Hundreds of thousands of used cars may have costly errors on their digital records that could affect future finance quotes, online solutions provider iVendi has warned.
Its analysis indicates that 8% of digital records for vehicles are incorrect, after it researched 140,000 vehicles being sold online and found problems with 11,000. Each year, several million used cars are sold in the UK, suggesting hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be affected across the market.
James Tew, chief executive officer at iVendi, warned: “It is not too difficult within the data we have compiled to find complete misidentifications such as prestige cars that have been listed as panel vans.”
Experts at iVendi warn this could lead to inaccurate quotes being offered to consumers when agreeing finance deals, such as for personal contract purchase agreements.
A vehicle’s digital record includes data about the car including a physical description but also a unique code generated by established industry data providers that is used as a standard method of identifying a car by the finance company.
Tew said: “By its very nature, vehicle taxonomy is complicated, and it is very easy for both humans and software to get the taxonomy code wrong. The majority of errors concern numbers of doors, transmission types and trim levels and while these are of some concern, they are of limited impact on the finance quote.
“In other cases, the mistake is much more fundamental. The wrong code means the wrong valuation and the wrong forecast residual value for the PCP. This can have a positive or a negative effect from a financial point of view, but it remains an error and one that can have unpredictable results.”
In addition to financial errors, the mistakes could cause concern among regulators, Tew warned.
In response, iVendi will launch a tool in 2020 that aims to identify errors in data provided by third parties.
Founded in 2009, iVendi is a specialist digital platform provider for the motor retailing and finance industry. Its software is used by more than 8,000 retailers in the UK.
