SmartAuction: Pushing the wholesale vehicle marketplace into the digital age Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2022

In the early 2000s, Ally saw the opportunity to resell vehicles coming off lease. Looking to enter the market quickly, Ally disrupted the standard physical auction process by launching the first ever digital wholesale vehicle auction marketplace - SmartAuction. At the time, there was no precedent for selling vehicles fully online. Since then, Ally has continued to be an industry leader – nearing seven million online sales since 2000. Since launching, Ally has accelerated strategic investments in the SmartAuction platform to help meet existing demands as well as attack new market opportunities. To ensure new functionality is relevant and useful to our user base, we leverage our industry-leading human-centered design methodology to identify key challenges and develop associated solutions. Due to our long-standing relationships with our consignors (sellers) and our dealer customers (buyers), we have a clear understanding of their unique personas, and we regularly solicit feedback from these groups through one-on-one interviews and group sessions to ensure the experience fully meets or exceeds their expectations. Our most recent innovation takes vehicles in current inventory and surfaces a curated vehicle list unique to each dealer. This feature digitizes the traditional offline person-to-person interactions between a consignor representative and a dealer buyer. Furthermore, it provides the purchasing dealer a faster path to fill their exact inventory needs.