Subprime lender Arivo Acceptance Chief Executive Landon Starr will continue to embrace technology while making structural adjustments to the company’s operations in his new role.

Starr aims to create a structure that facilitates “more empathy, collaboration and integration of technology,” he told Auto Finance News, a sister publication to Bank Automation News. He intends to execute this by cross-pollinating employees in multiple segments of the business, so everyone is well-versed in all areas of operations, he said.   

Starr was named CEO earlier this month following more than five years as the lender’s chief risk and information officer. He said he has been groomed as the intended successor of former CEO Robert Avery. 

The new CEO is now in the process of filling his previous roles of chief information officer and chief risk officer, Starr said. 

Starr spoke with Auto Finance News about his plans for changing the organization’s structure, creating a collaborative work environment and continuing technological innovation. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.  

Auto Finance News: What new technology initiatives is Arivo exploring?  

Landon Starr: Creating a healthy collaborative environment with technology being innate to the operational environment is key. We launched our brand new loan management system in mid-2023, and we’ve already started seeing some enormous efficiency gains.  

We’re going to be rolling out an intelligent contact sequencing capability, that was curated and cultivated by our data science and technology organization, that’s going to get our collectors and account servicers contacting the right people at the right time with machine learning optimization of contact timing. We’re expecting another 20% to 30% increase in operational efficiency, just from better allocation of time and resources of who we’re contacting and when. 

We’re doing a lot of research and development on the generative AI front for dynamic prompts and augmenting human capacity and capabilities in the operations space to elevate employee’s abilities to execute the different initiatives and KPIs that we’re targeting. It is about creating innate pairings of advanced technology with operations people who are open to it, who are excited about it, and who like to utilize some of those cool tricks of the trade and the new technology that’s available.  

Arivo was born in the cloud, and we’ve always been a very tech-forward company. We don’t have much of that legacy platform of transition and transformation that a lot of the incumbent older companies in the space have been straddled with, so we’re moving full speed ahead.  

AFN: Can you be more specific about how Arivo is using generative AI? 

LS: AI can’t be a destination; it has to be a tool to solve a business problem.  

From our standpoint, the big application opportunity for generative AI is about speeding up the learning curve of new collections and customer service agents, giving them dynamic prompts of what successful commentary looks like based upon our historical conversation audio files that we’re feeding into the generative AI framework.  

What are the best conversations that drive the best conversion rates for receiving payment and helping a consumer get back on their feet and get back on track to a more traditional payment relationship with us? We have terabytes of data and thousands of phone calls historically that we explicitly have success versus non-success events defined. We’ve created a data platform that feeds algorithms to facilitate a lot of that optimization, so intelligent contact sequencing is one part of it.  

A new collector will automatically have the best response in real time to a consumer’s reason why they weren’t able to make that payment. They can curate the best response based on historical data and successful events that we’ve observed, and pop that up to make it available at their disposal. 

AFN: What operational changes do you intend to make within the company? 

LS: There are a couple of different opportunities. Previously with risk, operations have reported up to Robert Avery as he liked owning those components. There’s an opportunity for us to detangle underwriting risk from dealership services because I have always believed there’s a bit of a conflict of interest anytime underwriting, sales and service intermingle too much.  

That’s one of the first things that I’m going to start looking at is how to make sure that our risk function stands alone.  

Sales and risk must have some form of healthy friction between them, and I’m going to deliberately try to curate that. It has a lot of nuances, though. You need to make sure that the friction is positive and constructive, and you have great people who like to challenge each other and have a lot of fun doing it.  

Cross-pollinating a lot of our technology organization into our operations organization — so we can get quicker and more efficient adoption of all the brand-new technology that we have coming to bear — is another big initiative for us. It is going to help us facilitate more empathy and collaboration and integration of technology into our operations space.

AFN: Have you identified your successors for chief risk information officer and chief information officer, and why are you making them separate positions?  

LS: From the risk and information segment of the company, I have a few really strong executives on the bench there. I’ve got my vice president and head of data science and risk that’s likely going to be able to quickly go into the career path moving towards the chief risk officer position. I’ve got a head of product and engineering as well as a head of architecture, both at the vice president levels, that’ll take the chief technology officer and chief information officer roles and functions as well, so I already have appropriate successors for my prior role. It’s just a matter of figuring out how I divvy those responsibilities up.  

I don’t like the idea of keeping too much bundled, I was carrying too many hats as the chief risk, technology and information officer. I’m going to curate a lot more specialized expertise within the executive management team as we move forward. We’ve got a great bench list of named successors already for all of those various roles. 

Editor’s note: This article first appeared on Auto Finance News, a sister publication to Bank Automation News. 

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