assess the impact of driving more receivables through the merchant system.

Look for operational savings with the simplified processing and reconciliation of merchant processing offers. A higher level of merchant processing could help mitigate fraud. Consider how contactless payments and Apple Pay would affect customer satisfaction.

Step 3 - Evaluate operational integration with industry-specific software.

Look for opportunities to integrate with software partners and dealer management systems (DMS). You’ll be able to provide an intuitive user experience that could reduce accounting and reconciliation workload and simplify staff education.

Step 4 - Gauge improvements in fraud protection and chargebacks.

Evaluate how vendors validate card information, location of origin, and other fraud-related factors. Consider specialized industry solutions for dealerships that identify transactions with high risk of chargebacks, such as PCI-compliant terminals that protect you from losses with advanced stolen card identification.

Step 5 - Minimize noncompliance fees (PCI DSS).

Common reasons for non-compliance and the fees associated with them include failure to complete an annual Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ). Weak protections and a higher level of fraud events can result in added fees or can trigger loss of fraud protections.

You can avoid some of these non-compliance issues by performing a one-time setup for PCI compliance using a common linked client number for all locations. Also, you should conduct a quarterly vulnerability scan.

Your Truist Dealer Services relationship manager and our Merchant services team will work with you to find improvements in merchant services that can increase margin, help you streamline operations, and enhance your customer experience.