“Industry Expertise” is sponsored content produced by AFSA’s Business Partners’ to provide thought leadership and best practices for AFSA member companies. For more information about this sponsored content opportunity, contact Dan Bucherer.
From the outside, a loan payoff looks simple. A customer trades in a vehicle, the loan gets paid, and the process moves forward. Inside a dealership, it rarely works that cleanly.
What most lenders don’t see is what it actually takes inside the dealership to get that payoff done. The friction isn’t in the payoff itself. It’s everything around it. A store isn’t dealing with a single lender – it’s working across banks, credit unions, and captives all at once.
That usually means logging in and out of multiple portals to complete payoffs. What looks straightforward on one side becomes inconsistent and time-consuming on the other.
Where It Slows Down
A payoff moves across sales, F&I, and accounting. It’s handed off, checked, and rechecked. Because every lender operates differently, teams aren’t following one workflow. They’re reworking the same task with slight variations each time.
That lack of standardization creates delays on both sides. Funds take longer to post. Reconciliation becomes less predictable. Titles are delayed.
Why Checks Still Create Friction
A big part of the friction is still paper checks. Dealers cut and overnight checks while lenders process them manually. That adds cost and slows everything down. The loan stays open, the lien isn’t released, and the title doesn’t move.
ACH removes most of that friction, but adoption is still inconsistent, so the process continues to shift between manual and digital workflows by lender.
What Lenders Should Consider
A store isn’t handling one payoff at a time. It’s working through 20-30 daily across lenders that all operate differently. Dealers know which lenders are easy to work with and which introduce friction, and that experience carries into future financing decisions.
Lenders can reduce that friction by aligning around a more consistent approach to how payoffs are received and processed. The National Loan Payoff Clearinghouse™ (NLPC), powered by EPIC, gives dealers and lenders a single way to handle payoffs instead of navigating dozens of variations.
Through the NLPC, payments and data move in a consistent format, making posting more predictable and reconciliation easier at scale. Lenders receive funds one way, track them one way, and resolve issues in one place.
Joining the NLPC connects lenders directly into dealer workflows, reducing delays, improving transparency, and making the payoff and lien release process more predictable from start to finish.
Bio: Tab Edmundson is the Senior Director of Lender Solutions for Epic and can be contacted at Tab@withepic.com. The National Loan Payoff Clearinghouse™ (NLPC), powered by EPIC, operates as a secure and trusted financial infrastructure that facilitates the standardized exchange, processing, and settlement of loan payoff and lien release transactions among network participants nationwide. Learn more at www.withepic.com.
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