Classified Ads for Cars Making Room for Lease-Purchase Contracts

FACTS

• Zoomcar.fr –website listing classified ads for second-hand vehicles– now includes lease-purchase options in partnership with CGI Finance.

• Their platform already features car loans for their users in partnership with Cetelem.
• For this new service Zoomcar bets on CGI Finance’s expertise.
• This lease-purchase offer includes: 
  • Financing offer for used car,
  • Maintenance package,
  • Take-back guarantee when the contract ends.
• CGI Finance’s existing distribution partners are the first to be able to add lease-purchase offers when selling cars via Zoomcar. The offer will later on be applied to all cars on the platform.
• Besides Zoomcar, the lease-purchase option will also be available from Ouest-France Auto, another website from Ouest-France Multimedia group.

KEY FIGURES

• 200,000 ads for used cars
• 2,200 points of sale (e.g.: car dealerships and Aramis agents)
• 2.6M unique visitors each month on Ouest-France Auto and Zoomcar websites
• Lease-purchase contracts represented 75% of all financing applications when purchasing a new car in 2018, and 12% for used cars
• These figures kept increasing since

CHALLENGES

• Expanding their customer portfolio. Since the vehicles are returned when the leasing period ends, rental prices are much lower than currently observed monthly credit repayments. As the rental industry keeps gaining ground, this partnership with CGI Finance could help them target more customers: e.g.: people more interested in leasing a vehicle than taking out a loan.
• An industry first. With CGI Finance, Zoomcar will be the first website for classified ads on the market for used cars to introduce lease-purchase contracts.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• The car financing specialist, subsidiary of Société Générale, keeps pushing their offers’ boundaries. In 2016, they started dematerialising financing application processes.
• In 2018, they came up with a technological solution helping car dealerships withstand competition from digital players selling used cars. Even so, they are teaming up with one of these online players now and they also acquired a minority stake in Reezocar’s capital in December 2018.