Subprime auto lender Consumer Portfolio Services (CPS) inked a pair of fintech partnerships in September to automate credit decisioning and servicing operations that will allow it to grow at scale without having to hire additional staff. 

CPS’s partnership with cloud-based finance solutions provider Prodigal will streamline the Irvine, Calif.-based business through a suite of products to pre-populate call notes and eliminate the need for collectors to issue notes.

 “The [return on investment] is big, with more calls per collector and less accounts per collector, and we don’t have to hire any more [collectors],” Mike Lavin, chief operating officer and chief legal officer at CPS, said during the Auto Finance Summit last week. “If we want to grow, we’re totally at scale. [CPS is] refreshing what we have and bolting on technologies on the margins with our company.” 

Prodigal uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate standardized and structured call notes, eliminating the need for after-call work by collectors and reducing the need for additional training, according to the company’s website. Prodigal offers ProAssist to provide agents with real-time assistance, ProNotes for automated notetaking and ProVoice for managers to monitor agent performance. 

For credit decisioning, CPS is partnering with consumer auto financing platform Informed.IQ to use robotic processing automation and AI capabilities to improve the authenticity of loan documents, Lavin added. The functionality is expected to become available in the first quarter of 2023. 

“On the origination side of things, the bots read the documents and extract the information out of the documents and populate a checklist,” Lavin said, noting through the partnership the lender won’t have to hire as many funders or processors and will have access to more accurate data.  

CPS had a managed portfolio of $2.5 billion at the end of the second quarter of 2022, according to the company.