Inventory costs have been a pressure point for the floor plan market. Net new-vehicle floor plan expense rose 39% across U.S. dealerships tracked by Optimum Info in the second quarter of 2025, driven by growing days’ supply and interest expense. The longer inventory sits, the more of a lender’s portfolio is at risk if it goes unmonitored.
That pressure set the tone at this year’s SBS Connect US, held in Dallas on September 16. Executives from Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, Nissan Motor Acceptance Company, Daimler Truck Financial Services, GM Financial, NextGear Capital and more spent the day comparing notes on how they are responding, from spotting portfolio risk earlier to modernizing dealer audits and putting AI to work.
For Ron Spratt, Senior Vice President of Sales for North America at SBS, which hosted the event, the questions attendees asked each other said a lot about where the industry is headed. “We heard risk leaders asking each other how they spot trouble in a portfolio before it shows up as a loss,” he said. “People ask those questions when they’re ready to change how they work.”
Growth versus control
Throughout the day, conversations kept returning to how lenders can grow without losing control of their portfolios. “Lenders want to grow and move faster, and every step in that direction makes it harder to keep track of the cars and equipment they’ve financed,” Spratt said.
An executive panel with leaders from Nissan Motor Acceptance Company, TD Auto Finance and Axle Funding dug into that question, discussing where their organizations are pushing for speed and where they are balancing risk and control.
For many lenders, disconnected systems make that balance harder to strike. Loan origination, dealer onboarding, inventory management and audit often run on separate platforms that don’t share data, leaving staff to piece the picture together by hand. Spratt said wholesale finance has been slower than the rest of financial services to replace that kind of legacy technology.
That problem cuts across the industry, from global captives to regional independents. “My favorite part of the event,” Spratt said, “was watching a regional floor plan lender and a global captive sit at the same table and discover they were stuck on the same problem.”
Getting the data right before AI
Though the agenda included a dedicated AI session, Spratt said the topic came up in nearly every conversation throughout the day. “Nobody in the room was debating whether to use AI,” he said. “They wanted to know where it pays off and how to keep it under control.”
According to Spratt, the answer usually came down to data. “Picture a lender with dealer onboarding in one system, inventory in another, audit results in a spreadsheet and risk reports somewhere else,” he said. “Put AI on top of that, and you’ve just automated the confusion between systems that were never built to talk to each other.”
His advice is to fix workflows and connect the data first, then apply AI to the specific problems lenders already have. The use cases that drew the most interest in Dallas fit that approach, like catching a car that has been financed twice or reviewing audit photos faster.
Lenders also want their teams to stay involved as AI takes on more of the work, and they need to understand how it reaches its decisions. “Especially for regulated businesses, that’s non-negotiable,” Spratt said.
Rethinking the dealer audit
Hybrid auditing drew some of the most attention of the day, in large part because of the scale of the U.S. market. North American dealer networks are large and spread across long distances, which makes traditional lot inspections expensive. “When every inventory check means putting someone in a car and driving to a lot,” Spratt said, “costs climb fast and coverage suffers.”
Under a hybrid model, dealers photograph and report their own inventory, the lender verifies it digitally and inspectors focus their visits on the locations that carry the most risk. The model is intended to support more frequent inventory checks and reduce inspection costs. Digital checks still require clear verification and escalation controls when something doesn’t match.
Those discussions extend well beyond passenger cars. Commercial trucks, farm and construction equipment, boats, powersports and RVs all run on similar inventory financing, and the same conversations came up across all of them.
SBS builds its U.S. presence
The challenges raised in Dallas are ones SBS has spent decades working on with wholesale lenders. “None of this surprised us,” Spratt said. Built on more than 40 years in wholesale finance, SBS’s platform connects dealer onboarding, inventory management and floor plan billing in one place, and already runs operations for auto finance companies including Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Toyota Financial Services and Volvo.
The Paris-based company provides software to more than 1,500 financial institutions across 80 countries.
In September, the company named Spratt to lead its established U.S. team, with recent additions including Leigh Revis, who has 15 years of automotive finance experience and a background at Datascan, and Zak Gordon, formerly a regional director at NextGear Capital. Dealer Financial, a floor plan lender serving independent dealerships in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, recently selected SBS’s digital audit solution as part of modernizing its wholesale finance operation.
SBS is also bringing AI into its wholesale finance, portfolio management and digital audit products through SBS AI Foundation. The company says the new capabilities are designed to help lenders move faster without compromising on risk management or compliance.
Dallas was one of five Connect events the company held this year, and SBS plans to return to the U.S. with Connect in 2027. “We left Dallas knowing the right people want to work on the right problems, and we plan to continue to build on that,” Spratt said.